If you have been confused over the last couple of days by the mixed messages emerging from Downing Street about the government’s policy on international students, you are not alone: the same applies to many figures inside Whitehall.
The Sunday Times reported a Number 10 source saying David Cameron is 'definitely considering a change in policy', 'fearing the UK could lose billions if students are caught up in the pledge to reduce net migration to below 100,000 by 2015'. The Mail followed up the story in its leader on Monday, endorsing it but suggesting it would be a mistake – and blaming it on the Lib Dems. But since then Downing Street has distanced itself from any talk of a U-turn; and the Home Office has unveiled its latest policy changes on student visas, re-introducing interviews for some applications and giving immigration officials broader powers to turn them down – and boasting that student numbers have already been cut by over 20 per cent.
One of the reasons the Government has come under growing pressure in this area is because it has equivocated about what its real objective is: to reduce the number of international students, or simply to stop those who it believes are bogus. As in other areas, the influence of the net migration target can be felt in the confusion or distortion of policy choices, and of how policy is communicated.
The argument for excluding students from the net migration figures is simple. Those figures are meant to measure 'long term immigration'. Most international students are not 'long term immigrants'. They are far more likely to return home after a few years than the other main immigration categories of work, family, and asylum: the evidence suggests only around 15 per cent stay permanently. At the same time, they are a major source of export revenue, and a potential growth industry, as well as an important source of revenue for the education sector at a time when it is having to adjust to reductions in government funding. The combination of these factors means that cutting the numbers of international students brings only very modest reductions in long term net migration, at the price of significant negative effects on our economy and education sector at the worst possible time.
The case for another U-turn, then, is strong. But if Cameron really is considering it, two things will be giving him pause. The first is that U-turning on immigration is not like forests, or even pasties: it is a far more flammable issue for his own party, for the right wing media, and potentially for the public. In fact, polling suggests the public would find a shift in policy on student visas unobjectionable on its merits – but they will not react so generously if is served up to them as a broken promise or an example of 'fiddling the figures' on an issue where trust in politicians is even lower than elsewhere.
The second is that excluding students from the figures, while sound in policy terms, would make the government’s attempts to control immigration look even feebler. As I argued here, the only honest way to exclude students from the net migration figures – taking them out of emigration as well as immigration figures – would make the 100,000 target look more attainable, but only by reducing the level of net migration the coalition inherited, from 250,000 to a more accurate level around 150,000. It would also bring into even sharper relief the government’s failure to make any real impact on other kinds of immigration, including from Eastern Europe, which voters are far more worried about.
These are serious political downsides, but excluding students from the long term net migration figures remains the right thing to do – along with targeting bogus students for their own sake, rather than as simply a way to get the numbers down – so this is one U-turn we should welcome, rather than sneer at.
Matt Cavanagh is a visiting fellow at IPPR.