Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government why all international students on postgraduate taught courses are counted as migrants, even though a proportion of those students leave the UK after less than a year.

Long-term international migration estimates are produced by the independent Office for National Statistics (ONS). Any decision around the methodology used to estimate net migration would be for the ONS. They use the “UN-recommended definition of a long-term international migrant”, a person who moves to another country other than their own for at least a year (12 months). Students who leave the UK within one year of their arrival are not considered to be long-term migrants. In their ‘Reason for international migration, international students update’ they said:

“An international student is currently defined as someone who arrives in the UK to study and remains for a period of 12 months or more. In line with the current United Nations (UN) definition of a long-term migrant, international students are included in our estimates of long-term immigration.”