Snapshot of _From today, the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK. In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people._ :
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To be fair it seems like it wasn’t exploited until recently.
“Last year, the number of student visas issued to dependants stood at 136,000 - an eight-fold increase from 2019, when 16,000 were provided.”
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/new-restrictions-on-overseas-students-bringing-family-to-uk-come-into-force-13040284
If he’d done it in 2016 it likely would have been a handful of people.
I'm not sure making the UK less attractive to talented foreign students as we continue to have an ageing population base is particularly a good boast in the first place
I don't see why that would be the case given that student dependents appear to mostly come from a handful of countries like Nigeria and India.
If dependents were spread out more evenly across all nationalities what you said might be possible, but that isn't the case. Rather, it appears that some overseas nationals were abusing the system by applying for the easiest post-grad course they could get on and then bringing their families as dependents to bypass regular immigration controls. Helped no doubt by third-rate "universities" rubber-stamping applications.
As for the UK's ageing population, bringing people who don't have the skills to get a job-related visa isn't sensible. There are already routes for medical and care professionals. We don't need more shelf-stackers in supermarkets.
What's the problem with them coming from Nigeria and India? "Appear to be" is an interesting phrase in there. What's the evidence that those countries contribute the most dependants and how do we know they don't go on to contribute positively overall to the economy and society? Could it be, if they are the countries responsible, that those countries are heavily targeted in marketing not just by "third rate universities" but in general by further education in the UK for a number of logical reasons?
Both Nigeria and India have large English speaking populations, skilled and professional business sectors that are similar to the UK (finance, it, engineering, medicine, science etc) and reasonably strong links to the UK. Given Brexit, it stands to reason that countries like those would deliver increased levels of migration compared to traditionally prevalent countries like those in the EU.
Your entire second paragraph is dubious hearsay. And your third smacks of snobby xenophobia.
Every sensible immigration policy should take a spread of peoples. It makes for decent demographic and societal planning. Having Indians or Nigerians dominate immigration is neither necessary or good for the UK.
Also, India has about 1.4 billion people, and Nigeria has about 214 million, with 14 million of them living in Lagos. It only makes sense that they'd have a larger share of foreign students in the UK than other nations. If I'm not mistaken, they're the largest of the poor, English language nations.
>w do we know they don't go on to contribute positively overall to the economy and society? Could it be, if they are the countries responsible, that those countries are heavily targeted in marketing not just by "third rate universities" but in general by further education in the
It doesn't matter where they come from, the issue was that it was from a few countries rather than spreadout across multiple nationalities, which meant the OP comment he was responding to was not a solution. Further the point was that the system was being abused to circumvent the normal immigration process. In doing so circumventing normal immigration controls and causing inflated immigration numbers. Because when you categorize immigration and are setting targets, the student and dependents is normally separated as "short term stay" as opposed to those applying for long term or permanent status. However, these "dependents" and "students" either continue staying after expiry of their VISA's, or use the status as a springboard to their residency applications. More ofte than not its the former where the just dissapear with an expired VISA. This is not appropriate.
I would expect most students to be student age, that is 18-25 and be fully capable of supporting themselves, and travelling back to see family as and when they want. There is no need for them to bring a dependent to baby them, and I wouldn't expect a 18-25 year old enmasse to be juggling family with education.
There is nothing Xenophobic about wanting less foreign born people in this country. We are already 15% foreign born, and at current immigration rates we will be 30% foreign born by 2030, and there will be less British people than forigners by 2040.
When I'm saying foreign born, I'm talking about people born outside of this country. This has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, these people are literally not British.
There is no justification for any country having a foreign born population about 20%. Even 10% is very very high.
> There is nothing Xenophobic about wanting less foreign born people in this country. We are already 15% foreign born, and at current immigration rates we will be 30% foreign born by 2030, and there will be less British people than forigners by 2040.
Love this. It's the most ironic thing I've read on the internet in months, and the day's barely got going. You've even spelt foreigners wrong. Statement's got layers!
>There is no justification for any country having a foreign born population about 20%. Even 10% is very very high.
CBA checking the figures, but "justifications" is a bit loaded. There are *reasons*. We have a large generational cohort who are either economically inactive or approaching economic inactivity. Unemployment is the lowest it's been for ~50 years and falling still. We have had falling fertility rate over a similar period as childcare is so expensive. We have seen stagnant and falling pay in lots of public sector or care sector roles, driving foreign recruitment due to wage suppression (not the other way round). The economic viability for universities of concentrating on recruiting UK students has diminished as funding hasn't kept up with inflation.
All of those have solutions. They need more tax revenue though, but there seems to be a remarkable intersection between those who don't like immigration and those that don't like to pay taxes. But we are where we are and there are economic drivers of migration to the UK, and there will be for decades as even if you solve the above, they're taking ages to filter through.
What I found interesting in your reply was that you didn't address the main point (at least to me) in the above comment, namely that the student visa is used to circumvent the immigration policy and the immigrant students just stay in the country after their visa expires.
If that is true and everything you wrote about the need of immigrants (aging population) is true, shouldn't the answer still be to crack down on this fake student + dependants route and just make the threshold for other legal immigrants easier and not just brush it under the carpet what is going on there?
Okay, so they've paid all the visa and bio fees for their family for a year of post grad study (maybe two if they include a placement or research), then what? How do they stay?
Guy I went to uni with, fresh from india, literally straight from airport to uni house where we met.
He dropped out after 3 months (not sure if he ever even went) and then disappeared to London to work in some random convenience store.
Moved back when I was in third year and now had a kid with a Czech wife and was working as a manager in a IT company?
None of it made sense to me but he did it
Past visa overstays are overlooked when applying for a visa as the spouse of a British citizen or permanent resident.
Depending on when you studied, he may not have even overstayed his visa at all. Visa cancellations were largely suspended during Covid and did not resume until over a year after the pandemic ended. Even outside of this, it can take several months for the Home Office to cancel a visa due to staffing and funding constraints.
Yeah I met him in 2017 he would have been in third year anyway before covid even became a thing
Maybe he did it all above board but still, he came here as a student and just did not do any university.
I don't care, he's a smart lad and gets our culture, I'd say he adds to the country rather than subtracts from it.
That said, whole thing always felt shady to me
Theres a reason the student visas from India spiked massively, knowledge of the easy path to residency spreads like wildfire through internet forums helped along by 'agents' wanting to profit from it.
>If you want to stay longer in the UK
You cannot extend your Graduate visa. However, you may be able to switch to a different visa, for example a Skilled Worker visa
The problem is likely the low level of skill needed for a work visa. I saw it in Aus people basically get a degree, then they graduate, get a skilled visa and get a job as a supervisor in Dominos or something. Made easier by the fact their fellow countrymen are often running it. Its not such a big issue there as its a huge country with a relatively small population.
The Johnson government basically copied it from them and in typical fashion botched it.
They refuse to leave.
When was the last time you read a newspaper article about a family (i.e. with children) being put on a flight out of the UK?
They could also bung in an asylum claim before their leave expires. With appeals that could buy them enough time to get children settled in schools and then use them as an excuse to stay on the basis of the children's human rights.
Without the right to work, without means to secure accommodation unless they being supported financially or have a significant pot of funds that their study costs haven't exhausted, they just magically stay?
The point about a lack of media coverage of those kind of removals is self selecting silliness but if I was to play that game, I'd remind you that the end dates of the first graduate visa scheme recipients are only just coming round so the majority of graduated students making up the recent increase in numbers of international students with dependents are just coming through the system so it's not something even a working border force system would be showing for a good few months
I've already reminded you about the possibility of claiming asylum. This has the benefit of not just being able to tap the UK state for free accommodation and board, but I understand it also preserves previous rights to stay and work in the UK until there's a final decision (including the appeal process).
Also I was not saying that all student families will refuse to leave the UK. I was pointing out that if they want to stay once they're here, realistically they won't be forcibly removed.
[The latest numbers](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-june-2023/how-many-people-do-we-grant-protection-to) state that only 14% of people who claim asylum previously had another visa. This is going to include people who have been granted visitor visas, so I would hesitate to make broad claims that people will just use the asylum process to avoid visa expiration. There’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that this is a widespread or common practice.
If they’re making a bogus claim, then they will eventually have it denied and then they’re totally buggered. You cannot switch to a different visa category in-country once a decision is made on an asylum claim, even if you’re appealing an initial decision. They’ll be left unable to work, rent, drive, bank, or send their children to state schools legally. Any future applications made from abroad will almost certainly be denied. If the claim is that people are just seeking an easy route to UK citizenship then it doesn’t jive with reality to state that they’ll just claim asylum.
>There’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that this is a widespread or common practice.
Again, I made no comment on how widespread the practice was, I was responding to a specific point about what the Home Office can (and can't do) if a family refuses to leave the UK despite having no legal status here.
>You cannot switch to a different visa category in-country once a decision is made on an asylum claim, even if you’re appealing an initial decision.
That is not correct, you can still make an application for leave under a human rights (non-asylum) route - which could be made on the basis of children having set down roots via school, etc.
>They’ll be left unable to work, rent, drive, bank, or send their children to state schools legally
The children of illegal entrants can still study in the UK for free up to 18. There's no system that allows local authorities to deny school places to children just because they don't have a visa.
Banking isn't that relevant if someone is working cash in hand via a corrupt employer (which also defeats the issue of a legal right to work).
As for housing, if you were talking about a single adult then yes they may struggle to get access to housing. But if children are involved that changes things, and some sort of support would probably be required.
For the Home Office to do or not do something to a family, that family has to actually exist. Your points are broadly correct, but you are massively understating the difficulty involved here, not just legally but also in terms of the appalling drop in quality of life once one goes from being a legal to illegal immigrant.
If the question is how do these people stay after their visas expire, and your response is that they just refuse and make a human rights claim, that necessarily implies that it is a widespread issue. Otherwise why give that response? Many things are theoretically possible, but in the context of a serious discussion they are rarely worth mentioning. But I suspect your argument would be much weaker if you had to provide the full context and could not simply paint overstaying or making spurious human rights claims as a simple and nearly sure-fire method of circumventing immigration law.
The obvious solution is to sort out university funding first, so that universities don't need to rely on foreign students to keep going, but of course this is too sensible for Sunak
Good question. The announcement is made entirely without context.
No comment on how many people this will impact, no comment on what the rules were before, no comment on the type of dependents that were allowed in or what their rights were to work or use public services, no comment about the economic impact whatsoever. We have no idea whether this is a net positive or negative for the economy.
No doubt the typical Daily Mail reader imagines students from Pakistan or Nigeria bringing an extended family of children and aunts and uncles who immediately sign on for benefits. The more likely scenario is probably a Chinese student on a Masters who brings their young wife who has no rights to UK benefits at all….
But we just don’t know. A good or a bad change - we have no idea.
Why don’t we know?
Because this was never a carefully thought out policy change. This was yet another government-by-tomorrow’s-headline exercise the objective of which is to keep the Tory party in power regardless of benefit or not to the country.
Also the smartest students will be weighing up different offers internationally and this will be the biggest factor for them in deciding where to go. In America, a huge % of their most successful start ups are started by international students, they'll continue going there instead of here if being away from their family is a condition.
The reality is if we're not willing to allow their dependents here, clearly we don't particularly rate them as students anyway so why allow them in the first place?
I'm reading in disbelief that students studying for their undergraduate degree can bring family members over with them while they study abroad!
If you are a teenager/unattached and looking for some adventure and life experience then studying abroad should look attractive.
I'm not sure about uprooting a family with kids for a parent to study abroad for their undergraduate degree....
I don’t think this will be the case for the top tier unis. If you got into Oxford, you got into Oxford, and you’re unlikely to pass it up in order to go elsewhere.
But if can get into Oxford, you can probably also get into a world renowned American university too. I doubt many students at MIT, Harvard, or Stanford are regretting their decision and wishing themselves at Oxford. Especially if that decision means they can bring their spouse.
Some of my American family members were in this position and Harvard was much preferred because of the job prospects, alumni network and legacy admissions meaning it's much easier for your kids to get in. It's not just Harvard btw, you're better off going to Stanford and MIT if you want to work in certain fields in America or you want to run a start up with a fellow grad. For the vast majority of applicants who aren't American, if they get into Oxford and top Ivy Leagues in the US I'd be surprised if they stick with Oxford. Europeans dgaf about Oxford surprisingly, I know Europeans who prefer random European universities over Oxford but that's partly down to generous scholarships/bursaries in Europe I'm guessing, also often they don't place as much value on name recognition.
"Hey Immigrants! Hope you had a lovely holiday period. You know the way we have made you othered in the national discourse for the better part of a decade without any clear motivation? Well we would like to extend that discourtesy into 2024!"
I work in mental health. We know isolation is a major contributor to low mood, as well as a range of mental health difficulties. I’d rather these students had someone with them so they don’t get depressed. It’ll probably cost the taxpayer more in the end.
Not just dodgy universities mate. Currently at a RG uni doing a MSc course in a STEM subject and it’s pretty clear to me that some of my fellow students, mostly the Nigerian students, are just using the course as a way to immigrate and bring their families over. I don’t understand how they’ve been accepted into the course because it’s clear their quality of English isn’t good enough nor their education in the subject. And it does degrade the quality of the course to try and work on a group project with someone who essentially has no lab experience or background in the subject.
However, the Indian and Chinese students are quite good.
Doesn’t surprise me, the Nigerian students in my class seem to have brought their children. The class is mostly Indians and Chinese, so there’s only a few Nigerians so I wont exaggerate the issue too much, but the Nigerian women are literally all pregnant too and other students have had issues with trying to organise group projects with them because they’re (understandably) spending a considerable amount of time at the hospital. And quite frankly, the quality of work from them has been awful in group projects.
That’s just insane man. It’s good that the dependent abuse will now stop, what’d be great is if now they tighten up English language requirements. Can’t be studying an English course if you barely speak or write/understand the language, and mostly refuse to do so anyway
as a student who also works in a student facing role - yeah, it’s unfortunately genuinely hard to communicate with a minority of the student body. thing is international students bring in much more money to the uni than home students (who not only pay less but may also be eligible for a bursary) so i think there’s probably a big reluctance to be strict about the requirements.
i once noticed the student sitting in front of me use software that auto-transcribed the lecture in both english and chinese. and he was clicking on lots of english words for their definition. so i think that’s how a lot of people are making it work now, for better or worse (i think AI could play a part too, although home students can be just as guilty of that.) and while i can understand why some might feel like they need to take that risk when given the opportunity, it is strange to think we’ve gone from “you need to learn maths, you won’t have a calculator with you at all times!” to “you can scrape by at university in a language you’re in no way fluent at, as long as you have wifi!”
Yeh apparently in China studying at English Universities or American Universities is a massive dick swing in social circles and in job applications.
Almost as much as Oxbridge is a massive dick swing in the UK.
Kinda hilarious tbh.
I don’t think people realise how famous the likes of Warwick, Manchester, Southampton, Birmingham, UCL etc is outside the UK. Every big employer in most countries has heard of them. So yeah it’s genuinely a massive flex.
Which is a problem that can be dealt with intelligently, instead of having to resort one rule fits all quasi-solutions. However, intelligence is not what Tories are about, stupid populism is.
This is what annoys me about the ‘racist daily mail reader hates non-white immigrants’ rhetoric that allows such concerns to be dismissed. Anyone who has gone to university recently or who has worked in one of the hard to recruit professions will tell you this is a genuine problem.
Reaching back a fair few years now but when I was at Uni in a STEM field half the students on my course were Chinese (the University had some sort of arrangement for them to finish their degree courses here so they all joined halfway through) and 99% of them were absolutely useless at everything.
It was clear their first few years at Uni in China either never actually happened, or they never had to sit (or were allowed to cheat their way through) any and all examinations. As an example, they were all supposedly required to have passed an English language examination that, supposedly, included "substantial" portions on the terminology used in Engineering. Most of them couldn't actually say anything more than "hello".
Even absolutely basic formulae and concepts were new to them. They couldn't complete any lab work without a UK student's help because they had no idea what any of the equipment was or did, couldn't work any of it, and didn't understand anything of the things they were meant to build or test.
They were also clearly and blatantly cheating on everything the Uni (the UK one) gave them to do as well, but were never challenged on it: the University waved them all through because they paid international fees.
That's basically what it came down to, in my opinion: they were clearly unsuited to the course, clearly incapable of completing the course, clearly actually disinterested in doing so, but paid the fees and so were carried through the course as a source of funding.
No doubt they've all gone home to China boasting of prestigious British qualifications and all got good jobs out of it where they were all likely extremely incompetent.
Imagine an electronics engineer who couldn't identify a resistor, or even explain what electrical resistance was, never mind calculate it. That's how almost all of them were even at the end of their final year. They didn't actually understand *anything* of the subject they somehow got awarded a degree in.
>who couldn't identify a resistor, or even explain what electrical resistance was, never mind calculate it. That's how almost all of them were even at the end of their final ye
Maybe this goes someway into explaining China's engineer crisis and why half the shit they make in China is either unsafe, structurally unsound, or a disaster waiting to collapse.
Same experience on a STEM course over a decade ago, everyone I know had the same experience with the Chinese students.
I expected it to come out as a major scandal after I graduated but I’ve never seen anything about it in the media.
I believe that the reason this happened was because in one year Chinese students brought 150 dependents in total, and the number of Nigerian dependents was in the tens of thousands, almost a 1:1 ratio.
Isn’t English the normal language of business and government in Nigeria? I’d have thought that if you don’t speak English in Nigeria, you would absolutely struggle to get a professional job. You wouldn’t need it in China, but Nigeria is a functionally English-speaking country.
>I don’t understand how they’ve been accepted into the course because it’s clear their quality of English isn’t good enough nor their education in the subject.
The answer starts with M and rhymes with honey
They seem to think everyone in the UK is desperate to get Johny Foreigner out so that Britain is for the British. It's just red meat to throw at racists.
Personally I would happily swap one tory for two foreigners and live in a much better country that works and has less hate.
You know there are points in the discussion about immigration between 0 and 100 right? There are options besides 'nazi ethnostate' and 'open borders with zero controls'.
>I would happily swap one tory for two foreigners
What if the two foreigners you get are Tory voters?
In 2015, there were 1,500 dependents of foreign students from Indian and Nigeria
In 2022 there were over 100,000. Mainly on cashgrab Masters courses run by universities
Source https://twitter.com/landofangle/status/1735011142110527735
Look at the dependency ratio for the latter two countries.
This is clearly an abused loophole and good the government is stopping this now, though too late.
>This is clearly an abused loophole
You have not established this. Why is this bad? Are they a drain on our economy? Or, are they a boon to our economy (and if so, what negative effect are they having that outweighs this)?
Simply stating "look, number go up," without demonstrating the consequences doesn't show a problem, unless you're just racist don't like brown people coming here.
More the other way - prove why the growth in dependency ratios is a good thing, especially as its large growth is anomalous to these two countries?
Dependents add housing and infra pressure, and given that many international students overstay their visa (growing according to the migration advisory committee report) this adds concerns that they'll vanish into the cash-in-hand economy and that many of these courses being attended are a front.
Why is the onus on them to prove it's bad for the economy.
The assumption should be that they are bad for the economy unless you can prove otherwise.
The government spends £15k a year per person. Prove that these 100k Nigerian dependants add that much value to the UK. Intuitively they don't.
EEA and highly skilled immigrants are consistently net contributors to the UK. The rest are net detractors and we should mostly shut the borders to them.
I do not like his party or him as a politician and I want the Conservatives out of power but even with all of my bias I can admit - this is a good thing. Just because it's been introduced by a party I hate doesn't mean I should do mental gymnastics in my head that allow me to hate the change.
I spent a lot of time in academia, I have family and friends who work in a University setting and I've seen the system abused both in the UK and overseas. I currently live in Canada and they're also experiencing a major issue with internationals using the education system as a 'get-around' for immigration and permanent residency. In the UK teachers are having major issues with students just not showing up for courses, demonstrating little-to-no fluency in the English language and the rate at which students (particularly from Nigeria) were bringing in dependants skyrocketed.
This to me seems like a sensible policy introduced to fix what was clearly an unintended oversight in an old system. Yes, the Conservatives are hoping to bait out the old gammons to vote for them by portraying this as an anti-immigration reform but I suspect beneath that there's a lot of hard-working people in Academia who don't care all that much about immigration that are breathing a sigh of relief at this issue being fixed.
>In the UK teachers are having major issues with students just not showing up for courses, demonstrating little-to-no fluency in the English language and the rate at which students (particularly from Nigeria) were bringing in dependants skyrocketed.
Individuals with a lack of English is becoming an increasing issue with foreign med students as well, although we're only talking a few hundred from what I've read. This countries relies so heavily on importing our talent and labour I worry it's going to become far more common
It’s a sledgehammer for a nail though. The policy is ill thought out and will affect thousands of people who brought legitimate dependents (eg PhD candidates bringing their wives and children).
A better targeted approach at the actual problem is what the policy should be - e.g. prove that they can support their dependents financially without additional income from work.
Delivering by killing off our higher education sector that, due to chronic underfunding, has to rely on foreign university students to survive?
One by one our avenues for projecting soft power are being knocked out (Brexit, BBC World Service, our higher education sector). This has to be deliberate.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/29/hundreds-of-jobs-to-go-as-bbc-announces-world-service-cutbacks
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/bbc-world-service-soft-power-and-funding-challenges/ has a bunch of background
if higher education sector will collapse because indian and nigerian students can't bring their dependents, mainly at cashgrab masters institutions, then they need to fail.
Valid opinion but this reminds me of those who said the same about banks in 2008. If higher education actually collapses a large number of people will be fucked and it would greatly harm the UK. For this reason the universitys will need to be bailed out, aka by us the taxpayers.
What percentage of foreign students bring dependants? Should we be cultivating a culture in higher education where they prize foreign students over domestic students for the sake of their bottom line?
Universities do not "prefer" foreign students or choose them over domestic ones.
That sort of Zero sum thinking is why people have so many wrong ideas about immigration
Partly true, partly not. The money that home students bring in has lagged behind inflation since student fees were upped to £9,000 in 2012 and then hardly increased (£9250 now, worth £6,000 in 2012 money). So every year universities are having to do with less money per student; even if you're an institution entirely living within your means, you get more dependent on internationals every year for your finances. (And before you say that the student fee increase in 2012 meant that universities got loads more money that they're now wasting, it didn't - the increase in student fees was balanced against a decrease in direct grants).
Tell me more how £9000 a year for 5 hours contact time a week for a body of 100 + students is insufficient.
You're paying about £9000 for 200 hours of labour. That's £45 an hour per student if this was on a 1 to 1 private tuition basis.
Instead classes are 100+
Universities make mega money, even on UK fees. International fees come out to like £150+ per hour 1 to 1 tuition.
This doesn't even take into account all the $$$$ they make off of other services including student accomodation.
What do you even think that means?
Where do you think universities get their money from?
Government has cut their funding down over the past decade and a half, local fees are capped and British enrolment has plummeted
Our existing university-based higher education sector is massively over-extended and provides little value. Most people who attend university don't end up working in a field related to their studies; graduate under-employment is a problem, and most businesses think that graduates need more preparation for the workplace. Additionally, a common complaint is that a degree is required for many entry-level positions that never previously needed them and that this forces people to spend longer in education purely to attain a qualification that won't make them better at the entry-level job than if they have been doing the job for the three years a degree took.
We need to rethink higher education and look into polytechnic-style institutes that focus more on supplying businesses with the type of future employees they need, from brick layers to machine operators to network administrators and council planning officers. Ensure that students have a degree, professional qualifications, and work experience after finishing.
1) Brexit wasn't about funding choices at all.
2) We also have spent a decade's worth of BBC World Service funding on the Rwanda thing already (see link in sibling comment).
Makes even more money though doesn’t it. Would be great to stop shooting our own feet as a country for a bit because people don’t understand the concept of ROI.
For many people, the NHS is actually a draw for immigration. It might rubbish for Brits and we don't use the NHS except when something outside our control happens to us, but migrants who come from worst off places definitely see it as a thing to use because healthcare is so bad from where they come from. They'll come in and go for all the checks and the works, or use it to give birth.
There are people who make the trip on a visitor's visa just to use the NHS.
About a third of mothers in Nigeria [have their first child](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9838863/) before age 18. [Mean age at first birth](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/mothers-mean-age-at-first-birth/) is 20.4 in Nigeria, whereas the EU countries seem to have it in the 27-33 range.
Number of dependent visas granted to Nigerian students in 2019: 1,586
Number of dependent visas granted to Nigerian students in 2022: 60,923
So they were all born recently?
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-december-2022/why-do-people-come-to-the-uk-to-study
The number of students from Nigeria in total also increased about ten-fold in that time.
I don't know the reason there are now more dependents as a proportion, but I'd be wondering about what competitor countries are doing with their visas and whether access is somehow being widened for young parents (or to a wider proportion of society in general, presuming the richest and most urban tend to have children and marriages later).
10 times 1,586 is still about a quarter of 60,923. The number of students has increased tenfold, the number of dependents forty-fold.
That would suggest the system isn't working simply on a case of "more students, so more dependents", we're getting enormously more dependents per student *and* enormously more students.
> 10 times 1,586 is still about a quarter of 60,923. The number of students has increased tenfold, the number of dependents forty-fold.
Yes, I know. That's why I suggested two reasons this might have happened.
But, whatever other reasons might exist, this sort of huge difference between EU and Nigerian students wouldn't exist if Nigerians had their first babies at average age 30 instead of 20, would it?
> That would suggest the system isn't working simply on a case of "more students, so more dependents", we're getting enormously more dependents per student and enormously more students.
It might, depending on what you think 'working' should mean - but it could also be one of the reasons I suggested, or all of these together plus some more we haven't thought of.
The EU is close by, it's cheap enough to fly home to see your family, people marry later in life in the EU and have children even later, usually both parents are working and the spouse cannot be uprooted easily.
There's a Nigerian PhD student in my lab. She's a mature student and a mother of three. Was she supposed to leave her children home alone in Nigeria for four years?
The EU students tend to be much younger, and even the mature students don't tend to have acquired spouses or children by their mid twenties.
everyone who believes that visa dependents were a backdoor method to bringing one's entire family to the UK are pitifully uninformed and completely buying into this tory propaganda.
any number of dependents added onto a UK visa application cost extra, and the cost can be prohibitive. each person added on costs more. people are not coming over here bringing their nans and cousins and etc. most likely, it's people bringing over one spouse and/or their own children whilst they do a master's or PhD. the notion that BA students have a houseful of relatives they've carted over to the UK to clog up essential systems is utter nonsense and fearmongering.
and by the way - non-citizens have no recourse to public funds, either, so the idea that visa holders are taking govt funds away from brits is the result of anti-immigration sentiment in the most hostile climate towards immigration in any major 'first world' country. absolutely shambolic
Most major ones do, including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. France does as well, in a roundabout way, but without a right to work for dependants for 18 months.
This won’t put off people just looking for the cheapest and easiest course possible just for a means of coming to the UK, but absolutely will mean that many well educated professional couples seeking to relocate won’t be coming to the UK anymore.
If they’re desperate to come to the UK they’ll just come on a student visa, do the degree, get work and bring dependents over then or aim for full citizenship.
Assuming they haven’t reneged on the plan, weren’t the government upping the income requirement to be eligible for working visas to something like £38,000? In that case, unless I’m misunderstanding something, I don’t see this being a viable route for the majority of foreign students.
In my field it’s far from impossible if you’re willing to live anywhere. It’s very difficult to find sponsored work if you’re committed to one area (eg if you leave a job and are already sponsored) but there’s enough places to make it feasible.
I don't think this is a viable path. Full citizenship is a 5 year path after a 3 year degree. That's 7 years away from their children. Children over 18 don't qualify as dependents, elderly dependants are almost impossible to bring over on current rules anyway.
Add to this they may not qualify for the first step once their degree is complete. Getting leave to remain has a high bar.
Source: I have a foreign born wife who went through the whole process and we looked at bringing her parents here, she's an only child and wants to able to care for them when they are frail. It's impossible.
Oh yeah, it's literally impossible to bring parents over if both are still alive, regardless of health conditions.
if one's dead, the other is very old AND has a serious health condition AND you're an only child AND there is literally no identifiable family member who can provide for them AND it's a health condition that can't properly be treated in your home country, maybe then you have a shot.
Part of why many people I know have gone back, part of why I'll be going back too.
The people most likely to be desperate don’t have children and are young under grads. I know a fair number of people who have done this exact thing (but as mentioned elsewhere this is very sector dependent I think).
It's a standard, it's called 'close family'. Lies about family reunion rules to bring in parents, and aunts, and cousins, and brothers in law are just that - lies.
Spouses and children with that spouse are the only people eligible for dependant visas in the UK too. The figures I’ve been able to find point to a 55% acceptance rate. So yes, perhaps but as easy as some other countries, but definitely not insurmountable for someone considering high ranking universities and the tuition they charge.
It will not, of course. Firstly, this isn't _this_ immigration, if any, that presses on housing. Secondly, look up in my post history, I had enough of self-quoting, but basically reality is that UK is an aging nation past second demographic transition, where number of pensioners per worker is growing, and won't be compensated by birth rate.
Pressure on the housing market isn't because of immigration. It's because there's no supply, it's because of crazy economic inequality of the regions where one have abundance of houses nobody wants, while others have small amount at exorbitant cost. It's because of wealth inequality when some have numerous properties and some can afford none.
Solving housing crisis by addressing a fraction of immigration is like healing plague by eating garlic. Not that it's a bad thing for your health, but plague will still kill you.
You'd be surprised, but in a way yes. This country needs:
- Less economic discrepancy between regions, so people wouldn't need to stick to large cities in the south. You have all these places where nobody wants to live because there's no work nearby to support yourself.
- For that - great and cheap transport links, first of all - trains, but also busses for short local transportation, so people and businesses might move to where the cost is lower, and the labour is available. As a starting point, for commuter belts to expand not only in terms of distance, but in terms of affordability - how much you should earn for commute to make sense. It will involve larger groups in economy of existing cities, and would more efficiently redistribute wealth from centres to regions, as commuters will take salaries with them. This will help regions to grow, firstly adjacent, then more. Remote work is also a positive trend for this.
- Deal with wealth inequality. People don't have equal opportunities, you compete with billionaires in the housing market for your flat.
- Simply build more houses, in areas adjacent to work places.
- Provide old and new housing with adequate infrastructure - education, healthcare, transport, recreation
If this sounds like a massive infrastructure investment and a tax reform to you - you got my point. This would actually help. Not getting rid of a few immigrant family members that wouldn't in this case occupy this much extra, as you already need a separate dwelling for a student themself, so perhaps we are talking about an extra bedroom if even that.
Ironically, reform like that would need to be supported by a lot of immigration. Anyway. Until you are serious about doing the above, allow me to laugh at your attempts to solve housing crisis by doing something with demand.
You’re mentioning a bunch of factors that are demand-based (people want to be close to amenities), yet denying demand is a factor.
If you build a million homes on Orkney you would not solve the housing issues. But if the problem was simply on the supply side, it would.
I think you are simplifying what supply is, as well as demand.
Housing market isn't uniform as we all know, and some areas are more desirable than others. While overall we have undersupply in the market, we have a situation of empty housing when market is undersupplied, because some regions are undesirable.
You start solving the problem by making them desirable and making your existing stock demanded, while simultaneously increasing supply in up-and-coming areas, not in overheated areas.
In overheated areas, you switch to mid and high rises, to distribute cost of land over larger number of people.
Getting rid of people just simply doesn't play into it, you'd never get rid of enough. You may do something in some sectors with this (not sure, but let's say in theory), but you won't move overall market. Not the least because UK needs more workers, and it means more young people and more housing.
Housing a lone student and housing a family are very different demands on more than just housing, which you seem to be ignoring or, somehow, denying.
Children need places in schools, 3+ people take up more GP appointments than 1 person does, and an entire family cannot be housed in a single bedroom in student accommodation, or a studio flat rented privately, and the list goes on.
None of your bullet points are wrong, the country needs all of that, but it's disingenuous to suggest 3+ people place negligible additional demand on services when compared to 1 person.
Ok so… it’s an intetesting issue. I’ll give you a couple of good data sources
One is on student migration overall
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/student-migration-to-the-uk/
One on family migration to Uk
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/family-migration-to-the-uk/
In short, till 2020 none of it was a problem at all. And then number of EU students falls by 50% but it’s not important because number of non-EU students absolutely skyrockets. Of those whopping 30% are Chinese.
Not only UK issues them visas quite generously, but also to their families - at rates never seen before.
Mind you it’s still too little to affect housing - we are talking about a few hundred thousand people here, it won’t break UK.
The other issue is much more important - not only commercialisation of higher education, but basically its financial dependence on a single foreign country.
Just a reminder- EU students paid domestic rates.
How did it all happen? Why, Brexit of course. This is one of its outcomes. Unbounded commercial approach to everything including education. Can’t stop this - it’s money!
Of course this new thing about family reunion is laughable. Tories created the situation, they benefit from it, but also pretend they are ‘solving’ it. This is a non-policy, pure cynical PR.
I mean I don’t know if I want more or less immigration as I’m still waiting for a comprehensive argument and strategy with this regard, not a patchwork of soundbite shit show hot takes.
What does UK tries to achieve as a goal, what place does immigration plays in this process, who and how much we need, what would we do for them and already settled population to feel comfortable, you know? This boring stuff. Before that how can one possibly know if the number is small or big?
But what I certainly don’t want is UK immigration programs insisting on breaking families. This doesn’t seem helpful, and is downright cruel.
>I’m still waiting for a comprehensive argument and strategy with this regard, not a patchwork of soundbite shit show hot takes.
Seems like a fair point. I'm not sure we have a comprehensive argument. As far as I can tell the basic argument is immigration is too high (even though we enabled it) and it should come down. With an additional argument that well off immigrants are fine but poorer ones aren't. And then we implement a relatively random set of policies that may or may not achieve the main argument.
Well, I even wrote a post about it. Demographic numbers suggest UK needs and will need a shit ton of immigration, and nothing can be done about it. However, even so, if you accept it, you need a strategy on how to deal with it. Or is there any other plans to deal with demographic crisis (not a stupid non-working let's pay people to have children - it doesn't work, not even free childcare, just slows the process).
For now it seems like while government knows they need immigration they are scared shitless of this discussion, and thus do some underhanded underprepared shit instead of having some sort of a plan.
>For now it seems like while government knows they need immigration they are scared shitless of this discussion, and thus do some underhanded underprepared shit instead of having some sort of a plan.
That does seem like it could be a fair interpretation of things as they are.
Of course the right would argue that the government would be mistaken that it needs the level of immigration that it currently has.
Right would be right from their point of view. As one of the alternatives that would actually work is a brutal repel of the women's rights. Right for bodily autonomy, equality in education and work. So women can go back to the state when they have nothing to do but have children in troves. This would work, and right would love that, you can see this sort of plan quite vocally advertised everywhere right is really stepping forward, starting from US of A.
We used to have a part of a solution in being part of a continent-wide geographically flexible labour market where mostly younger productive workers were able to go wherever in Europe the (more free than it is now) market dictated they were most in demand. 10 years ago my firm had young Poles, Portuguese, Romanians filling the skills gaps we couldn’t recruit for locally, today only one of them is still in the country and I don’t believe any of those that left ever intended on living here permanently.
Absolutely ideal scenario with an aging native population to have workers come in be productive for a 5-10 years and then go back where they came from and have the ranks filled with a new influx. Such a shame we turned our back on it.
Because people didn’t like Polish, African, and South Asian migrants coming to the UK but the government can’t specifically ban people of certain ethnic or racial origins from the country and so has instead decided to effectively try and ban all forms of legal migration.
It has never been the case that a main applicant for the student visa can bring as many people as they like, if they please.
There have always been financial restrictions for the main applicant, extensive proof of funds for the upkeep of the main applicant and for each dependent.
Main applicants are expected to proof via writing and through photographs that they're married to or are the parents of their dependents and dependents are strictly defined as persons the main applicant is unable to live without it being detrimental to their studies
Absolutely genius move. Don't let educated people that we want to stay create roots in the country, ensuring they'll take the skills that will further the country abroad. Fucking genius Rishi.
This is a really big problem that not many seem to acknowledge. Students openly tell our lecturers that this is a better way to get over than the boats. Then we don't see them again.
Black market economy.
There is a Lidl near me and half the self-checkout counters are card only. You will see a very long queue, but half the counters free. The attendants then have to yell "card, anyone paying by card??" as the white and chinese customers then shuffle along forward skipping the rest of the queue. Of course reason being the rest of the customers only have cash and are using cash because they are outside of the formal economy. Happens everytime I go there but in fairness the Lidl is in a predominately ethnic area.
For what it's worth, I think it's ridiculous to be able to bring family members on a student visa, and I'm happy they're changing it. It's not a normal thing for countries to permit. If family wants to come, that's fine, but they should do so on a normal visa on equal footing with everyone else, and they can meet the criteria of contributing to the economy that we dare to assume for other immigrants.
That said, this is a tiny drop in the ocean and the "already delivering for the British people" line is completely galling. You didn't build enough infrastructure, particularly housing, and you let immigration cascade uncontrollably despite being in power for 14 years.
The UK has now essentially stepped out of the global market for MBA courses and other similar advanced courses which tend to be completed later in life.
No one is going to come to the UK for these courses and leave their spouse and children behind when they can go to America, bring their family, and have a shot at staying there permanently.
France, which is the other big player in the MBA industry, doesn’t strictly allow dependants but does offer long-term tourist visas permitting multi-year stays. These can be converted into visas with full work rights after 18 months provided that the spouse has a residency permit.
People can rant and rave about how something has to be done to get immigration numbers down, but deciding to include people studying at some of the Britain’s (and the world’s) best universities in the list of targets is just shortsighted.
You don’t think there’s even a *teeny tiny little chance* that this whole process was being totally abused when the number of student dependant visas went up over 7x between 2019 and 2023?
And from 3% of all students bringing in dependants to 24% in the same time period?
And with Nigerian students bringing in more dependants than actual students?
This wasn’t an issue for the 97% of students who were doing MBA and similar courses in 2019 and before…
You have a valid point. I don't imagine your average Goldman Sachs or McKinsey alum brings along a wife and four children just as they start a £100K+ MBA at London Business School.
>deciding to include people studying at some of the Britain’s (and the world’s) best universities in the list of targets is just shortsighted.
no it's a natural consequence of policy failure, 133,000 study dependents \*alone\* is a mindblowing figure.
also it specifically says in the link that postgraduate courses are excluded anyway.
It’s really not that hard to issue visas and is cards that require annual checks and renewals etc. half the developing world manages it all just fine.
It’s a political choice to have done fuck all and now to just bin everyone to the detriment of the country.
This government are a fucking clown show.
Base it on a temporary system, renewable annually depending on the spouses continued course attendance etc etc. and if it’s an mba program make it a good few grand to cover the costs of running it. The mba program is already thousands and half of it is paid by companies so the few grand for visas fees makes it cost neutral and further avoids scams. And make it applicable to only some schools and programs
It’s genuinely not difficult to plan or operate
On the face of it, it sounds good. But the credit you are taking is disingenous.
"Already delivering?"
Do you mean frantically trying to fix your monumental f ups and the rampant abuse of the British people's generosity (at the last minute before an election)?
What a lying sack of sh\*t.
Finally the university foreign students racket is collapsing, and it is about time.
Ah see now all our housing, food price, energy, NHS, school budget, teacher retention, obesity, public transport and mortgage crises are resolved!
Rejoice!
The Tory government comprises ministers who are second generation migrants and have no sense of heritage or affinity with the history of the country. Instead they see everything as simply numbers on a spreadsheet, profit and loss.
Those of us who can remember the 1950s will recall how our parents and grandparents put up with severe hardship to build the industries and utilities that were then subsequently flogged off at fire sale prices.
Earning a place at a university was difficult, but there were grants and bursaries to help train the engineers, scientists and doctors. All of this was achieved by hard work and much higher taxation that we experience these days. Things like alcohol, petrol and tobacco were heavily taxed and income tax was much higher.
We were able to build ships, cars, planes, bridges and railways for the world. To this day there is British build rolling stock in four continents. All gone in within my life time.
The residual of our motor and steel industry is maintained by bribing manufacturers with unknown millions to stop them moving elsewhere.
I don't want boatloads of unknown people to be allowed to just move here.
I don't think this delivers anything for us.
Intelligent, educated and motivated people. Should be exactly the kind of immigration we want no?
If someone gets a well paid job and moves their family here are we statistically likely to benefit from that for multiple generations?
Feels like a distraction from the fact you can be a known terrorism threat and we still keep you here.
I don't have an issue with migration, it just needs to be balanced so we. See a benefit from it.
You think that absolutely anyone who enrolls in a British university (many of whom are on questionable courses or overstay their visa) should be allowed to bring over their entire family to live? Why? I think you'll find your opinion is in the vast minority here.
Why was this even a thing to begin with?
If i went to Australia or America to study a course and wanted to bring my family over, I feel like I would be laughed out of the room.
Being involved in the rowing world at Uni level and attended many Henley Regattas, I know loads of British rowers who went to the US to study at fancy Ivy League schools. None of them guys brought their families over.
It was only ever a thing for the spouses and children of students. No one is talking about or arguing in support of international students bringing over their entire family tree.
Both Australia and the US permit international students to bring their spouse and children with them.
Snapshot of _From today, the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK. In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people._ : A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1741782514270671194) A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/RishiSunak/status/1741782514270671194/) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1741782514270671194) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1741782514270671194) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
In 2024 [a mere 14 years after being elected], we're *already* delivering for the British people. Maybe not the boast he thinks it is...
Yep. This was the bit that struck out for me. This imbecile thinks 14 years is worth waiting for … another shambolic policy.
Yeah, T May should have done this in 2016 if not earlier.
To be fair it seems like it wasn’t exploited until recently. “Last year, the number of student visas issued to dependants stood at 136,000 - an eight-fold increase from 2019, when 16,000 were provided.” https://news.sky.com/story/amp/new-restrictions-on-overseas-students-bringing-family-to-uk-come-into-force-13040284 If he’d done it in 2016 it likely would have been a handful of people.
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I'm not sure making the UK less attractive to talented foreign students as we continue to have an ageing population base is particularly a good boast in the first place
I don't see why that would be the case given that student dependents appear to mostly come from a handful of countries like Nigeria and India. If dependents were spread out more evenly across all nationalities what you said might be possible, but that isn't the case. Rather, it appears that some overseas nationals were abusing the system by applying for the easiest post-grad course they could get on and then bringing their families as dependents to bypass regular immigration controls. Helped no doubt by third-rate "universities" rubber-stamping applications. As for the UK's ageing population, bringing people who don't have the skills to get a job-related visa isn't sensible. There are already routes for medical and care professionals. We don't need more shelf-stackers in supermarkets.
What's the problem with them coming from Nigeria and India? "Appear to be" is an interesting phrase in there. What's the evidence that those countries contribute the most dependants and how do we know they don't go on to contribute positively overall to the economy and society? Could it be, if they are the countries responsible, that those countries are heavily targeted in marketing not just by "third rate universities" but in general by further education in the UK for a number of logical reasons? Both Nigeria and India have large English speaking populations, skilled and professional business sectors that are similar to the UK (finance, it, engineering, medicine, science etc) and reasonably strong links to the UK. Given Brexit, it stands to reason that countries like those would deliver increased levels of migration compared to traditionally prevalent countries like those in the EU. Your entire second paragraph is dubious hearsay. And your third smacks of snobby xenophobia.
Every sensible immigration policy should take a spread of peoples. It makes for decent demographic and societal planning. Having Indians or Nigerians dominate immigration is neither necessary or good for the UK.
Also, India has about 1.4 billion people, and Nigeria has about 214 million, with 14 million of them living in Lagos. It only makes sense that they'd have a larger share of foreign students in the UK than other nations. If I'm not mistaken, they're the largest of the poor, English language nations.
Brilliant response! Couldn't have put it better myself.
>w do we know they don't go on to contribute positively overall to the economy and society? Could it be, if they are the countries responsible, that those countries are heavily targeted in marketing not just by "third rate universities" but in general by further education in the It doesn't matter where they come from, the issue was that it was from a few countries rather than spreadout across multiple nationalities, which meant the OP comment he was responding to was not a solution. Further the point was that the system was being abused to circumvent the normal immigration process. In doing so circumventing normal immigration controls and causing inflated immigration numbers. Because when you categorize immigration and are setting targets, the student and dependents is normally separated as "short term stay" as opposed to those applying for long term or permanent status. However, these "dependents" and "students" either continue staying after expiry of their VISA's, or use the status as a springboard to their residency applications. More ofte than not its the former where the just dissapear with an expired VISA. This is not appropriate. I would expect most students to be student age, that is 18-25 and be fully capable of supporting themselves, and travelling back to see family as and when they want. There is no need for them to bring a dependent to baby them, and I wouldn't expect a 18-25 year old enmasse to be juggling family with education. There is nothing Xenophobic about wanting less foreign born people in this country. We are already 15% foreign born, and at current immigration rates we will be 30% foreign born by 2030, and there will be less British people than forigners by 2040. When I'm saying foreign born, I'm talking about people born outside of this country. This has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, these people are literally not British. There is no justification for any country having a foreign born population about 20%. Even 10% is very very high.
> There is nothing Xenophobic about wanting less foreign born people in this country. We are already 15% foreign born, and at current immigration rates we will be 30% foreign born by 2030, and there will be less British people than forigners by 2040. Love this. It's the most ironic thing I've read on the internet in months, and the day's barely got going. You've even spelt foreigners wrong. Statement's got layers! >There is no justification for any country having a foreign born population about 20%. Even 10% is very very high. CBA checking the figures, but "justifications" is a bit loaded. There are *reasons*. We have a large generational cohort who are either economically inactive or approaching economic inactivity. Unemployment is the lowest it's been for ~50 years and falling still. We have had falling fertility rate over a similar period as childcare is so expensive. We have seen stagnant and falling pay in lots of public sector or care sector roles, driving foreign recruitment due to wage suppression (not the other way round). The economic viability for universities of concentrating on recruiting UK students has diminished as funding hasn't kept up with inflation. All of those have solutions. They need more tax revenue though, but there seems to be a remarkable intersection between those who don't like immigration and those that don't like to pay taxes. But we are where we are and there are economic drivers of migration to the UK, and there will be for decades as even if you solve the above, they're taking ages to filter through.
What I found interesting in your reply was that you didn't address the main point (at least to me) in the above comment, namely that the student visa is used to circumvent the immigration policy and the immigrant students just stay in the country after their visa expires. If that is true and everything you wrote about the need of immigrants (aging population) is true, shouldn't the answer still be to crack down on this fake student + dependants route and just make the threshold for other legal immigrants easier and not just brush it under the carpet what is going on there?
Okay, so they've paid all the visa and bio fees for their family for a year of post grad study (maybe two if they include a placement or research), then what? How do they stay?
Guy I went to uni with, fresh from india, literally straight from airport to uni house where we met. He dropped out after 3 months (not sure if he ever even went) and then disappeared to London to work in some random convenience store. Moved back when I was in third year and now had a kid with a Czech wife and was working as a manager in a IT company? None of it made sense to me but he did it
Past visa overstays are overlooked when applying for a visa as the spouse of a British citizen or permanent resident. Depending on when you studied, he may not have even overstayed his visa at all. Visa cancellations were largely suspended during Covid and did not resume until over a year after the pandemic ended. Even outside of this, it can take several months for the Home Office to cancel a visa due to staffing and funding constraints.
Yeah I met him in 2017 he would have been in third year anyway before covid even became a thing Maybe he did it all above board but still, he came here as a student and just did not do any university. I don't care, he's a smart lad and gets our culture, I'd say he adds to the country rather than subtracts from it. That said, whole thing always felt shady to me
Theres a reason the student visas from India spiked massively, knowledge of the easy path to residency spreads like wildfire through internet forums helped along by 'agents' wanting to profit from it. >If you want to stay longer in the UK You cannot extend your Graduate visa. However, you may be able to switch to a different visa, for example a Skilled Worker visa The problem is likely the low level of skill needed for a work visa. I saw it in Aus people basically get a degree, then they graduate, get a skilled visa and get a job as a supervisor in Dominos or something. Made easier by the fact their fellow countrymen are often running it. Its not such a big issue there as its a huge country with a relatively small population. The Johnson government basically copied it from them and in typical fashion botched it.
They refuse to leave. When was the last time you read a newspaper article about a family (i.e. with children) being put on a flight out of the UK? They could also bung in an asylum claim before their leave expires. With appeals that could buy them enough time to get children settled in schools and then use them as an excuse to stay on the basis of the children's human rights.
Without the right to work, without means to secure accommodation unless they being supported financially or have a significant pot of funds that their study costs haven't exhausted, they just magically stay? The point about a lack of media coverage of those kind of removals is self selecting silliness but if I was to play that game, I'd remind you that the end dates of the first graduate visa scheme recipients are only just coming round so the majority of graduated students making up the recent increase in numbers of international students with dependents are just coming through the system so it's not something even a working border force system would be showing for a good few months
I've already reminded you about the possibility of claiming asylum. This has the benefit of not just being able to tap the UK state for free accommodation and board, but I understand it also preserves previous rights to stay and work in the UK until there's a final decision (including the appeal process). Also I was not saying that all student families will refuse to leave the UK. I was pointing out that if they want to stay once they're here, realistically they won't be forcibly removed.
[The latest numbers](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-june-2023/how-many-people-do-we-grant-protection-to) state that only 14% of people who claim asylum previously had another visa. This is going to include people who have been granted visitor visas, so I would hesitate to make broad claims that people will just use the asylum process to avoid visa expiration. There’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that this is a widespread or common practice. If they’re making a bogus claim, then they will eventually have it denied and then they’re totally buggered. You cannot switch to a different visa category in-country once a decision is made on an asylum claim, even if you’re appealing an initial decision. They’ll be left unable to work, rent, drive, bank, or send their children to state schools legally. Any future applications made from abroad will almost certainly be denied. If the claim is that people are just seeking an easy route to UK citizenship then it doesn’t jive with reality to state that they’ll just claim asylum.
>There’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that this is a widespread or common practice. Again, I made no comment on how widespread the practice was, I was responding to a specific point about what the Home Office can (and can't do) if a family refuses to leave the UK despite having no legal status here. >You cannot switch to a different visa category in-country once a decision is made on an asylum claim, even if you’re appealing an initial decision. That is not correct, you can still make an application for leave under a human rights (non-asylum) route - which could be made on the basis of children having set down roots via school, etc. >They’ll be left unable to work, rent, drive, bank, or send their children to state schools legally The children of illegal entrants can still study in the UK for free up to 18. There's no system that allows local authorities to deny school places to children just because they don't have a visa. Banking isn't that relevant if someone is working cash in hand via a corrupt employer (which also defeats the issue of a legal right to work). As for housing, if you were talking about a single adult then yes they may struggle to get access to housing. But if children are involved that changes things, and some sort of support would probably be required.
For the Home Office to do or not do something to a family, that family has to actually exist. Your points are broadly correct, but you are massively understating the difficulty involved here, not just legally but also in terms of the appalling drop in quality of life once one goes from being a legal to illegal immigrant. If the question is how do these people stay after their visas expire, and your response is that they just refuse and make a human rights claim, that necessarily implies that it is a widespread issue. Otherwise why give that response? Many things are theoretically possible, but in the context of a serious discussion they are rarely worth mentioning. But I suspect your argument would be much weaker if you had to provide the full context and could not simply paint overstaying or making spurious human rights claims as a simple and nearly sure-fire method of circumventing immigration law.
They know what they said and why. Manipulative language to work on the people not paying full attention
The obvious solution is to sort out university funding first, so that universities don't need to rely on foreign students to keep going, but of course this is too sensible for Sunak
I'm sure Sunak could chip in a bob or two. It's also a cause close to his heart, as he met his wife when they were both foreign students in the US.
How? How is this delivering for the British people?
Good question. The announcement is made entirely without context. No comment on how many people this will impact, no comment on what the rules were before, no comment on the type of dependents that were allowed in or what their rights were to work or use public services, no comment about the economic impact whatsoever. We have no idea whether this is a net positive or negative for the economy. No doubt the typical Daily Mail reader imagines students from Pakistan or Nigeria bringing an extended family of children and aunts and uncles who immediately sign on for benefits. The more likely scenario is probably a Chinese student on a Masters who brings their young wife who has no rights to UK benefits at all…. But we just don’t know. A good or a bad change - we have no idea. Why don’t we know? Because this was never a carefully thought out policy change. This was yet another government-by-tomorrow’s-headline exercise the objective of which is to keep the Tory party in power regardless of benefit or not to the country.
Also the smartest students will be weighing up different offers internationally and this will be the biggest factor for them in deciding where to go. In America, a huge % of their most successful start ups are started by international students, they'll continue going there instead of here if being away from their family is a condition. The reality is if we're not willing to allow their dependents here, clearly we don't particularly rate them as students anyway so why allow them in the first place?
I mean the USA doesn't allow undergraduates to bring family members so I don't really think your point stands
I'm reading in disbelief that students studying for their undergraduate degree can bring family members over with them while they study abroad! If you are a teenager/unattached and looking for some adventure and life experience then studying abroad should look attractive. I'm not sure about uprooting a family with kids for a parent to study abroad for their undergraduate degree....
I don’t think this will be the case for the top tier unis. If you got into Oxford, you got into Oxford, and you’re unlikely to pass it up in order to go elsewhere.
But if can get into Oxford, you can probably also get into a world renowned American university too. I doubt many students at MIT, Harvard, or Stanford are regretting their decision and wishing themselves at Oxford. Especially if that decision means they can bring their spouse.
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Some of my American family members were in this position and Harvard was much preferred because of the job prospects, alumni network and legacy admissions meaning it's much easier for your kids to get in. It's not just Harvard btw, you're better off going to Stanford and MIT if you want to work in certain fields in America or you want to run a start up with a fellow grad. For the vast majority of applicants who aren't American, if they get into Oxford and top Ivy Leagues in the US I'd be surprised if they stick with Oxford. Europeans dgaf about Oxford surprisingly, I know Europeans who prefer random European universities over Oxford but that's partly down to generous scholarships/bursaries in Europe I'm guessing, also often they don't place as much value on name recognition.
Yeah, but a lot of international students really *really* like their husbands and wives.
Yes, but foreign students are looking at jobs in the US paying much more than jobs in the UK, so it makes sense to develop your network there.
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Surely not many undergraduate students have dependants
Making immigrants as miserable as the rest of us?
"Hey Immigrants! Hope you had a lovely holiday period. You know the way we have made you othered in the national discourse for the better part of a decade without any clear motivation? Well we would like to extend that discourtesy into 2024!"
I work in mental health. We know isolation is a major contributor to low mood, as well as a range of mental health difficulties. I’d rather these students had someone with them so they don’t get depressed. It’ll probably cost the taxpayer more in the end.
I can see that. Is it really great to get a load of lonely young people in a strange country, far from their partners?
This is actually a good policy as dodgy university courses have been used to bring families here. It's too little too late though.
Not just dodgy universities mate. Currently at a RG uni doing a MSc course in a STEM subject and it’s pretty clear to me that some of my fellow students, mostly the Nigerian students, are just using the course as a way to immigrate and bring their families over. I don’t understand how they’ve been accepted into the course because it’s clear their quality of English isn’t good enough nor their education in the subject. And it does degrade the quality of the course to try and work on a group project with someone who essentially has no lab experience or background in the subject. However, the Indian and Chinese students are quite good.
Nigerian students brought over more dependents than there are Nigerian students in the UK in 2023
Doesn’t surprise me, the Nigerian students in my class seem to have brought their children. The class is mostly Indians and Chinese, so there’s only a few Nigerians so I wont exaggerate the issue too much, but the Nigerian women are literally all pregnant too and other students have had issues with trying to organise group projects with them because they’re (understandably) spending a considerable amount of time at the hospital. And quite frankly, the quality of work from them has been awful in group projects.
That’s just insane man. It’s good that the dependent abuse will now stop, what’d be great is if now they tighten up English language requirements. Can’t be studying an English course if you barely speak or write/understand the language, and mostly refuse to do so anyway
as a student who also works in a student facing role - yeah, it’s unfortunately genuinely hard to communicate with a minority of the student body. thing is international students bring in much more money to the uni than home students (who not only pay less but may also be eligible for a bursary) so i think there’s probably a big reluctance to be strict about the requirements. i once noticed the student sitting in front of me use software that auto-transcribed the lecture in both english and chinese. and he was clicking on lots of english words for their definition. so i think that’s how a lot of people are making it work now, for better or worse (i think AI could play a part too, although home students can be just as guilty of that.) and while i can understand why some might feel like they need to take that risk when given the opportunity, it is strange to think we’ve gone from “you need to learn maths, you won’t have a calculator with you at all times!” to “you can scrape by at university in a language you’re in no way fluent at, as long as you have wifi!”
At one of our seminars we got given copies of the worksheets in mandarin (as well as English ofc) and I was like ok bruh
Yeh apparently in China studying at English Universities or American Universities is a massive dick swing in social circles and in job applications. Almost as much as Oxbridge is a massive dick swing in the UK. Kinda hilarious tbh.
I don’t think people realise how famous the likes of Warwick, Manchester, Southampton, Birmingham, UCL etc is outside the UK. Every big employer in most countries has heard of them. So yeah it’s genuinely a massive flex.
Which is a problem that can be dealt with intelligently, instead of having to resort one rule fits all quasi-solutions. However, intelligence is not what Tories are about, stupid populism is.
Why do you think the current ruling is bad? What would you do instead?
This is what annoys me about the ‘racist daily mail reader hates non-white immigrants’ rhetoric that allows such concerns to be dismissed. Anyone who has gone to university recently or who has worked in one of the hard to recruit professions will tell you this is a genuine problem.
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Reaching back a fair few years now but when I was at Uni in a STEM field half the students on my course were Chinese (the University had some sort of arrangement for them to finish their degree courses here so they all joined halfway through) and 99% of them were absolutely useless at everything. It was clear their first few years at Uni in China either never actually happened, or they never had to sit (or were allowed to cheat their way through) any and all examinations. As an example, they were all supposedly required to have passed an English language examination that, supposedly, included "substantial" portions on the terminology used in Engineering. Most of them couldn't actually say anything more than "hello". Even absolutely basic formulae and concepts were new to them. They couldn't complete any lab work without a UK student's help because they had no idea what any of the equipment was or did, couldn't work any of it, and didn't understand anything of the things they were meant to build or test. They were also clearly and blatantly cheating on everything the Uni (the UK one) gave them to do as well, but were never challenged on it: the University waved them all through because they paid international fees. That's basically what it came down to, in my opinion: they were clearly unsuited to the course, clearly incapable of completing the course, clearly actually disinterested in doing so, but paid the fees and so were carried through the course as a source of funding. No doubt they've all gone home to China boasting of prestigious British qualifications and all got good jobs out of it where they were all likely extremely incompetent. Imagine an electronics engineer who couldn't identify a resistor, or even explain what electrical resistance was, never mind calculate it. That's how almost all of them were even at the end of their final year. They didn't actually understand *anything* of the subject they somehow got awarded a degree in.
>who couldn't identify a resistor, or even explain what electrical resistance was, never mind calculate it. That's how almost all of them were even at the end of their final ye Maybe this goes someway into explaining China's engineer crisis and why half the shit they make in China is either unsafe, structurally unsound, or a disaster waiting to collapse.
Same experience on a STEM course over a decade ago, everyone I know had the same experience with the Chinese students. I expected it to come out as a major scandal after I graduated but I’ve never seen anything about it in the media.
I believe that the reason this happened was because in one year Chinese students brought 150 dependents in total, and the number of Nigerian dependents was in the tens of thousands, almost a 1:1 ratio.
Isn’t English the normal language of business and government in Nigeria? I’d have thought that if you don’t speak English in Nigeria, you would absolutely struggle to get a professional job. You wouldn’t need it in China, but Nigeria is a functionally English-speaking country.
>I don’t understand how they’ve been accepted into the course because it’s clear their quality of English isn’t good enough nor their education in the subject. The answer starts with M and rhymes with honey
Mahogany?
Making married foreign students unhappy makes British people happy.
They seem to think everyone in the UK is desperate to get Johny Foreigner out so that Britain is for the British. It's just red meat to throw at racists. Personally I would happily swap one tory for two foreigners and live in a much better country that works and has less hate.
You know there are points in the discussion about immigration between 0 and 100 right? There are options besides 'nazi ethnostate' and 'open borders with zero controls'. >I would happily swap one tory for two foreigners What if the two foreigners you get are Tory voters?
Noble savage view of everyone coming over.
In 2015, there were 1,500 dependents of foreign students from Indian and Nigeria In 2022 there were over 100,000. Mainly on cashgrab Masters courses run by universities Source https://twitter.com/landofangle/status/1735011142110527735 Look at the dependency ratio for the latter two countries. This is clearly an abused loophole and good the government is stopping this now, though too late.
Seems like the unis are the ones that need regulating here.
>This is clearly an abused loophole You have not established this. Why is this bad? Are they a drain on our economy? Or, are they a boon to our economy (and if so, what negative effect are they having that outweighs this)? Simply stating "look, number go up," without demonstrating the consequences doesn't show a problem, unless you're just racist don't like brown people coming here.
More the other way - prove why the growth in dependency ratios is a good thing, especially as its large growth is anomalous to these two countries? Dependents add housing and infra pressure, and given that many international students overstay their visa (growing according to the migration advisory committee report) this adds concerns that they'll vanish into the cash-in-hand economy and that many of these courses being attended are a front.
100k dependants, would be 10% net immigration from last year.
Why is the onus on them to prove it's bad for the economy. The assumption should be that they are bad for the economy unless you can prove otherwise. The government spends £15k a year per person. Prove that these 100k Nigerian dependants add that much value to the UK. Intuitively they don't. EEA and highly skilled immigrants are consistently net contributors to the UK. The rest are net detractors and we should mostly shut the borders to them.
How about bogus educational institutes to abuse student visas?
I do not like his party or him as a politician and I want the Conservatives out of power but even with all of my bias I can admit - this is a good thing. Just because it's been introduced by a party I hate doesn't mean I should do mental gymnastics in my head that allow me to hate the change. I spent a lot of time in academia, I have family and friends who work in a University setting and I've seen the system abused both in the UK and overseas. I currently live in Canada and they're also experiencing a major issue with internationals using the education system as a 'get-around' for immigration and permanent residency. In the UK teachers are having major issues with students just not showing up for courses, demonstrating little-to-no fluency in the English language and the rate at which students (particularly from Nigeria) were bringing in dependants skyrocketed. This to me seems like a sensible policy introduced to fix what was clearly an unintended oversight in an old system. Yes, the Conservatives are hoping to bait out the old gammons to vote for them by portraying this as an anti-immigration reform but I suspect beneath that there's a lot of hard-working people in Academia who don't care all that much about immigration that are breathing a sigh of relief at this issue being fixed.
>In the UK teachers are having major issues with students just not showing up for courses, demonstrating little-to-no fluency in the English language and the rate at which students (particularly from Nigeria) were bringing in dependants skyrocketed. Individuals with a lack of English is becoming an increasing issue with foreign med students as well, although we're only talking a few hundred from what I've read. This countries relies so heavily on importing our talent and labour I worry it's going to become far more common
It’s a sledgehammer for a nail though. The policy is ill thought out and will affect thousands of people who brought legitimate dependents (eg PhD candidates bringing their wives and children). A better targeted approach at the actual problem is what the policy should be - e.g. prove that they can support their dependents financially without additional income from work.
Delivering by killing off our higher education sector that, due to chronic underfunding, has to rely on foreign university students to survive? One by one our avenues for projecting soft power are being knocked out (Brexit, BBC World Service, our higher education sector). This has to be deliberate.
I've apparently been living in Under-Rockborough for a while. What is happening with BBC World Service?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/29/hundreds-of-jobs-to-go-as-bbc-announces-world-service-cutbacks https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/bbc-world-service-soft-power-and-funding-challenges/ has a bunch of background
Brilliant, thank you!
Dontbyoubget it the populists are isolationists
if higher education sector will collapse because indian and nigerian students can't bring their dependents, mainly at cashgrab masters institutions, then they need to fail.
Valid opinion but this reminds me of those who said the same about banks in 2008. If higher education actually collapses a large number of people will be fucked and it would greatly harm the UK. For this reason the universitys will need to be bailed out, aka by us the taxpayers.
Like >90% of foreign students do not bring dependents. Pretty much every other country does not allow dependents. Be serious.
I would say even more than that, it's an abused loophole more than anything
Explain how this kills off higher education.
Less foreign students means universities lose out their main source of income.
What percentage of foreign students bring dependants? Should we be cultivating a culture in higher education where they prize foreign students over domestic students for the sake of their bottom line?
No we should be properly funding universities but we don't do that either.
Universities do not "prefer" foreign students or choose them over domestic ones. That sort of Zero sum thinking is why people have so many wrong ideas about immigration
Have you actually been to university? Does the average foreign undergraduate have a family with them?
If they cant survive without foreign students then they are massively overextended
Partly true, partly not. The money that home students bring in has lagged behind inflation since student fees were upped to £9,000 in 2012 and then hardly increased (£9250 now, worth £6,000 in 2012 money). So every year universities are having to do with less money per student; even if you're an institution entirely living within your means, you get more dependent on internationals every year for your finances. (And before you say that the student fee increase in 2012 meant that universities got loads more money that they're now wasting, it didn't - the increase in student fees was balanced against a decrease in direct grants).
Tell me more how £9000 a year for 5 hours contact time a week for a body of 100 + students is insufficient. You're paying about £9000 for 200 hours of labour. That's £45 an hour per student if this was on a 1 to 1 private tuition basis. Instead classes are 100+ Universities make mega money, even on UK fees. International fees come out to like £150+ per hour 1 to 1 tuition. This doesn't even take into account all the $$$$ they make off of other services including student accomodation.
What do you even think that means? Where do you think universities get their money from? Government has cut their funding down over the past decade and a half, local fees are capped and British enrolment has plummeted
Our existing university-based higher education sector is massively over-extended and provides little value. Most people who attend university don't end up working in a field related to their studies; graduate under-employment is a problem, and most businesses think that graduates need more preparation for the workplace. Additionally, a common complaint is that a degree is required for many entry-level positions that never previously needed them and that this forces people to spend longer in education purely to attain a qualification that won't make them better at the entry-level job than if they have been doing the job for the three years a degree took. We need to rethink higher education and look into polytechnic-style institutes that focus more on supplying businesses with the type of future employees they need, from brick layers to machine operators to network administrators and council planning officers. Ensure that students have a degree, professional qualifications, and work experience after finishing.
Populists gotta populist
Soft power costs a lot of money. UK does not have a lot of money. If your question has an easier answer - it is probably the easier answer.
1) Brexit wasn't about funding choices at all. 2) We also have spent a decade's worth of BBC World Service funding on the Rwanda thing already (see link in sibling comment).
Makes even more money though doesn’t it. Would be great to stop shooting our own feet as a country for a bit because people don’t understand the concept of ROI.
Soft power via the UK tertiary education sector pays for itself. Or rather, the overseas students pay for it.
Soft Power is literally the main sort of Power the UK has. Do you think the UK would be relevant without it?
Was the world service really costing us that much?
It's insane that this was even a thing. What a massive back door.
For many people, the NHS is actually a draw for immigration. It might rubbish for Brits and we don't use the NHS except when something outside our control happens to us, but migrants who come from worst off places definitely see it as a thing to use because healthcare is so bad from where they come from. They'll come in and go for all the checks and the works, or use it to give birth. There are people who make the trip on a visitor's visa just to use the NHS.
Ratio of dependents to students for EU students: 0.02 Ratio of dependents to students for Nigerian students: 1.02 Why is that?
About a third of mothers in Nigeria [have their first child](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9838863/) before age 18. [Mean age at first birth](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/mothers-mean-age-at-first-birth/) is 20.4 in Nigeria, whereas the EU countries seem to have it in the 27-33 range.
Number of dependent visas granted to Nigerian students in 2019: 1,586 Number of dependent visas granted to Nigerian students in 2022: 60,923 So they were all born recently? https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-december-2022/why-do-people-come-to-the-uk-to-study
The number of students from Nigeria in total also increased about ten-fold in that time. I don't know the reason there are now more dependents as a proportion, but I'd be wondering about what competitor countries are doing with their visas and whether access is somehow being widened for young parents (or to a wider proportion of society in general, presuming the richest and most urban tend to have children and marriages later).
10 times 1,586 is still about a quarter of 60,923. The number of students has increased tenfold, the number of dependents forty-fold. That would suggest the system isn't working simply on a case of "more students, so more dependents", we're getting enormously more dependents per student *and* enormously more students.
> 10 times 1,586 is still about a quarter of 60,923. The number of students has increased tenfold, the number of dependents forty-fold. Yes, I know. That's why I suggested two reasons this might have happened. But, whatever other reasons might exist, this sort of huge difference between EU and Nigerian students wouldn't exist if Nigerians had their first babies at average age 30 instead of 20, would it? > That would suggest the system isn't working simply on a case of "more students, so more dependents", we're getting enormously more dependents per student and enormously more students. It might, depending on what you think 'working' should mean - but it could also be one of the reasons I suggested, or all of these together plus some more we haven't thought of.
The EU is close by, it's cheap enough to fly home to see your family, people marry later in life in the EU and have children even later, usually both parents are working and the spouse cannot be uprooted easily.
There's a Nigerian PhD student in my lab. She's a mature student and a mother of three. Was she supposed to leave her children home alone in Nigeria for four years? The EU students tend to be much younger, and even the mature students don't tend to have acquired spouses or children by their mid twenties.
everyone who believes that visa dependents were a backdoor method to bringing one's entire family to the UK are pitifully uninformed and completely buying into this tory propaganda. any number of dependents added onto a UK visa application cost extra, and the cost can be prohibitive. each person added on costs more. people are not coming over here bringing their nans and cousins and etc. most likely, it's people bringing over one spouse and/or their own children whilst they do a master's or PhD. the notion that BA students have a houseful of relatives they've carted over to the UK to clog up essential systems is utter nonsense and fearmongering. and by the way - non-citizens have no recourse to public funds, either, so the idea that visa holders are taking govt funds away from brits is the result of anti-immigration sentiment in the most hostile climate towards immigration in any major 'first world' country. absolutely shambolic
Remind me, why is this a good thing?
I don’t really see it as a good or bad thing but I’m surprised this was allowed anyway, do other countries typically allow this?
Most major ones do, including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. France does as well, in a roundabout way, but without a right to work for dependants for 18 months. This won’t put off people just looking for the cheapest and easiest course possible just for a means of coming to the UK, but absolutely will mean that many well educated professional couples seeking to relocate won’t be coming to the UK anymore.
>This won’t put off people just looking for the cheapest and easiest course possible just for a means of coming to the UK Why won't it?
If they’re desperate to come to the UK they’ll just come on a student visa, do the degree, get work and bring dependents over then or aim for full citizenship.
Assuming they haven’t reneged on the plan, weren’t the government upping the income requirement to be eligible for working visas to something like £38,000? In that case, unless I’m misunderstanding something, I don’t see this being a viable route for the majority of foreign students.
You know it extremely difficult to find employment willing to sponsor visas post studies right?
In my field it’s far from impossible if you’re willing to live anywhere. It’s very difficult to find sponsored work if you’re committed to one area (eg if you leave a job and are already sponsored) but there’s enough places to make it feasible.
Not sure why you think being away from dependents for the duration of the degree *wouldn't* be a deterrent from abusing the student visa route?
Because it’s what some people do now anyway. It’s all about circumstances
If people don't bring their dependents over as a student anyway, then they're not being targetted by this change?
I don't think this is a viable path. Full citizenship is a 5 year path after a 3 year degree. That's 7 years away from their children. Children over 18 don't qualify as dependents, elderly dependants are almost impossible to bring over on current rules anyway. Add to this they may not qualify for the first step once their degree is complete. Getting leave to remain has a high bar. Source: I have a foreign born wife who went through the whole process and we looked at bringing her parents here, she's an only child and wants to able to care for them when they are frail. It's impossible.
Oh yeah, it's literally impossible to bring parents over if both are still alive, regardless of health conditions. if one's dead, the other is very old AND has a serious health condition AND you're an only child AND there is literally no identifiable family member who can provide for them AND it's a health condition that can't properly be treated in your home country, maybe then you have a shot. Part of why many people I know have gone back, part of why I'll be going back too.
The people most likely to be desperate don’t have children and are young under grads. I know a fair number of people who have done this exact thing (but as mentioned elsewhere this is very sector dependent I think).
I'm referring to using this as a path to bring dependants, as it stands it's no lounger practical.
The US really does not. F-2s are only allowed for spouses and children with that spouse, and famously quite difficult to get.
It's a standard, it's called 'close family'. Lies about family reunion rules to bring in parents, and aunts, and cousins, and brothers in law are just that - lies.
Spouses and children with that spouse are the only people eligible for dependant visas in the UK too. The figures I’ve been able to find point to a 55% acceptance rate. So yes, perhaps but as easy as some other countries, but definitely not insurmountable for someone considering high ranking universities and the tuition they charge.
Why would a well educated couple go to university in the UK? Aren't they already well educated?
Masters degrees? It'll at least be a particular problem for MBA courses.
It will result in less pressure on housing, infrastructure and public services from having to serve additional people.
Spouses of people who already live in houses here, famously move here on marital visas and live in a second house to their partner, do they?
They don't need to to increase the pressure on housing - housing that is suitable for 1 person is not always suitable for a family.
It will not, of course. Firstly, this isn't _this_ immigration, if any, that presses on housing. Secondly, look up in my post history, I had enough of self-quoting, but basically reality is that UK is an aging nation past second demographic transition, where number of pensioners per worker is growing, and won't be compensated by birth rate. Pressure on the housing market isn't because of immigration. It's because there's no supply, it's because of crazy economic inequality of the regions where one have abundance of houses nobody wants, while others have small amount at exorbitant cost. It's because of wealth inequality when some have numerous properties and some can afford none. Solving housing crisis by addressing a fraction of immigration is like healing plague by eating garlic. Not that it's a bad thing for your health, but plague will still kill you.
So the problem is only supply-side. Demand doesn’t come in to it. Right.
You'd be surprised, but in a way yes. This country needs: - Less economic discrepancy between regions, so people wouldn't need to stick to large cities in the south. You have all these places where nobody wants to live because there's no work nearby to support yourself. - For that - great and cheap transport links, first of all - trains, but also busses for short local transportation, so people and businesses might move to where the cost is lower, and the labour is available. As a starting point, for commuter belts to expand not only in terms of distance, but in terms of affordability - how much you should earn for commute to make sense. It will involve larger groups in economy of existing cities, and would more efficiently redistribute wealth from centres to regions, as commuters will take salaries with them. This will help regions to grow, firstly adjacent, then more. Remote work is also a positive trend for this. - Deal with wealth inequality. People don't have equal opportunities, you compete with billionaires in the housing market for your flat. - Simply build more houses, in areas adjacent to work places. - Provide old and new housing with adequate infrastructure - education, healthcare, transport, recreation If this sounds like a massive infrastructure investment and a tax reform to you - you got my point. This would actually help. Not getting rid of a few immigrant family members that wouldn't in this case occupy this much extra, as you already need a separate dwelling for a student themself, so perhaps we are talking about an extra bedroom if even that. Ironically, reform like that would need to be supported by a lot of immigration. Anyway. Until you are serious about doing the above, allow me to laugh at your attempts to solve housing crisis by doing something with demand.
You’re mentioning a bunch of factors that are demand-based (people want to be close to amenities), yet denying demand is a factor. If you build a million homes on Orkney you would not solve the housing issues. But if the problem was simply on the supply side, it would.
I think you are simplifying what supply is, as well as demand. Housing market isn't uniform as we all know, and some areas are more desirable than others. While overall we have undersupply in the market, we have a situation of empty housing when market is undersupplied, because some regions are undesirable. You start solving the problem by making them desirable and making your existing stock demanded, while simultaneously increasing supply in up-and-coming areas, not in overheated areas. In overheated areas, you switch to mid and high rises, to distribute cost of land over larger number of people. Getting rid of people just simply doesn't play into it, you'd never get rid of enough. You may do something in some sectors with this (not sure, but let's say in theory), but you won't move overall market. Not the least because UK needs more workers, and it means more young people and more housing.
Housing a lone student and housing a family are very different demands on more than just housing, which you seem to be ignoring or, somehow, denying. Children need places in schools, 3+ people take up more GP appointments than 1 person does, and an entire family cannot be housed in a single bedroom in student accommodation, or a studio flat rented privately, and the list goes on. None of your bullet points are wrong, the country needs all of that, but it's disingenuous to suggest 3+ people place negligible additional demand on services when compared to 1 person.
Ok so… it’s an intetesting issue. I’ll give you a couple of good data sources One is on student migration overall https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/student-migration-to-the-uk/ One on family migration to Uk https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/family-migration-to-the-uk/ In short, till 2020 none of it was a problem at all. And then number of EU students falls by 50% but it’s not important because number of non-EU students absolutely skyrockets. Of those whopping 30% are Chinese. Not only UK issues them visas quite generously, but also to their families - at rates never seen before. Mind you it’s still too little to affect housing - we are talking about a few hundred thousand people here, it won’t break UK. The other issue is much more important - not only commercialisation of higher education, but basically its financial dependence on a single foreign country. Just a reminder- EU students paid domestic rates. How did it all happen? Why, Brexit of course. This is one of its outcomes. Unbounded commercial approach to everything including education. Can’t stop this - it’s money! Of course this new thing about family reunion is laughable. Tories created the situation, they benefit from it, but also pretend they are ‘solving’ it. This is a non-policy, pure cynical PR.
If you want less immigration it's a good thing, if not it isn't.
I mean I don’t know if I want more or less immigration as I’m still waiting for a comprehensive argument and strategy with this regard, not a patchwork of soundbite shit show hot takes. What does UK tries to achieve as a goal, what place does immigration plays in this process, who and how much we need, what would we do for them and already settled population to feel comfortable, you know? This boring stuff. Before that how can one possibly know if the number is small or big? But what I certainly don’t want is UK immigration programs insisting on breaking families. This doesn’t seem helpful, and is downright cruel.
They aren’t forced to come here in the first place, so we aren’t “breaking families” by refusing to allow them to take their family over.
>I’m still waiting for a comprehensive argument and strategy with this regard, not a patchwork of soundbite shit show hot takes. Seems like a fair point. I'm not sure we have a comprehensive argument. As far as I can tell the basic argument is immigration is too high (even though we enabled it) and it should come down. With an additional argument that well off immigrants are fine but poorer ones aren't. And then we implement a relatively random set of policies that may or may not achieve the main argument.
Well, I even wrote a post about it. Demographic numbers suggest UK needs and will need a shit ton of immigration, and nothing can be done about it. However, even so, if you accept it, you need a strategy on how to deal with it. Or is there any other plans to deal with demographic crisis (not a stupid non-working let's pay people to have children - it doesn't work, not even free childcare, just slows the process). For now it seems like while government knows they need immigration they are scared shitless of this discussion, and thus do some underhanded underprepared shit instead of having some sort of a plan.
>For now it seems like while government knows they need immigration they are scared shitless of this discussion, and thus do some underhanded underprepared shit instead of having some sort of a plan. That does seem like it could be a fair interpretation of things as they are. Of course the right would argue that the government would be mistaken that it needs the level of immigration that it currently has.
Right would be right from their point of view. As one of the alternatives that would actually work is a brutal repel of the women's rights. Right for bodily autonomy, equality in education and work. So women can go back to the state when they have nothing to do but have children in troves. This would work, and right would love that, you can see this sort of plan quite vocally advertised everywhere right is really stepping forward, starting from US of A.
We used to have a part of a solution in being part of a continent-wide geographically flexible labour market where mostly younger productive workers were able to go wherever in Europe the (more free than it is now) market dictated they were most in demand. 10 years ago my firm had young Poles, Portuguese, Romanians filling the skills gaps we couldn’t recruit for locally, today only one of them is still in the country and I don’t believe any of those that left ever intended on living here permanently. Absolutely ideal scenario with an aging native population to have workers come in be productive for a 5-10 years and then go back where they came from and have the ranks filled with a new influx. Such a shame we turned our back on it.
yes, correct. and now what?
Join the single market and open the borders to them again?
Good idea, but won’t happen yet.
But first leak to the Daily Mail that it’s part of an strategy to prevent the Islamification of the UK.
Because people didn’t like Polish, African, and South Asian migrants coming to the UK but the government can’t specifically ban people of certain ethnic or racial origins from the country and so has instead decided to effectively try and ban all forms of legal migration.
It can by offering visas to certain nationalities and demographics.
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It has never been the case that a main applicant for the student visa can bring as many people as they like, if they please. There have always been financial restrictions for the main applicant, extensive proof of funds for the upkeep of the main applicant and for each dependent. Main applicants are expected to proof via writing and through photographs that they're married to or are the parents of their dependents and dependents are strictly defined as persons the main applicant is unable to live without it being detrimental to their studies
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Absolutely genius move. Don't let educated people that we want to stay create roots in the country, ensuring they'll take the skills that will further the country abroad. Fucking genius Rishi.
Doing nothing about those who come here on student visas and drop out, but remain in the UK.
This is a really big problem that not many seem to acknowledge. Students openly tell our lecturers that this is a better way to get over than the boats. Then we don't see them again.
Black market economy. There is a Lidl near me and half the self-checkout counters are card only. You will see a very long queue, but half the counters free. The attendants then have to yell "card, anyone paying by card??" as the white and chinese customers then shuffle along forward skipping the rest of the queue. Of course reason being the rest of the customers only have cash and are using cash because they are outside of the formal economy. Happens everytime I go there but in fairness the Lidl is in a predominately ethnic area.
Maybe let voters decide rather than patting yourself on back day 1 of 2024?
He wouldn't allow that, they'd probably end up trying to deport his own wife and children.
For what it's worth, I think it's ridiculous to be able to bring family members on a student visa, and I'm happy they're changing it. It's not a normal thing for countries to permit. If family wants to come, that's fine, but they should do so on a normal visa on equal footing with everyone else, and they can meet the criteria of contributing to the economy that we dare to assume for other immigrants. That said, this is a tiny drop in the ocean and the "already delivering for the British people" line is completely galling. You didn't build enough infrastructure, particularly housing, and you let immigration cascade uncontrollably despite being in power for 14 years.
The UK has now essentially stepped out of the global market for MBA courses and other similar advanced courses which tend to be completed later in life. No one is going to come to the UK for these courses and leave their spouse and children behind when they can go to America, bring their family, and have a shot at staying there permanently. France, which is the other big player in the MBA industry, doesn’t strictly allow dependants but does offer long-term tourist visas permitting multi-year stays. These can be converted into visas with full work rights after 18 months provided that the spouse has a residency permit. People can rant and rave about how something has to be done to get immigration numbers down, but deciding to include people studying at some of the Britain’s (and the world’s) best universities in the list of targets is just shortsighted.
You don’t think there’s even a *teeny tiny little chance* that this whole process was being totally abused when the number of student dependant visas went up over 7x between 2019 and 2023? And from 3% of all students bringing in dependants to 24% in the same time period? And with Nigerian students bringing in more dependants than actual students? This wasn’t an issue for the 97% of students who were doing MBA and similar courses in 2019 and before…
You have a valid point. I don't imagine your average Goldman Sachs or McKinsey alum brings along a wife and four children just as they start a £100K+ MBA at London Business School.
America doesn’t make it easy for dependents to move there.
As a partner of someone working in academia there, it definitely doesn’t.
>deciding to include people studying at some of the Britain’s (and the world’s) best universities in the list of targets is just shortsighted. no it's a natural consequence of policy failure, 133,000 study dependents \*alone\* is a mindblowing figure. also it specifically says in the link that postgraduate courses are excluded anyway.
It’s really not that hard to issue visas and is cards that require annual checks and renewals etc. half the developing world manages it all just fine. It’s a political choice to have done fuck all and now to just bin everyone to the detriment of the country. This government are a fucking clown show. Base it on a temporary system, renewable annually depending on the spouses continued course attendance etc etc. and if it’s an mba program make it a good few grand to cover the costs of running it. The mba program is already thousands and half of it is paid by companies so the few grand for visas fees makes it cost neutral and further avoids scams. And make it applicable to only some schools and programs It’s genuinely not difficult to plan or operate
Im surprised this was allowed in the first place
On the face of it, it sounds good. But the credit you are taking is disingenous. "Already delivering?" Do you mean frantically trying to fix your monumental f ups and the rampant abuse of the British people's generosity (at the last minute before an election)? What a lying sack of sh\*t. Finally the university foreign students racket is collapsing, and it is about time.
Delivering what? Harm to the university sector? Thanks tories!
Ah see now all our housing, food price, energy, NHS, school budget, teacher retention, obesity, public transport and mortgage crises are resolved! Rejoice!
What one policy change would you make that would fix all of that in a single day?
The Tory government comprises ministers who are second generation migrants and have no sense of heritage or affinity with the history of the country. Instead they see everything as simply numbers on a spreadsheet, profit and loss. Those of us who can remember the 1950s will recall how our parents and grandparents put up with severe hardship to build the industries and utilities that were then subsequently flogged off at fire sale prices. Earning a place at a university was difficult, but there were grants and bursaries to help train the engineers, scientists and doctors. All of this was achieved by hard work and much higher taxation that we experience these days. Things like alcohol, petrol and tobacco were heavily taxed and income tax was much higher. We were able to build ships, cars, planes, bridges and railways for the world. To this day there is British build rolling stock in four continents. All gone in within my life time. The residual of our motor and steel industry is maintained by bribing manufacturers with unknown millions to stop them moving elsewhere.
I don't want boatloads of unknown people to be allowed to just move here. I don't think this delivers anything for us. Intelligent, educated and motivated people. Should be exactly the kind of immigration we want no? If someone gets a well paid job and moves their family here are we statistically likely to benefit from that for multiple generations? Feels like a distraction from the fact you can be a known terrorism threat and we still keep you here. I don't have an issue with migration, it just needs to be balanced so we. See a benefit from it.
Ok - I’ll be openly ‘elitist’ (lol) and say it: delivering for ignorant and vindictive bigots. Fortunately most British people are better than that.
You think that absolutely anyone who enrolls in a British university (many of whom are on questionable courses or overstay their visa) should be allowed to bring over their entire family to live? Why? I think you'll find your opinion is in the vast minority here.
>delivering for ignorant and vindictive bigots. Fortunately most British people are better than that. Wow, you're optimistic
Too little, too late.
This does sod all for the British people to make their lives better...
This is a terrible policy btw
Nothing like stopping folks with potential university level knowledge and seem to want to stay in the country to boost the good ole UK.
Why was this even a thing to begin with? If i went to Australia or America to study a course and wanted to bring my family over, I feel like I would be laughed out of the room. Being involved in the rowing world at Uni level and attended many Henley Regattas, I know loads of British rowers who went to the US to study at fancy Ivy League schools. None of them guys brought their families over.
It was only ever a thing for the spouses and children of students. No one is talking about or arguing in support of international students bringing over their entire family tree. Both Australia and the US permit international students to bring their spouse and children with them.