Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System

by Colin Yeo;

  He was right. Labour’s economic immigration policy undoubtedly did enhance economic growth, but it was also too ambitious in scope and its public appeal was doomed by the narrow, utilitarian justification relied on by its proponents. Economic migrants were mere tools. In other spheres of immigration policy, refugees were to be kept out at all costs and were dissuaded from coming to the UK with harsh treatment on and after arrival. Family migrants, for their part, were said to be failing to integrate. With leading politicians making these arguments themselves, it is little surprise that hostility towards immigration more generally and towards migrants themselves grew rapidly during this period.

  NOTES

  1 ‘Britain’s curry houses disappearing – 50 per cent to close within 10 years’, Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2017.

  2 R (on the Application of Imam) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 1760.

  3 Will Somerville, Immigration under New Labour (Bristol: Policy Press, 2007).

  4 Erica Consterdine, Labour’s Immigration Policy: The Making of the Migration State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

  5 ‘Selective Admission: Making Migration Work for Britain’, Home Office, 2006.

  6 ‘Australia’s points system is more liberal than you think’, Financial Times, 3 June 2016.

  7 ‘Quarterly Immigration Statistics Year Ended September 2019’, Home Office.

  8 ‘The UK’s points-based system for immigration’, House of Commons Library, 9 July 2018.

  9 Figures taken from ‘Simplifying the Immigration Rules: Consultation Paper No 242’, Law Commission, January 2019.

  10 Alvi [2012], UKSC 33 and Munir [2012] UKSC 32.

  11 ‘Immigration: the Points Based System – Work Routes’, National Audit Office, 15 March 2011.

  12 There were two separate cases, the second of which includes a summary of the first: R (on the application of HSMP Forum (UK) Ltd) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2009] EWHC 711 (Admin).

  13 ‘Analysis of the Points-Based System – Tier 1’, Migration Advisory Committee, 2009, p. 84.

  14 Theresa May, Hansard, House of Commons debate, 23 November 2010, vol. 519, col. 169.

  15 R (on the application of HSMP Forum (UK) Ltd) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2009] EWHC 711 (Admin).

  16 See Chapter 8 on students.

  17 ‘Home Office “wrongly tried to deport 300 skilled migrants”’, The Guardian, 23 November 2018.

  18 Williams, ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’, p. 115.

  19 ‘A Points-Based System: Making Migration Work for Britain’, Home Office, CM 6741, March 2006.

  20 Goodfellow, Hostile Environment.

  CHAPTER 8

  STUDENTS: AWESOME OR BOGUS?

  Priyanka Ann Joshi was a model student. She first arrived in the United Kingdom from India, her home country, in 2005. Joshi studied hard and obtained both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. In June 2014, she applied for further permission to stay in the country to study for a PhD. Everything seemed to be in order. Unknown to Ms Joshi, though, the sponsor licence of the college to which she had applied was revoked by the Home Office a few weeks after she had submitted her application. This meant that her request for permission to stay would inevitably be rejected. It took the Home Office a long time to tell her what the problem was, but she eventually found out in January 2015. She was then given sixty days to either make a new application or leave the country.

  Unfortunately, that was nowhere near enough time to actually find another institution at which to study. As the end of the period approached, she put in a holding application explaining the difficulty and asking for more time. A decision was made on 6 May 2015 to reject this request – and yet no one told Ms Joshi. Instead, the refusal sat on her file at the Home Office. Ms Joshi only found out four weeks later, at 6.15 a.m. on 11 June 2015, when a team of immigration enforcement officers arrived at her house, woke her and her husband, bundled them both into a van and detained them. Ms Joshi later complained that the immigration officers were ‘extremely rude’ and had wrongly accused her of lying when she said she was still waiting for a decision from the Home Office.

  Ms Joshi and her husband were eventually released two weeks later. Neither had broken any law or overstayed their visa, yet they had been detained for no obvious reason in extremely distressing circumstances. It seemed that the enforcement team at the Home Office wrongly thought that the refusal had been served; that one month was long enough for a migrant to leave; and that a dawn raid with no prior warning was an appropriate way of ensuring that Ms Joshi left the country, after almost ten years of lawful residence and studies. Ms Joshi brought a legal case against the Home Office, which ultimately failed. While the judge expressed ‘considerable sympathy’ for Ms Joshi and her husband, and said it was not clear that it really had been ‘necessary’ for them to be detained before they were even informed of the negative decision, he still found that the Home Office had not actually acted illegally, as such.1

  ATTRACTING INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

  Ms Joshi had entered the UK at a time when foreign students were being actively sought by the British government. They were seen as an unalloyed good. The high fees they pay to study injected much-needed funding into the further and higher education sectors, cross-subsidising academic research and the education of homegrown students. While living in the UK, they also spent money in the local economy on accommodation, food, entertainment and more. The vast majority leave at the end of their studies, as we will see in a moment, but those who remain are by definition highly skilled and economically beneficial. Educating foreign elites in the United Kingdom also potentially increases British ‘soft power’ and influence abroad in the long term: think of Bill Clinton or Benazir Bhutto, both of whom attended British universities before becoming premiers of their respective countries. Finally, the public have historically been relaxed about the entry of foreign students, at least when responding to opinion polls.

  In 1999 Tony Blair launched an official Prime Minister’s Initiative to increase the numbers of foreign students by 50,000 over six years. It was accompanied by a major marketing campaign, revisions to the student visa routes and a relaxation of the rules on students working. In the end, the target was exceeded by 43,000, which, on the face of it, looked like a high level of success. The British government was not acting in a vacuum, though; more and more students were studying abroad over this period anyway, and other countries, such as the United States, Australia and Canada, were also targeting the same, relatively small number of internationally mobile students. In reality, the British share of this market for international students actually fell over the period. A new initiative was duly launched in 2006 to recruit an additional 100,000 students from a more diverse range of countries.

  Problems with private colleges first started to emerge in 2004. These colleges were unregulated, meaning anyone at all was able to set themselves up in any premises in the country, fire up a website and offer any course they had invented themselves. Some were providing very poor-quality or even non-existent teaching, offering false attendance records and allowing their students to work full-time alongside their ‘studies’, in breach of their visas. Some of the students applying to these colleges may have known, or arguably should have known, what they were getting themselves into.

  But it is impossible to tell from a website and prospectus what you are really going to get when you arrive, and considerable fees had to be paid up front. Legitimate students might well find that they had been duped and their money wasted. Some had spent a substantial amount of their family’s money or had borrowed the funds needed. One Nepalese student was defrauded of £9,500 by a corrupt college and, despite assisting the police with their enquiries, she was still forced to leave the United Kingdom before being able to commence an alternative course.2 A student in this position faced either leaving the UK empty-handed or trying to make the best of a bad job and at least getting some work e
xperience and picking up some language skills while they could. With students restricted to working no more than twenty hours per week and plenty of genuine students on high-level courses at top institutions breaking the rules, it was sorely tempting for others to follow this example and violate the given student visa laws.3 In order to fix the problem, from January 2005, international students were only permitted to study at a list of accredited institutions. As the list was being drawn up, the Home Office visited 1,200 private colleges. Twenty-five per cent were found to be ingenuine and were removed from the list.

  Student visas were absorbed into the points-based system in 2009. The number of students entering the UK rose sharply but, to the chagrin of educational institutions, so too did the level of administration associated with them. Any school, college or university that wanted to teach international students now needed to apply for, gain and keep a precious sponsor licence. Loss of a sponsor licence would be financially catastrophic for any university and many colleges.4 The new system meant that a digital ‘confirmation of acceptance for studies’ had to be issued to every student, and detailed attendance and other records needed to be kept. Students were prevented from switching courses even within the same institution. Significantly, the licence also imposed general duties to ‘support immigration control’ and to co-operate with the Home Office.5 This was not restricted only to the international students for which each individual institution was directly responsible.

  DETERRING INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS

  A serious, high-profile crisis hit the Home Office in 2009, when it emerged that eight Pakistani nationals arrested in the UK under terrorism laws had first entered the country on student visas facilitated by a fake college. A subsequent Home Affairs Committee report was highly critical of Home Office oversight of student visas, and the language of ‘bogus students’ and ‘bogus colleges’ became commonplace.6 When David Cameron and Theresa May entered government in 2010 promising to reduce immigration, international students seemed an obvious target. May soon announced a range of measures intended to combat the perceived abuse of student visas by closing colleges, tightening visa requirements, restricting the right to work during and after the completion of courses and restricting the entry of the dependents of students.7

  The idea now seemed to be to deter foreign students from coming to the UK rather than encouraging them. Twelve years after Blair’s first initiative to increase international student numbers by 43,000 per year, in 2011 Cameron announced an intention to reduce student visa numbers by 80,000 per year.8 The reforms met with some success, if it can be called that. Having increased gradually year-on-year since at least 1999 to 2011, the numbers of non-EU university students entering the UK started to fall slightly.9 This came at a time when the total number of students studying abroad was increasing globally. The share of this market coming to the UK to study started to fall. The UK was in danger of losing its second place in the international rankings to Australia, which was successfully increasing its share. In particular, the number of Indian students deciding to come to the UK to study fell by more than 10 per cent.10

  In spite of these measures, yet another scandal emerged in 2014 when the BBC’s Panorama uncovered evidence of organised cheating by a handful of students at two different test centres for English language certificates. The Home Office had signed a huge commercial contract with an American company called English Language Testing (ETS), which would provide these tests remotely with minimal oversight by officials or by ETS itself. The test centre would play a recording provided by ETS, document the student’s responses and send the recording off to ETS to be marked. However, the BBC journalists caught two test centres offering a ‘service’ to students, through which someone else could take the test for them.

  ETS had previously detected some cheating back in 2012 and had informed the Home Office. Action was quietly taken against the 446 individuals concerned, but no wider review was undertaken. This time, though, with the cheating exposed in the media, the Home Office response was rapid and robust. Too robust. Having regularly touted their crackdown on bogus colleges and students, May and Cameron looked like they had lost control. A hasty review by ETS of its own exam recordings led it to accuse a staggering 97 per cent of its own students of cheating. The review was based on computerised voice recognition software that ETS had been developing but had not yet considered suitable for deployment. It seems to have been the scale of the review necessary and the short timescale demanded by ministers that led ETS to deploy the software now, rather than faith in its accuracy. Officials at the Home Office, untrained in linguistics or the technology and techniques deployed by ETS, simply accepted what they were told. The evidence produced by ETS to the Home Office consisted merely of a list of people said to be cheats. ETS refused to hand over any recordings either to the Home Office or to the individuals concerned. Everyone just had to accept that ETS was right, whether ETS was actually right or not.11

  It is certain that some students did cheat. It seems inherently unlikely that as many as 97 per cent did. Nevertheless, between 2014 and 2016, the Home Office took action against over 50,000 foreign students. Nearly 3,000 students were removed or refused re-entry to the UK. More than 12,000 appeals were heard by the courts, with 40 per cent of those who appealed winning their case. Over 11,000 students left the UK voluntarily. A subsequent inquiry report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that the Home Office had been ‘quick to act on imperfect evidence, but slow in responding to indications that innocent people may have been caught up in its actions’.12 The Home Office is nothing if not consistent, and it would seem that officials always assume the worst of immigrants. It is standard operating procedure to refuse, detain and remove migrants before they are allowed the opportunity to explain or challenge the assumption that they are dishonest.

  On any rational level, it was hard to understand why Theresa May and David Cameron were so determined to drive down the numbers of international students. Mainstream opinion across the political spectrum was that such migrants should be encouraged to come to the UK. Preventing and, if necessary, punishing proven outright cheating is understandable, but the approach of the government went far beyond that. Responses to signs of wrongdoing were sweeping and indiscriminate rather than considered and proportionate. Wider reforms to the student visa route were not just about preventing fraud; they were clearly intended to apply a much more selective approach to student admission. Those students who did not meet preconceived ideas of who might be ‘the brightest and the best’ were to be kept out. These were the students studying at below degree level at private colleges, for example, or those at degree level but studying at universities that ministers seemed to regard as second-rate or even those taking external degrees from reputable universities. Like those lucky few to be admitted to degree-level courses at top universities, these migrants still injected money into educational institutions, cross-subsidised domestic students, pumped spending into local economies outside of London and, if they qualified to stay at the end of their studies, brought new skills, productivity and drive to the British economy. Yet, for some reason, they were no longer to be allowed in.

  OPPORTUNITY OR THREAT?

  There were two potential explanations for why international students were so unpopular at the top of government during the Cameron years. One was political: as ever, it all came back to the net migration target. As we have already seen, net migration measures the number of migrants in and out of the country, and a ‘migrant’ is defined in international statistical standards as a person moving from one country to another for a period exceeding one year. Most students therefore met the definition of ‘migrant’ and they were duly counted in the net migration target. With the government missing the target year after year, there was pressure to reduce immigration in any way, and indeed in every way, possible. Whether reducing immigration would be beneficial or harmful became irrelevant when viewed through this political lens. Reducing the number of intern
ational students coming to the UK can be seen as a simple matter of short-term political expediency.

  There is a second way of interpreting the hostility that Cameron and particularly May seemed to feel towards international students, though: fear of change. Both were conservatives as well as Conservatives, after all. It is clearly true that reducing the numbers of students arriving would have an immediate impact on the net migration figures. However, net migration by definition measures both incoming and outgoing migrants. If students left the UK at the end of their studies, they would also show up as an outgoing migrant in the second part of the net migration equation several years later; in the longer term, this would help with meeting the target. But this assumes that the students would leave at the end of their studies, and both Cameron and May seemed concerned that they were staying. International students come from a diverse range of countries, with China, India, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Nigeria all amongst the top countries of origin. If such students made the United Kingdom their home, the ethnic composition of the population would change over time.

  As we have seen, international students were welcomed with open arms during the Blair era and it was seen as positive if they chose to make their homes in the UK permanently: the evidence suggested that on average this would be good for the economy. In contrast, Theresa May devoted a whole segment of her speech at the Conservative Party conference in 2015 to international students and claimed, ‘Too many of them are not returning home as soon as their visa runs out.’ Showing her disdain for the university sector as a whole, she continued, ‘I don’t care what the university lobbyists say: the rules must be enforced.’13 Elsewhere, Cameron and May had both already argued that it was important to ‘break that link between temporary visas and permanent settlement’.14