Paul Blomfield
Main Page: Paul Blomfield (Labour - Sheffield Central)Department Debates - View all Paul Blomfield's debates with the Home Office
(11 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Robert Jenrick
I do not think anyone listening to the debate will be fooled by the damascene conversion of the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and her colleagues to controlled migration, when they have spent their entire lives campaigning for completely the opposite. One of the few pledges that the Leader of the Opposition launched his campaign on just a few years ago was freedom of movement. We have committed to controlled migration. We share a deep conviction that we have to get the numbers down. I am hopeful and confident that the package the Prime Minister and Home Secretary will bring forward very soon will do just that.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
International students contribute £42 billion annually to the UK. They are vital to the economies of towns and cities across the country. Most return home after their course. Those who do not are granted a visa for further study or a skilled workers visa, because we want them in the country. Students are not migrants. The public do not consider them to be migrants. Is it not time we took them out of the net migration numbers and brought our position into line with our competitors, such as the United States, whose Department of Homeland Security, as the arm of Government responsible for migration policy, does not count students in its numbers?
Robert Jenrick
I do not think fiddling the figures is the answer to this challenge. The public want to see us delivering actual results and bringing down the numbers. Of course, universities and foreign students play an important part in the academic, cultural and economic life of the country, but it is also critical that universities are in the education business, not the migration business. I am afraid that we have seen a number of universities—perfectly legally but nonetheless abusing the visa system—promoting short courses to individuals whose primary interest is in using them as a backdoor to a life in the United Kingdom, invariably with their dependants. That is one of the reasons why we are introducing the measure to end the ability of students on short-taught courses to bring in dependants. Universities need to look to a different long-term business model, and not just rely on people coming in to do short courses, often of low academic value, where their main motivation is a life in the UK, not a first-rate education.