Ministers face hard migration trade-offs
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Rishi Sunak will no doubt be pleased that the latest report from the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) shows that his decision to restrict visas for the dependents of foreign students is already having the desired effect.
Partly as a result, the chair of the Committee has suggested that annual net migration could fall to between 150,000 and 200,000 by September. This could boost the Prime Minister’s electoral prospects, and would allow him to go to the polls having delivered sizeable cuts to immigration.
But the report also points to a more difficult issue for the Government. If it wishes to make yet further reductions to net migration, it will have to confront some of the consequences, particularly the costs to sectors that have grown rich off an almost uninterrupted supply of foreign arrivals.
Britain’s universities are increasingly dependent on the fees provided by foreign students, which subsidise research and the education of domestic students. As the MAC puts it, it is “not inconceivable” that some universities “would fail” without this revenue.
At the same time, it is clear that the current system is not quite what was sold to the public. The Government’s aim was to retain the “brightest and best” talent, but the growth in graduate visas has been concentrated in students from lower ranking institutions, whose median earnings then appear to lag behind those of domestic graduates.
This is the issue ministers face. The graduate visa is effectively doing what it was designed to do: act as a pull factor as the Government attempts to meet its target of attracting 600,000 international students. It is hard to square this, however, with the Government’s aim of reducing migration.
For too long, immigration has been used as a way to patch over policy problems. Frozen tuition fees have fallen in real terms substantially, digging universities into a financial hole. International fees have accordingly picked up the slack.
If the Government intends to unpick this, it is likely that domestic student fees or subsidies will have to rise, or that some institutions will have to close. It is a similar situation in the care home sector, where a reliance on imported labour is a direct consequence of the relatively low pay offered to employees.
As the Government wishes to keep its promise to the British public and bring legal immigration down, it will face difficult trade-offs. It is positive, at least, that these are finally being debated.
