Immigration Bill

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She is rightly highlighting the concern that has been expressed from both sides of the House in previous debates. UK higher education is a major export earner, contributing about £8 billion to the UK economy annually.

I remember an exchange with the Immigration Minister when he was newly appointed, at a meeting of the all-party parliamentary university group, in which he pointed out that we should be talking not only about the income that international students brought in but about the costs that were incurred, including the cost to the health service. I went back to Sheffield university and said that we needed to look into that issue. The university commissioned Oxford Economics to carry out the most rigorous assessment possible into the income involved and the costs for our city. That assessment did not just cover the NHS and education; it went to the nth degree, covering every conceivable cost including traffic congestion. It concluded that international students were worth about £120 million a year to the Sheffield economy in net terms, which probably equated to about 6,000 jobs. Measures such as those in the Bill will serve only to discourage students from coming to the UK.

The Minister will argue that the health surcharge will bring us into line with our major competitors, which require health insurance as a condition for obtaining a student visa, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) pointed out, it comes on the back of other changes introduced by the Home Office that have done huge damage to the competitive position of our universities. This will simply be seen as another signal that international students are not welcome in the UK.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Is the hon. Gentleman not aware of the latest university entrance figures, which show that the number of foreign students applying to and getting into our top universities has actually increased this year?

[Paul Blomfield]

I am well aware of those figures. In general, the defence has been that the numbers were flatlining and that there has been a slight increase this year. There has, however, been a disturbing fall in numbers in certain areas, including taught postgraduate courses, and that is a problem. The point is not that there might be a slight increase; it is that we are losing market share. Higher education is a hugely growing sector of the international economy. The Government, through the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, have estimated that the number of international students travelling around the world will have doubled by 2020. It is not good enough to be complacent about flatlining figures or about small increases, because they mean that we are losing market share.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn]

No. I am going to make my speech.

I would like the House to consider for a moment the general narrative that is current in this country and across Europe—a narrative condemning people who are migrants and condemning people who try to survive in Europe, and at the same time expressing deep concern when 200 were drowned off the coast of Italy in the tragedy of Lampedusa, along with the 20,000 others who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in the past 20 years, as well as those who have drowned trying to get to the Canary islands or to Greece. Yes, some of those were economic migrants and some were asylum seekers. Yes, some were trying to escape from human rights abuses in Eritrea, Sudan and many other countries, and we express concern at what happened.

We need to think about why people seek to move in order to survive. Do not we, as a powerful industrial country, have some responsibility not just for the economic situation that this country faces but, through our contributions to the European Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, and to the general agreement on tariffs and to trade and other organisations, for the sense of economic imbalance around the world?

We should be a little more sanguine about immigration and emigration. During the 1950s and 1960s, which, it is always apocryphally told, were a time of mass migration into Britain, the figures show—they are helpfully put together in the House of Commons Library briefing—net migration from Britain during the whole of that period. A very large number of British people went to live elsewhere and made their contributions and their lives in other countries. They did it for economic reasons and sent money home. Indeed, at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, there was a regular migration of more than 100,000 people a year from Britain, mainly to the United States, Canada and Australia, but to other places as well. Migration—

[Andrew Bridgen]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

No, I am not giving way.

Migration is something that people do to try to survive. We should think about that for a moment. We should also for another moment—I take the point that was made so well by my Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington—have some respect for the enormous contribution to the economy of this country that has been made by people who migrated here. Had there not been migration from the Caribbean, south Asia, Ireland, central Africa and many other parts of the world into this country over the past 50 years or so, what kind of health service would we have? What kind of education system would we have? What kind of industrial base would we have? What kind of society would we be? Would London have been the multicultural capital of the world hosting the Olympics? I think not. We would be a much poorer, much less relevant society and a much less relevant country. We need to think about the contribution that has been made and respect people for it.

Members on the Government Benches got very angry when my Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington was telling it like it is about the treatment of people in detention centres, the powers of arrest that the Bill gives to immigration officers, and the circumstances in which some people are removed from this country by force. I have met the family of Jimmy Mubenga, who died when he was forced to leave this country. I remember many years ago, shortly after I had been elected to this House, telling the House about a young Kurdish man called Shiho Iyguven, who was threatened with removal to Turkey and took his own life in a detention centre. His son, who was a tiny baby at the time, came to see me and asked, “What was dad like?” All I could say was, “Unfortunately, he was told he was going to be deported and in desperation he took his own life out of fear.”

We are taking some serious measures here today. I intervened earlier on one of my colleagues about the behaviour of the immigration service in carrying out the stop-and-search policy, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington talked about, making Conservative Members so very angry. Imagine a dispassionate, observant visitor to London who happened upon a tube station in Wembley or in the east end, or anywhere where there is a substantially multi-cultural population, seeing non-uniformed people go up to somebody, show a badge of authority and start asking about their immigration status, and when they start protesting seeing the police arrive and say they have to answer the questions. What would such a visitor on holiday in London think if they saw that going on? I am sorry to say that that is exactly the direction that the Bill takes us in.

The Conservative party are very concerned, and have been as long as I can remember, about the European convention on human rights and the European Court of Human Rights. They are an obsession with them. Never mind that the convention was written by a Tory lawyer and introduced in 1950 and has done a great deal to give people a benchmark of human rights throughout the member states of the Council of Europe. They want to say that article 8, the right to family life, somehow undermines the British way of life. So we have this curious clause 14, which talks about public interest considerations in respect of article 8 of the European convention on human rights. It is strangely written because much of it consists of assertions of the wishes of the Government of the day; they are not requirements but a series of assertions. It is only when one gets well into the clause that one finds specific requirements.

The clause seeks to guide immigration judges in the direction of minimising the question of family life, and because of the way in which it deals with children in family life, it will often be damaging to the interests of children who happen to have parents who may be applying for the right to remain in this country. I hope that in Committee there will be a serious examination of the whole question of article 8, and that when the Bill eventually reaches the House of Lords it will be able to do something more useful, such as protecting the rights of all of us by asserting the necessity of us remaining within the European convention on human rights, and therefore enjoying the protection of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. I know that Conservative Members are obsessed with the idea that we must withdraw from the ECHR, but it is a treaty obligation. Once we withdraw from a treaty, we are sending out the message that everyone else can do the same. Where then is the benchmark that we claim for ourselves of justice in society?

Like many others who have spoken in the debate, I deal with a large number of immigration cases—asylum seekers, family reunion cases, student visas. People come to my office and we do our best for them within the rules and try to get answers to their questions. I have no great problem with many of the civil servants who work in the Home Office, and I pay tribute to the many who work extremely hard, particularly those who are not particularly well paid, but they have a mammoth task. In 2008, I remember showing someone who came into my office a letter saying that legacy cases would all be resolved by mid-summer 2011. He duly came back in mid-summer 2011, queued up for my advice bureau for three hours, came in, put the letter down in front of me and said, “There, Mr Corbyn. It’s now mid-summer 2011,” which it absolutely was. It was June—you can’t get more mid-summer than that. I duly wrote to the Home Office asking when he would get a response, and I was told, “Maybe two years.”

People’s lives are on hold for year after year. They cannot travel, possibly cannot work or study and cannot make a living for themselves. They are in insecure accommodation and have an insecure future. What kind of life is that to thrust on anybody? It is an uncertain situation in which to bring up children. I ask the Minister to bring a sense of efficiency to the Home Office in dealing with long-term cases, which bring people great misery and difficulties.

I shall join my colleagues in voting against the Bill tonight, partly because of the details that it contains on education, housing, some aspects of health and so on, but also because of the atmosphere that it will create and the message that it will send at this particular time. Let us start with a sense of humanity. Every case is a human story, and every human story has its ups and downs, its triumphs and tragedies. Instead we have dog-whistle politics, the mantras being that every immigrant is an illegal immigrant who must somehow be condemned and that immigration is the cause of all the problems in our society.

A shortage of housing can be dealt with by building houses—it kind of helps. The two things go together. Recognising people’s skills and their ability to contribute to our society helps us all. If we descend into a UKIP-generated xenophobic campaign, it weakens and demeans all of us and our society, and we are all the losers for that.