RFI: UK Immigration Policy

Any other thoughts on this?

like, are they really doing this? how are UK universities going to stay globally competitive if they're restricted to hiring just EU citizens?

The final proposals are likely to be watered down a little but it's the gist of what they're up to. It's economic and social vandalism but they're determined to drive down headline non-EU immigration figures.

The changes to Tier 4 UK student visas are mostly already in place and they're starting to bite. There's a general feeling that the majority of degree-awarding universities in the state sector will keep their heads above water but that it's going to kill off a giant swathe of the below-degree-level colleges who are currently attracting thousands and thousands of students on business, finance, etc courses. Some of them deserve it, tbh, but a lot of decent institutions are going to go to the wall as well. There's always been a fear that 'bogus students' are signing up to fictitious courses just to get a visa. There are also strict English language proficiency requirements that provide an extra hurdle.

It's going to be tough for mainstream universities as well - the UK is unquestionably less attractive as a destination than it was five years ago but there's a case for saying that Australia is even more restrictive and the US has a range of its own issues. They might be gambling on a rising number of affluent students from places like China, Central Asia and Brazil making up for any lost numbers. It's likely to take billions out of the UK economy though.

this is far from the worst thing the current govt is doing, but conceivably the most thoroughly stupid

Some of them deserve it, tbh

Too right they doo

There's always been a fear that 'bogus students' are signing up to fictitious courses just to get a visa

They are, speaking from experience here before you ask

Yes, absolutely, but the way to stop that is having a proper inspection system in place to monitor colleges, not cutting the whole sector off at the knees.

It looks like London Metropolitan University might have its right to educate non-EU students taken away permanently. This could mean all current students, even those who have completed part of their degrees, would have sixty days to find another university ofrbe deported. London Met, and their students, apparently found out about this via a Sunday Times article yesterday. They had had their license suspended for six weeks but, as far as they were aware, the investigation was still ongoing. Evidently someone at the Home Office briefed the paper.

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/news/news-releases/2012-press-releases/response-in-regard-to-the-sunday-times-story-on-london-metropolitan-universitys-highly-trusted-status.cfm

Handling the situation this way is going to be catastrophic for the image of UK education abroad. The number of people applying for Tier 4 student visas has plummeted already. If students can potentially get thrown out of the country through no fault of their own, having already paid tens of thousands of pounds for an education, it's difficult to see why anyone would want to come in the future.

"or be deported"

Home Office are saying no decision has been made, but I suppose that's academic (...)

Official now.

From the Guardian comments thread:

UKBA decision is callous in the the extreme to existing non EU students who now have only 60 days to find somewhere to finish their studies. For home/EU students it could mean that some courses have insufficient students to continue.

In the 60 days, a student has to find the tuition fees (11k +) for a new university, at least £2000 of maintenance money, deposit it in a valid bank account for 28 days. They have to secure a place at another university, get a valid CAS and English certificate. Note many B2 English certificates expire after 2 years, so someone who would be entering their 3rd year of a course, certificate may have expired. Some universities are allowed to make their own assessment, but UKBA prefer their approved ones. Submit a valid visa application, best to do an in person application at £768, because if start another course whilst your visa is being processed you do so at your own risk. Some universities/colleges don't even allow you to start without holding a valid visa for their institution. Current in country visa applications can take in excess of 3 months to be processed.

Oh and by the way it is less than one month before most university terms start. Many non EU students may have already paid this coming year tuition fees to London Met, as they offered a discount for early payment in full. So let's hope London Met can refund those fees promptly.

ffs

London Met has long been a basket case, so though sad for everyone concerned, this isn't very surprising. It sounds to me like they've got serious problems managing student data- see for example this from 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7853203.stm

That said, the Home Office's heavy handed and counter-productive attitude towards overseas students, stemming from Tory paranoia about immigration, is the root cause of the problem.

London Met certainly has problems. They blame a lot of them on the previous management administration, but it's clear that there were ongoing issues. This is a spectacularly cruel way to treat international students, though, most of whom will have their paperwork in order.

It's not even paranoia, it's policy. The government has said that it's going to cut net immigration from the "hundreds of thousands" to the "tens of thousands". Literally the only way they can do this is to turn away legitimate students who are contributing billions to the economy and propping up large numbers of universities. It's madness. Green is too stubborn to support the change in designation of temporary students so they don't count as immigrants. Willetts apparently support this.

Agreed on both points.

Here's more on bad stuff happening at London Met, something close to my heart as a librarian: http://doombrarian.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/do-you-want-outsourcing-with-that-london-met-to-sell-off-support-and-library-services/

Yeah, that was interesting. Seen by many as a first step towards something much bigger:

http://www.wonkhe.com/2012/08/23/london-met-outsourcing-or-something-else/

ugh. Presumably the holding company will be exempt from providing all those extraneous luxuries such as HE payscales, pensions etc.

It's going to be a real challenge for LMU to continue in its current guise, i think. They're at least £30m down in student fees and could face significant legal action. Even if they get their license back in six months' time, their brand reputation will have been destroyed. Of course, this doesn't just affect the current students, it is going to reflect badly on anyone who holds one of their degrees or will do in the future. They're probably big enough so survive but i wouldn't rule out a change of name and management. It might be a risky, but potentially opportune, time for someone to look at privatisation.

I haven't had a proper look at the stats yet but it looked to me like the home office figures were showing a drop of 50,000 in net immigration and a drop of 112,000 in student visas granted.

Tempted to start a rolling international education thread but this will do for now. Expect the Panorama show on Monday about visa fraud to have a pretty significant impact on short term policy wrt student migration.

What's your background/current situtation, SV, if you don't mind saying? (can't remember if you're an "international" student or if you work in HE)

Neither, as such. I work for a big education company that provides a lot of products and services to students, HE institutions, etc.

Mark Harper, the immigration minister responsible for the Go Home racist vans, has resigned after being found to have employed an undocumented cleaner.

Haha! That's priceless.

I'd be interested in that thread, ShariVari! I am an academic in les É tats-Unis but I am heading back to Olde Gaule later this year for another extended stint over there. there's a lot of consolidation of French universities going on right now, and the one at which I'll be ensconced is one of the newest, and largest, of the new fusions.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jun/24/english-language-tests-cheating-results-invalid-overseas-students

3 universities and 57 FE colleges have had their overseas student licences suspended. In theory up to 50,000 people could be deported if still in the UK, though that's unlikely.

Christ. Had heard rumours today and were wondering which Unis they'd turn out to be...

May be more to come...

Immigration minister James Brokenshire

omg

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/18/border-police-arrest-cleaner-mark-harper-immigration-isabella-acevedo

Two days after Harper got a new government post.

The lack of compassion shown by border police is pretty disgusting. So is the reappointment of Harper, really.

http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2014/12/02/without-due-process-how-britain-deported-50-000-students

I know that people who had taken TOEIC to support a visa application were given an opportunity to take an alternative test if their application was still being processed.

If the article is correct, it looks like they've identified entire cohorts of test takers as fraudulent and are using that identification to automatically invalidate any visas that were granted prior to the scandal breaking, though. How watertight that identification is, i don't know though. The structure of the cheating would have made it impossible for anyone in the room to have been unaware / complicit in most cases but i'd assume that proving it on a case by case basis for 29k-50k people would be tricky.

*unaware / not complicit*

How watertight that identification is, i don't know though.

Not at all, there won't even be any grounds for suspicion in most cases - this is just a bullshit pretext to game the figures, because who gives a fuck about immigrants getting deported lol

It's relatively easy to identify testing centres that were providing fraudulent exams and also possible to identify who took tests at those centres and when. The way most of the the cheating was organised would have meant that anyone who wasn't paying the premium for a guaranteed pass wouldn't have been allowed in the room. On the balance of probabilities, the bulk of the people they've identified are likely to have cheated but that's a fair way from proving it beyond a reasonable doubt.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/foreign-students-could-be-sent-home-before-applying-for-work-visas-to-cut-immigration-9938145.html

Looks like nuisance value rather than anything else - foreign graduates would have to go abroad to submit applications for UK work visas rather than being able to do it while in the UK. I think many have to do so already though. The interesting bit is buried:

Mrs May is also pressing for the power to be able to penalise colleges and universities that would have low success rates in ensuring the departure of foreign graduates and to deprive them of their right to sponsor overseas students, the source added.

So not only would universities be responsible for monitoring the whereabouts of their students while they are studying, they would be responsible for ensuring that they left the country after they graduated.

There's more coming before the election. Expect the sector to be up in arms.

Sigh

Remarkable stroke of luck that the Saville report and the name of the British ISIS dude were both released on the same morning as the immigration statistics.

And the government's response is to...further restrict the rules around student visas.

I was a bit "eh was Seville an immigrant" for a sec there tbh

(xp) ... and blame the EU (though the biggest increase in immigration was in non-EU nationals) and the Lib Dems (get used to this line, you'll be hearing it a lot).

Was it luck?

re becoming a UK citizen:

One referee should be a person of any nationality who has professional standing, eg minister of religion, civil servant, or a member of a professional body e.g. accountant or solicitor (who is not representing you with this application).

WTF is this bullshit. What if you don't personally know any so-called "professional" people?

Thought this was going to be a bump about Nigel Farage wanting to do away with anti-discrimination laws...

my dentist counter-signed my passport application.

here's a list of suggestions:
http://www.immigrationboards.com/british-citizenship/british-passport-application-who-can-countersign-t53718.html

what about this section:

they have known the applicant personally for more than 3 years; • they are willing to give full details of their knowledge of the applicant;

seems like a dentist might have issues with this.

I would guess that virtually everyone will know at least one of a doctor, teacher, dentist or pharmacist on a purely professional basis but that's very different from knowing them personally for more than three years, if only because GPs and teachers move around so much.

(And I'm guessing this is written for people who have been legally resident in the country for a while, I may be wrong)

Well exactly. Even if you've been in the country for 11 years that doesn't mean you're friends with doctors and dentists! Is this just another way of keeping out working class people or something?

public librarians are happy to sign these kind of things, by and large

public librarians are happy to lie on official forms that they have known someone personally for 3 years? Fair enough, but you'd think the £5000 fine would put them off.

This isn't for a passport application btw, it is for a citizenship application, hence being on the UK immigration thread.

ah sorry, advice rescinded then

No expert here but there seems to be a lot of worth in the common idea that 'If you make controls on immigration stricter and stricter, you're only going to penalise well-meaning people who haven't done anything wrong, because they're the easiest to track down'?

Pretty damning:

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/03/23/disaster-for-theresa-may-as-legal-ruling-brings-student-depo

I probably shouldn't say too much about this off 77 but I think the vast majority were probably cheating though it's very possible honest candidates were unjustly impacted.

Also fairly sure that voice recognition, which was the public justification for the dragnet and the point at which the Home Office defence fell down at tribunal, had next to nothing to do with anything.

Well, a vague feeling that the vast majority were probably cheating was all the government had to go on, so ur in good(?) company.

Altho I'd say even the cheating candidates were unjustly impacted tbh

No. The cheating was so unsophisticated it would be very easy to detect if you were looking properly. The nature of the cheating (certain defined test centres charging a premium to read the answers out at the front) would have made it hard for honest candidates to have been accidentally caught up. However there could be grey areas where centres were offering bent and honest sessions at the same time. You could probably work out with a reasonable degree of confidence which was which but possibly not beyond a reasonable doubt.

Having the language requirement for students isn't wildly unfair but it is for families, etc. The main problem was ETS not paying attention and the government choosing an inappropriate test for inclusion.

Kind of interesting given the fact that this is hugely embarrassing to the Home Office - both painting it as incompetent in dealing with tribunals and having very little idea of what they're doing when it comes to a major policy affecting hundreds of thousands of people - that it has received such little coverage in the press.

At the moment you have a politics.co.uk blog, a brief Times Higher Education article, a paywalled piece on the FT and one article in the Independent. Everyone else, from The Guardian to the Mail, hasn't touched it afaict.

all frightened to talk about immigration because of bullying by PC liberal thugs

tories losing legal rulings right, right and centre right

idk how much of this i am reading correctly but it looks like Byron organised a special "training event" across 15 of its branches as a ruse to round up all its foreign workers so the Border Force could come and deport any without valid visas:

http://www.eliberico.com/la-policia-de-s-a-sus-paises.html

what the fuck

Henry Dimbleby (Leon owner) is the child of which newscaster, again?

My Spanish isn't so hot but I'm pretty sure Leon isn't mentioned in there.

This isn't really the right thread for this but close enough.

My uncle is dying of cancer. Probably talking days left. He was living in Thailand but came back to go into hospital as he had no medical insurance there. His partner of 10 years is a Thai citizen, and we want to get him over here so they can be together for the last time, but he needs a Visa to enter the UK and it seems to take 3 months which we don't have. We think there is some kind of fast track way to get around this but I don't know how this stuff works and there seems to be a lot of dubious websites offering Visa services and I don't know if they are trustworthy or this is even possible. We're not really talking immigration because he just wants to be able to visit for a couple of weeks.

Long shot maybe but any ideas ILX?

Is your uncle a British citizen?

Yes

VFS runs visa processing for the UK in Thailand and I think they offer a priority service. That should be the first place you look. A visa consulting agency will typically only make sure you have all your documents in order and won't necessary speed things up otherwise.

May also be a long shot but there wouldn't be any harm in calling the British Embassy in Bangkok and explaining the situation to see if they have any emergency options.

OK, thanks SV - VFS is the main one we've been looking at but like I said not sure if these kinds of things are just scams or not. They do have a priority service for £750. Says it's for medical emergencies in the family tho and not sure if an unmarried gay relationship is gonna count for that :(

We've tried ringing the Thai embassy here in case they know anything but they're closed til Monday.

I think my uncle's partner has been in touch with an embassy or consulate in Chiang Mai, my mum drafted up a letter over email explaining the circumstances for him to give them.

VFS is the official processing partner of the embassy. They are the same people you go to if you want a Russian or Indian visa in the UK. They're usually very good.

Great, thanks. Feel more at ease we're looking in the right place now.

Good luck.

UK asylum refusal decision: 'Your strong attachment to your Islamic faith is inconsistent with your claim to use lesbian dating sites ...'

https://twitter.com/Paul_Dillane/status/763326753595133954

The treatment of LGBT asylum applicants is one of the great, under-reported scandals.

awful