Picking on foreign students won't solve the migration crisis

Spectator

3 days ago

We can't stop the illegal migrants, so let's crack down on legal ones instead. That pretty well sums up the government's policy on migration. Last year foreign students earned Britain £12.1 billion in revenue. They are one of our strongest export industries (while the students might physically be entering Britain, they are an export because it is the direction the money is flowing in which matters). Some universities have become truly international institutions – Imperial College and UCL now draw more than half their students from abroad. Mickey mouse courses aside, UK higher education has become one of Britain's success stories.
How natural, then, that the government wants to throttle it in its panic to get the migration figures under some sort of control. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is reported to be planning to announce a ban on universities accepting foreign students if too few students go on to start or complete their courses. If fewer than 95 per cent of accepted students get as far as enrolling, or if fewer than 90 per cent go on to complete their course, it seems as if that university would be banned from accepting any foreign students at all. In other words, you might be a university which is just embarking on advertising itself to foreign students. You make a tentative start by offering ten students a place. Then one of them fails to turn up to start their course – and you get banned from taking any more foreign students whatsoever.
There is, it has to be said, a problem with abuse of student visas. Some migrants have been applying for visas in order to gain access to the country in order to claim asylum. Last year, 16,000 asylum claims were made by foreign students.
But the issue, as ever, is the feebleness of the asylum system itself. It takes far too long to make decisions, and even when people are rejected, they are not removed from the country. Moreover, we have asylum tribunals which perversely interpret the European Convention on Human Rights to grant criminals and terrorists the right to stay in Britain if they have succeeded in impregnating a British woman and can claim the right to a family life. It is all these issues which need sorting out, not the higher education sector which needs thwarting.
If we are going to try to deal with abuse of the asylum system by stopping legal migrants entering Britain in the first place, we would have to close our borders completely: ban foreigners coming to Britain not just to study but to work, to come on holiday, visit relatives, take part in sporting competitions – all of which have been used by asylum claimants to enter the country. There might be a few Britons who would be happy with that situation, but it would be the actions of a country in which most of us would not be happy to live. And still it wouldn't stop people arriving illegally on small boats – and being put up in four-star hotels for years while their cases are wrung through layers of taxpayer-funded legal arguments.
This government's biggest error was one of its very first: to close down the Rwanda scheme. That failure has contributed to an explosion in illegal migration and the associated costs and other problems. The fact that the Rwanda scheme was beginning to act as a deterrent, even before a single asylum applicant was sent to that country, could be seen in the large number of migrants who were fleeing to Ireland to make their claims instead.
Now, to try to cover up for that failure, the government is going to pick on legal migrants instead, because they are the easy targets – never mind that it could mean turning down billions of pounds in foreign earnings from foreign students. That is where Starmer's fundamentalist approach to human rights leads.