As explained in these pages recently, the invasion on the south east coast of the UK continues. This is an invasion of people who have not been invited, who are neither needed nor wanted, are predominantly young, male, and Muslim, are not in danger back home and whose respect for our culture makes Sadiq Khan seem like a member of the BNP. To November this year there have been 40,000 alone; a record number, and it is to be assumed that these are the ones we can count. How many slip the iron curtain of our fearsome UK Border Force ready to capture them and imprison them in the nearest Holiday Inn?
‘But we need immigrants!’ some say and maybe we do, but the above is against a backdrop of record levels (in the region of 500,000) of legal immigrants to the UK this year to date. Are none of these people able to work? According to Migration Watch UK over 300,000 visas were issued for work purposes and nearly a quarter of a million visas were issued for settlement in the UK. Yet we are described as racist, xenophobic, or fascist if we raise questions about people pouring in illegally.
Fear not however, the government has found a way to slash about half a million from the above figures and in such a way that will be entirely detrimental to the UK economy and to our international relationships. They have decided to enforce a heavy-handed crackdown on our annual influx of international students. To be precise, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (who has no known association with anyone from outside the UK) says that unless the students have places at ‘top universities’ they will not be issued with a student visa. Mind you, this is not the first time the Conservative government has said they intended to do this. In 2016 Amber Rudd (rhymes with ‘dud’) during her tenure as Home Secretary, announced her own crackdown.
This is madness. Reluctantly, I agree with The Guardian in which someone said this would push some of our already financially pressed universities ‘over the edge’. If students are only going to be permitted to attend ‘top universities’ then those are the universities already awash with cash due, on the one hand, to their popularity and their donations on the other. Many universities, most of which were created in the 1990s when there was an expansion of approximately 150%, do not benefit from such donations.
And how are we going to judge which are the ‘top universities?’ Will they only, for example, be those in the Russell Group or will there be some other objective criteria? Certainly, there are plenty of bogus universities in the UK—some notable examples are The University of McAllister, Rutland University and Bransfield University—but these are not funded by the university funding bodies in any of the four countries of the UK, and nobody but an idiot would issue a student visa for one of these…or would they?
Another major consideration is the income that international students bring to the places where they study. In the UK they bring an estimated £25.9 billion annually and for some regions such as the North East of England which benefits by around £1 billion annually this is a lifeline. International students rarely get into any trouble in the UK; they tend to drink considerably less alcohol than their UK counterparts, they can only do a few hours of paid work per week so are not a significant threat to the UK workforce and 97% of them return to whence they came when they graduate. What is not to like? I have supervised Chinese, Taiwanese, Jordanian, Saudi, Pakistani and a host of European doctoral students as an academic. They all went home except one and she is now working in the care home sector in the UK.
The fact is that students are an easy target. How easy, from the comfort of your own office—or your own spare bedroom where many civil servants work—to stamp ‘REFUSED’ on a visa legally applied for by a young and aspiring person from a country that needs him or her to benefit from a UK university education ultimately for the benefit of their own country, and to pay for it in the process. Much easier than getting on your sou’wester, fetching your high beam torch and stemming the nightly invasion on the beaches at Hastings.
Mind you, when it comes to doing anything, our government is high on promises and low on delivery and UK universities may have little to fear. Thankfully, Amber Rudd’s crackdown never came to much. There will be a backlash from Universities UK, the organisation for university Vice-Chancellors and Principals, over this. All it will take is a few threats that they may be less than keen to hand out honorary degrees and Chancellorships to retired MPs and peers if this goes ahead. That ought to do the trick.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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