Immigration Rules (International Students)

Stuart C McDonald Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered immigration rules for international students.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. Tomorrow is International Students’ Day, so I thank hon. Members for turning out to mark the occasion. I also thank the numerous organisations that have got in touch to provide helpful thoughts and briefings—enough to fill the debate, although I promise I will not do that.

The debate offers us the chance to celebrate the contribution of international students to our education sector, our economy and our whole society. But not just that—it is also the perfect time to reflect on where the UK is in the increasing global competition to attract international students, what our ambitions should be and whether the Government are pursuing the right immigration policies to achieve those. I suspect that hon. Members will need little persuading that we should celebrate international students, so I will only briefly put on record the economic, social and cultural benefits that they bring.

In economic terms, international students’ contribution to UK GDP almost certainly exceeds £10 billion per year and supports around 170,000 full-time equivalent jobs. Many international students go on to undertake post-doctoral research in the UK, helping to drive world-leading research. All analysis of the economic effect of taking on international students shows that they have a significant net benefit.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Leicester has two great universities—Leicester University and De Montfort University—that have a number of international students. Does he agree that not only is it important that we have fair and effective rules so people can answer criticisms that are made of them, but the Government’s rhetoric is extremely important? We should encourage more international students to come and study here in the United Kingdom. If they do not, they will just go elsewhere. There is a big market out there, and unless we have them here, we will lose the revenue and advantages that they bring.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I agree wholeheartedly. Indeed, I will mention later the messages that the Government have been sending out and the negative headlines that they have been attracting in key markets for international students. The Government must seriously rethink those messages.

When considering the economic benefits of international students, we must also think about the personal and professional links that 84% of those students maintain after they leave the United Kingdom. They are a tremendous source of soft power for this country and allow trade links and political alliances to be built. We should also remember that those benefits are triggered not only by our universities; hundreds of thousands of other students are taught English as a second language in the UK each year at around 450 institutions accredited by the British Council.

The benefits of attracting the brightest international students go way beyond the economy. Such students enrich and diversify the research and learning environment by exposing our own students and staff to different approaches, contributing to their international experience and skills, and creating a more culturally diverse environment.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. Is he aware that Bangor University in my constituency has widespread international links, including a site in China, as well as students from all over the world, all of whom have been made to feel very uncomfortable by the current atmosphere? This is not just a matter of the £400 million that international students contribute to the Welsh economy; it counts at the individual level as well.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Absolutely. There is a feeling of uneasiness among the migrant community more generally in the light of recent events. Again, I urge the Government to rethink their rhetoric about not just students, but migration generally.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Like some of my colleagues, I have two universities in my constituency: the University of Warwick and Coventry University. Students from abroad certainly make a major contribution—about £9 billion per year—to the British economy. That is a hefty sum. To put that another way, 380,000-odd students come to this country per annum. The Government are not really friendly towards students. As some colleagues will recall, the Government abolished the education maintenance allowance, and they do not show much enthusiasm even for apprenticeships and further education.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman says. International students’ contribution to GDP is actually now £10 billion—even higher than the figure he quotes.

I will finish my praise for international students by turning to the St Andrews University students’ association, which put out a statement this morning that I think sums things up nicely:

“Universities... owe much of their value and their success to their diversity. Without a student or staffing body comprised of people of all races, religions, class or political allegiance, we cannot and will not achieve the level of quality—in research and personal character—to which the UK is accustomed. By mixing, debating, and learning from those with varied views and cultural backgrounds, we become better, more rounded, more tolerant and accepting individuals.”

Those views are broadly shared by around three quarters of our own students, according to a Higher Education Policy Institute survey.

Turning to where we are now, the UK has for some time been a world leader in attracting international students, but that reputation is in jeopardy.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this important debate, and I echo what my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) said about the Government’s rhetoric on international students. There are a lot of students in Hampstead and Kilburn, and they are diverse; they make my constituency what it is. The hon. Gentleman talked about international students’ net contribution, which I believe is £14 billion a year. Does he agree that in post-Brexit Britain, we should recognise the value of those students and remove them from the net migration target to make them feel more welcome in our country?

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I agree wholeheartedly. I will turn later to the contradiction that on the one hand, the Treasury appears to be all for increasing our education exports, but on the other, the Home Office includes students in its net migration target and therefore sees them as a ready target for trying to clamp down on migrant numbers.

In 2014-15, of the around 2.27 million students at UK higher education institutions, more than 125,000 were from other EU countries and more than 300,000 were from non-EU countries. In the most recent year that we have figures for, overall international student numbers just about held up, but the number of new entrants fell by 2.8%. Figures from June this year show that the number of study-related visas granted by the UK fell by 5% from the previous year. The British Council has stated that the UK is beginning to lose market share to competitors.

There are serious concerns about the UK’s performance in attracting students from key markets. The number of Indian students enrolling in their first year at UK universities fell by 10% in 2015 compared with the year before. The number of Indian students studying here has fallen by around 50% in the four years since the UK Government started to turn the screw while our rivals were all improving their offer. It is no coincidence that there is now a record number of Indian students in the US, which has, for example, opened up post-study work schemes.

Where do we want to go from here? If any other industry brought such a wealth of benefits to the country, the Government would be mad not to pull out all the stops to go for growth. Education is one of the UK’s most successful exports. In what other export market would we say that we were not going to bother so much with expansion and we were quite happy to see our rivals catch us up and overtake us?

The Government’s official ambition is for education exports as a whole to be worth £30 billion by 2020. In last year’s autumn statement, the Chancellor projected that the number of non-EU students in England alone would rise by just over 7% in the next two years and by 3.2% in the two years after that, but if the 0.6% increase in student enrolments last year is anything to go by, the Government’s goal, modest though it is, has no chance of being met.

The Government must be much more ambitious. While our share of international students is beginning to falter, international student numbers are growing much more significantly and strongly in countries such as the US, Australia and Canada—in fact, those countries are in a completely different league from us. International student numbers are expected to grow significantly around the world in the years ahead, so the opportunities are there if we want to take them, but countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, China, Japan and Taiwan often talk about doubling their number of international students by 2020 or 2025.

Our universities are alarmed about the implications of Brexit, so the Government must step up to the plate to reassure rather than seek to complete what essentially would be a triple whammy, with another crackdown and a persistent failure to listen to rational arguments about a post-study work visa. One of the key underlying problems is, as the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) said, the inclusion of students in the net migration target. At best it seems inconsistent for, on the one hand, the Treasury to be targeting an increase in education exports and, on the other, the Home Office to be quite clearly seeing student numbers as a target for reductions.

To make matters worse, the Home Office appears to be motivated by international passenger survey statistics and a belief that about 90,000 students are not leaving when their courses end. That is not a good thing, because serious questions about the accuracy of those figures are now being asked not just by me, but by the UK Statistics Authority, the Select Committee on Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs, and the Institute for Public Policy Research, just by way of example. The main reason for the concerns is that the figures suggested by the Government are completely out of kilter with many other sources of information, from Home Office longitudinal studies to the destination of leavers survey and the annual population survey. We are talking about not just a few hundred students here and there, but many tens of thousands.

As the Minister will know, just a few weeks ago an article appeared in The Times that suggested that the Home Office has in its hands an independent analysis that shows that just 1% of international students break the terms of their visas by refusing to leave after their courses end. Sadly, as I understand it, the Home Office has refused to share that study with other Departments, never mind with MPs or the public. Perhaps the Minister will explain why.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Has the hon. Gentleman considered that there is another dimension to this? Universities such as the University of Warwick export knowledge to different countries. They set up various sub-universities, for want of a better term.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

That is a good point that we should bear in mind. The export of education takes the form of not just attracting international students, but physically building campuses and other institutions abroad.

I ask the Minister to explain what is happening with the study that we are not allowed to see, because that study almost certainly takes into account new exit checks, which have been in place for about 12 months. Using exit checks and cross-referencing other data sources gives us a tremendous new opportunity to get a proper handle on student migration patterns. It simply is not common sense for the Government to press ahead with new goals for reducing student numbers until such time as the assumptions on which the proposals are based are thoroughly tested.

I know from speaking with the Office for National Statistics just this morning that it is taking on a body of work to look at this issue and that it will today put some information on its website to explain the nature of that work. Will the Government therefore undertake to share the exit check data with the Office for National Statistics, which is important for its work, and will the Minister wait until that work is complete, rather than pressing ahead with any rash policy decisions?

I turn finally to the policies we need, if hon. Members agree with me that we should be going for growth. What policies would allow us to do that? The obvious first answer is that we need to up our game on post-study work offers. Post-study work is something that our competitor countries are using as a key means to attract talented international students, and they are doing it much better than us. Canada has three-year visas with no salary threshold and New Zealand has one-year visas with no salary threshold. Australia conducted a big review on the subject back in 2010, when it was beginning to struggle to attract international students, and, lo and behold, it proposed a two-year post-study visa with no salary requirement, just like we used to have here, and now it is much more competitive than we are.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the thresholds set are unrealistic for many graduates such as young post-doctorate students who would like to remain in their universities?

[Stuart C. McDonald]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. I will turn later to how some of the thresholds set are unrealistic for specific sectors, and indeed specific parts of the United Kingdom.

Post-study work is attractive, and it is important in attracting international students, because for them it is an opportunity to gain priceless experience of the business environment and culture in the UK. It allows them to utilise knowledge gained from their studies in an English-speaking setting, build networks and, importantly, offset some of the costs of studying abroad. The range of voices speaking out in favour of a post-study work scheme is huge. It includes Universities Scotland; Universities UK; the Russell Group; the Scottish Government; Scottish Tories, Labour, Lib Dems and Greens; the Scottish Government’s post-study work working group; the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, twice; various all-party parliamentary groups; the Select Committee on Home Affairs; the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee; the Scottish TUC; business groups; immigration lawyers; and the Cole commission on UK exports, which was asked to make a report. They are not all wrong. Even a study funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills made it clear that our failure in post-study work offers puts the UK’s universities at a competitive disadvantage in attempting to recruit the best of the international student pool.

If the Government will not listen on a UK-wide basis, I repeat the call that they should allow Scotland to press ahead, as well as any other nation or region of the UK that wishes to do so. The arguments offered by the Government in response recently to the Scottish Affairs Committee did not stack up. It is not true that allowing Scotland to introduce its own post-study work scheme would harm the integrity of the UK’s immigration system. We all know that other countries apply different immigration rules in different constituent parts—indeed, so has the UK. It did with the fresh talent scheme and the tech nation visa, and the plain old tier 2 permit ties visa holders, at least by implication to particular parts of the UK, so it can be done.

The Government complained that, under the fresh talent working in Scotland scheme, some people used study in Scotland as a means to move to England. The first point is, so what? Even if the numbers the Government quote are accurate—the Minister knows that the study probably was not comprehensive enough for that—we are talking about tiny numbers. We are also talking about people who were doing nothing illegal or in breach of their visa, because it was not a stipulation of the visa that the person had to live and work in Scotland.

If the Minister is so worried about a couple of thousand additional graduates entering the labour force outside Scotland, he should stipulate that condition in the visa. It really is that simple. Otherwise, the message from the Government to Scotland is that the demographic challenges and skills shortages it faces do not matter and that the priority is keeping a handful of extra migrants out of other parts of the UK.

To rub salt in the wounds, I cannot say strongly enough how many bridges were burned when the Government announced that their pilot of a half-baked alternative to the post-study work scheme would be piloted only in a tiny number of English universities. Even if rolled out, that pilot scheme is not remotely competitive with what other countries are offering. It offers just four months at the end of study and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) said, the starting salary thresholds are inappropriate for certain sectors and regions. Median salaries for graduates of Scottish universities are £19,000 or lower in biological sciences; agriculture and related subjects; law; languages; and creative arts and design, which is below the threshold for a tier 2 visa.

It is not just the absence of a post-study work visa that is problematic. There are serious concerns about the credibility interviews conducted by UK Visas that essentially reassess decisions made by the universities. Subjective criteria now operate alongside the Government’s decision to reduce the maximum visa refusal rates of an institution to 10%. That means that institutions are scaling back recruitment work in places from which there are higher refusal rates.

We are also alarmed at hints that a two-tier system is on its way, with visas for some universities incorporating more favourable terms and conditions than for others. All universities are quality assured—that is required by a tier 4 licence. I am therefore proud to speak up for all Scottish universities—indeed, all universities throughout the UK—and question the message that sends out.

I could speak for hours on the complexity of the application process and various other problems, but I will draw my remarks to a conclusion and leave it to other Members or for another debate to explore those issues. The key message is that international students are brilliant and we could do so much more to attract them here for the benefit of all. Government policy is misguided in the extreme and it is time for an urgent rethink. It is time to up our game and maximise our efforts to attract international students, who bring real benefits to this country.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) on securing this debate. The issue affects many people in my constituency and certainly needs attention. Like other hon. Members here, I believe in education. I believe that those with a vocation should be facilitated to learn their trade or skill, that those who are desirous of learning should be enabled to do that and that those who can bring skills to our economy must be able to do so. I believe that our universities must be able to welcome foreign students, with the higher tuition they bring, and that they should be in a position to facilitate higher learning.

But in all of this, I believe we should not be taken advantage of. Something the Prime Minister said when she was Home Secretary sticks in my memory:

“We want the best international graduates to stay and contribute to the UK economy. However, the arrangements that we have been left with for students who graduate in the UK are far too generous. They are able to stay for two years, whether or not they find a job and regardless of the skill level of that job. In 2010, when one in 10 UK graduates were unemployed, 39,000 non-EU students with 8,000 dependants took advantage of that generosity.

We will therefore close the current post-study work route from April next year. In future, only graduates who have an offer of a skilled graduate-level job from an employer licensed by the UK Border Agency will be allowed to stay.”—[Official Report, 22 March 2011; Vol. 525, c. 855.]

That does not seem to be unfair. It is our responsibility to provide the highest levels of our education to our own constituents and graduates who are unemployed. It is our privilege to offer the highest level of education to others who want to study in some of the best universities in the world but, with respect, it is not our responsibility to continue to cater for them to the detriment of our own economy.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jim Shannon]

I cannot give way because the Chairman was very clear about time.

Queen’s University Belfast is an example of some of the good work, student exchange participation, and research and investigation into new drugs that take place. The wealth of talent from overseas enables us to do that great work. Our medical staff are greatly enhanced by those junior doctors, or registrars, from other countries and they could not do without them. I am thankful that that work takes place, but it will not stop because things have been tightened up. It will merely stop our groaning system from being further burdened by responsibilities that are not ours to bear. I understand the need to tighten up some of the controls.

I welcome the fact that Brexit presents the opportunity to find terms of international study that suit students and the higher education institutions without impacting on the decision to ensure that we do not adversely affect our economy. I understand how the uncertainty of Brexit may impact on those who want to come here to live and to educate themselves, and I am sure that American universities are facing similar uncertainties, but this is not the end of international students. It is the beginning of teamwork to promote our universities and the benefits of coming here to work and study. Brexit does not signify the death knell, as I and others have said in recent days. It presents opportunities, and the universities can and must be part of this process. We must put in place agreements to promote our universities and allow visas for students, but the correct standards must apply.

I understand that India and other nations want a change to the system, and it is essential that we work with them as much as possible to provide an accessible system. It must never be forgotten that visas are a protection for us. During her visit to India, the Prime Minister indicated that she was looking at student visas for those from India, and that is important. Our universities want foreign students, foreign students want our universities and our Government want to facilitate this. We must find a balance between that and our security. There is a way and the Home Office must find it. The Home Secretary must outline how that balance will be struck and the Brexit team must deliver the negotiation of agreements to enhance and support European uptake.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Immigration (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) on securing the debate and I thank all hon. Members who participated in it for their worthwhile, considered and thoughtful contributions on such a wide-reaching and important topic. I think that we can all agree that it is in the best interests of the UK as a whole to ensure that the United Kingdom continues to attract the best and brightest international students to study here. High-quality international students make an important contribution to the UK. Our universities are strengthened by the presence of some of the finest minds from around the world, and the international students themselves benefit from the chance to receive an education at some of the world’s best educational institutions.

Much emphasis has been placed today on the desire for Scotland to re-establish a post-study work visa. Hon. Members may remember the Fresh Talent scheme that operated in Scotland between 2004 and 2008. That scheme placed few restrictions on those who wanted to stay in the UK to work post-study, and granted free access to the whole of the UK labour market. An evidence review published by Scottish Government Social Research in 2008 found that only 44% of applicants remained in Scotland at the end of their two years’ leave on the scheme, and a significant proportion were not in skilled work appropriate to the level of education.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

That is exactly the point I made during my speech and I suggested that it is made a condition of a post-study work visa that that person has to live and work in Scotland. That would absolutely solve the Minister’s concerns.

[Mr Goodwill]

It is very difficult to ensure that a person who gets a visa to work, potentially, in Scotland is stopped from travelling elsewhere in the UK. Certainly, the pull of the south-east and London is one we are all too well aware of.

In 2008, the tier 1 post-study work visa replaced the Fresh Talent scheme and was introduced country-wide. This route saw high levels of abuse, with evidence of large numbers of fraudulent applications and individuals deliberately using the student route solely as an avenue to work in the UK, with no intention to study and many in unskilled work. I am sure that hon. Members are not seriously suggesting that a return to a completely open post-study work route that does not lead to skilled work would be advantageous for any part of the United Kingdom.

The UK already has an attractive offer for international graduates of UK universities. Those who can find a skilled job are free to do so. There is no limit to the number of tier 4 students who can move to a tier 2 general skilled worker route, nor do they count against the annual tier 2 cap. Around 6,000 tier 4 international students move to tier 2 annually, and that number has been rising year on year. However, that does not mean that the Government do not remain open to keeping our offer for international students under constant review, to ensure that we help our renowned institutions to attract talent from around the world. One such recent development was the launch of the tier 4 visa pilot with the universities of Bath, Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College in July.