Hasta la visa, baby!
Civitas, 8 April 2011
By Aoife O’Donnell
This week heralded a new cap on immigration to the UK. The policy should come as a surprise to no one: the ‘numbers game’ has long been a feature of the British debate on immigration. The cap is the highest-profile element of a regulatory package of policies meant to meet the Government’s target of reducing net immigration to the UK to ‘tens rather than hundreds of thousands’. At the moment, Britain is experiencing a net immigration to the UK of around 200,000 per annum alongside soaring youth unemployment rates. This target may therefore seem to make political sense – especially given public concerns about immigration. However, in reality, it is bad policy and a waste of time.
Firstly, the immigration cap only applies to the inflow of non-EU residents. It doesn’t so far apply to non-EU students, or those whose eligibility is based on family ties. In fact, it only applies to labour applications, which by themselves make up only 20% of the non-EU inflow. This in itself only constitutes a small portion of total inflow. These working visas are estimated to account for 5% of net migration (at a generous estimation).
The removal of this particular immigrant demographic will make little difference to the net immigration flow. To get to anywhere near a figure of 40,000, the government would have to target groups such as highly-skilled migrants and students who account for the majority of non-EU migration (60%).
Regardless of concerns as to how these modifications could possibly deliver such a huge reduction, capping the number of non-EU students could have disastrous consequences. Non-EU students pay excruciatingly high university fees, fees that many universities use to subsidise British undergraduates.
It is far from clear that this is what voters want when they say they want stricter controls on immigration. Almost no migration statistic is without some caveat, but public opinions on immigration are particularly unreliable. People may be against migration in theory, but their opinion often wavers depending on how the term ‘immigrant’ is defined. The public tends to be against illegal immigration (which is impossible for any government to cap as it all happens informally anyway). Yet other migrants, such as those staying on after a student visa and those on working visas, do not provoke the same knee-jerk objections. This is because they immediately appear to be contributors and co-operators, rather than ‘undesirable burdens’ unlawfully seeking aid.
The Government’s proposed strategy to reduce immigration to a more sustainable level is, in reality, unlikely to succeed. While the Government should be rightly reticent to bar large swathes of international non-EU students and highly skilled workers from entering the country, to a significant degree, its hands are tied by EU free movement regulations. It seems then that the ‘cap it’ policy is as intangible and impractical as the common mindset of ‘send ‘em back’.
At least 50% of student numbers could be trimmed without affecting university students, as most on student visas don’t even attend university. The majority of Highly skilled workers could be cut as well. The term highly skilled is a complete misnomer as most of those here on a Tier 1 General visa are undertaking numerous menial jobs instead of what most people consider to be highly skilled work.
This won’t happen though because of the scaremongering sounds from the NUS and “business leaders”. Business wants its cheap foreign labour.
I think most people are every clear that imnmigration must be reduced massively in all cases. There is a difference between a non-EU applicant to a British University, and a non-EU applicant to a dodgy college in an upstairs office in Peckham. This is not difficult to manage. And in both cases the visa should only last as long as the course, and attendance at a police station for registration should be required on a regular basis to keep track of such students.
Family immigration must also be stopped. A single Pakistani can end up being allowed to bring tens of people into the country, who can then all marry and bring tens of others. This is not what most British people wish to accept.
How many very highly skilled Pakistanis are actually coming into the country? And to engage in which activities? It is surely necessary for the sake of our own social and cultural integrity that the cost of employing such immigrants be higher than that of training and employing British people.
Most people are quite able to draw a direct and proper correlation between high levels of youth unemployment with low levels of available housing and high and unsustainable levels of immigration.
It would be useful to have some materials produced by Civitas describing how the levels of recent immigrants COULD be reduced, so that many are ‘sent back home’, and how other routes for immigration could be closed. There may well be some costs to British society in doing so, but the costs of not doing so are even worse.
-the vast majority of the public has had enough of immigration whether it be legal or illegal.
– huge numbers of students enter the UK not to attend top universities but rather dodgy colleges which are little more than visa factories.
People are against immigration, when it occurs in such numbers that, your community is adversley affected, and when the government in question do not have the forethought or guts to put it into their election manifesto.
That is the long and the short of it, interlectual diliberation, is for those who suffer no consequence of mass unfetterd movement into the country of of values, religion, and social practises that are alien to ours.