The role of universities in the mass migration crisis

The number of foreign students in the UK is far too high - costing us £9bn a year.

This piece was originally published in the Daily Express.

The number of foreign students in our country is now at shockingly high levels. A legacy of Conservative Party failure, the figures released last week showed that, in the 2022/2023 academic year, there were 758,000 non-UK citizens lodged in student halls and accommodation across Britain.

This is before we even mention the 200,000 or so dependants and family members that they have been allowed to bring with them. In total there are close to one million people in our country as a result of the higher education system.

The cost of this is huge. The Treasury will be having to shell out at least £10billion to provide the public services capacity and infrastructure that these individuals will require.

It was not always like this. In 2012/2013 there were 307,000 international students in the UK, and they made up just 12% of the total student population. Today they now make up over a quarter of all students.

This is uncharted territory for our country, the numbers are on warp speed, and yet they have received almost no attention by politicians or the media.

We are being denied an important national debate. It is not in our country’s interest to have a higher education system that is deliriously intent on debasing itself into nothing more than a visa mill for foreign nationals.

But that is what it has become. The Graduate Visa Route, introduced in 2021 by Tory leadership contender Priti Patel, means that roughly 40% of foreign students now stay in the UK long after their studies are completed.

This might seem desirable if the students staying had just left Oxbridge with a STEM qualification in their back pocket. But a report out later this week by the Centre for Migration Control will show that this is far from the norm. We are far more likely to have foreign graduates remain with a BA in tourism management, interior design, or video game music, than in chemical engineering.

The economic virtue of these courses are negligible, but they provide a backdoor into the UK for those Nigerians, Indians and Pakistanis (who make up a large chunk of the foreign student population) that wish to move here.

A three-year course in Harry Potter studies at Swindon Roundabout Polytechnic allows an individual to get a foothold in Britain, to work in the gig economy for a few years, and then find themselves on the conveyor belt for indefinite leave to remain.

Most low-grade universities know full-well that this is what they are being used for and it is why institutions like the University of Portsmouth or Southampton have set up campuses in London. The job opportunities for foreign nationals on a student visa are far greater in the bustling capital, where Deliveroo and Pedicab drivers are in constant demand.

We are, of course, told that the higher education sector is an economic asset of which we should all be proud and that the tuition fees of foreign students help pay for cutting-edge research. But let’s be real about this. Universities are now spending billions of pounds each year on pointless research into critical race theory, gender identity, and colonisation. These days you are more likely to bump into a blue-haired member of the Socialist Workers Party in a Students’ Union than you are a budding Isaac Newton or Stephen Hawking.

Those institutions languishing at the bottom of the university league tables may very well have built their business models on the assumption that there will always be a huge inflow of international students to Britain. But this does not mean that we have to continue satisfying their gluttony. All economic bubbles eventually burst and those who have been foolish enough to put all their eggs in one basket deserve to fall by the wayside.

Any politician looking to address mass migration in the future must make it perfectly clear to Vice Chancellors that they can no longer undermine British social cohesion, and heap huge pressure onto the nation’s public services, by chasing the Chinese Yuan or the Nigerian Naira. It is time we took a bit more pride in Britain’s university sector and stopped renting it out like a cheap tuxedo to the rest of the world.