Immigration: shedding the delusions

By Richard North - May 30, 2023

Unsurprisingly, we’re already getting pushback on the ban on admitting dependents accompanying some post-graduate foreign students.

According to The Times, six universities that account for a quarter of all Nigerian students in the UK are complaining that they stand to lose a proportion of what are described as their “lucrative fees” as students switch to other countries, especially as Canada seems keen to take up the slack.

Much is made of the fact that the tuition fee paid by home students is currently set at £9,250 and has effectively been frozen for ten years, whereas foreign students are being charged around £15,000 a year.

With more than 44,000 Nigerian students enrolled in UK universities in 2021-22, the vast majority taking taught masters courses, this amounts to a healthy cash injection into the higher education system, approaching £700 million last year.

Vice-chancellors of the institutions are quick to claim that these fees provide a considerable boost to the British economy, while also claiming that the students play a vital role in filling crucial UK skills gaps – particularly in science and healthcare sectors.

Professor Quintin McKellar, Hertfordshire university’s vice-chancellor, asserts that it “seems extremely short-sighted to be implementing regulations that will make the UK a less attractive destination to come and study at a time when other similar countries, such as Canada and Australia, are opening up and making it easier because they recognise the huge benefits of doing so”.

However, McKellar and his colleagues are perhaps being a tad narrowly focused in their views, as it is self-evident (and more so since students are set to go elsewhere) that the Nigerians are not just buying an education with their fees but also access to the UK jobs market and, potentially, British citizenship.

And, it turns out, that accompanying spouses are an important part of the economic package. The rules allow students to work for 20 hours a week and spouses unlimited hours, the combined incomes being used to help pay the costs of the courses.

This rather puts a different slant on the attempts to position the sale of educational services to foreign students as a post-Brexit export opportunity. When, as seems to be the case, studies are at least part-financed by income from UK employment, the export value of the course sales is correspondingly reduced.

Then, it is commonly the case that Nigerians who gain employment in this country – as with other communities – tend to remit part of their earning back to the home country. In the case of Nigeria the country enjoyed remittances estimated at $20.9 billion last year.

This makes the country one of the top ten recipients of remittances globally, representing about 5 percent of its GDP. Individual country sources are not specified but World Bank data suggest that about 60 percent of the remittances come from the US and the UK. These two countries host the largest Nigerian diaspora communities, estimated at over 5 million people.

Whether this student community actually confers any net economic benefit to the UK, in terms of overseas earning, is therefore, debatable. But it is indisputable that it is less than the headline figure cited by the universities.

What thus might be happening is that the universities are selling “goods” which are not in theirs to offer – UK employment and citizenship – leaving the broader community to meet the external costs and downside effects of their income-generating activities.

Furthermore, the downside effects – such societal disruption, crime, housing pressure and infrastructure stresses – cannot always be measured in direct economic terms. Then there are the reduced educational opportunities for the indigenous population, when resources are directed to foreign students and employers are disincentivised from training local talent.

It is a reflection of the underlying dishonesty of the immigration debate – such that it is – that there is never any attempt by the open-border protagonists, or governments, to draw up a properly founded balance sheet, setting out the advantages and disadvantages of mass immigration.

Even with the best will in the world, this would prove difficult as so much is a matter of subjective assessment. Some, for instance, will see diversity as an unalloyed good, while others might take a different view. But nobody is even trying.

At least, in respect of one specific group, we are getting a better idea of the demerits of taking a soft line on illegal immigration. Courtesy of the Telegraph, we learn of the scale of the Albanian Channel migrants’ crime wave in the UK. The paper estimates that 80 people – mostly young men – have been jailed for a total of 130 years in the first four months of 2023 alone.

Offences range from murder, manslaughter, rape, violent disorder, firearms offences, kidnap, causing death by dangerous driving, burglary and producing cannabis in gang-run farms in houses and disused industrial sites.

The cumulative total of 130 years in jail will cost the UK taxpayer at least £20 million to house each offender for the allotted time, at an average cost of £57,000 per prisoner per year.

Furthermore, this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Officials at the National Crime Agency say that a “significant number” of Albanian Channel migrants came to the UK to work in the “grey” market or for organised criminal drug gangs. They are remitting “hundreds of millions of pounds” of cash a year to Albania.

The Agency underlines the attraction of the grey economy, where migrants can earn up to £100 a day in construction, hospitality, car washes or barbers, or £1,000 a week as a “gardener” in a cannabis farm.

Some have been brought over to work in indoor cannabis groves, where Albanians have usurped the Vietnamese as kingpins in the production of the drug. Their passage across the Channel in small boats is paid for by the gangs before they are “debt bonded” to repay it by working on the farms or for the gangs.

Currently, Albanians make up the largest national component in UK prisons, accounting for 1,393 foreign national offenders as of 31 March, compared to 830 Poles, 823 Romanians, 391 Jamaicans and 380 Lithuanians. That means Albanians comprise 16 percent of all prisoners despite representing less than 0.05 percent of the UK population.

And while the number of Albanians coming over is, at last, reducing, many others of diverse nationalities may be on their way. The Times is telling us that police from the National Crime Agency are on their way to countries in North Africa to assist in identifying and breaking up people-smuggling gangs.

This is part of an attempt to stop an expected surge of hundreds of thousands of migrants trying to leave the continent for Europe this summer, with the Italian government forecasting that 400,000 migrants will seek to enter Italy from north Africa this year.

The Home Office fears that this will lead to a surge in migrants trying to travel to the UK in small boats and in the back of lorries later this year. So far 7,569 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats this year, a quarter fewer than the same time last year. But more crossings in the summer are expected and the Home Office is beefing up efforts to curb the gangs that organise the journeys.

But, in the months to come, the battle is on between illegal and legal migration. And, in purely numerical terms legal entry is the bigger issue, especially when it is cloaked in a spurious educational strategy.

The Nigerians themselves are under no illusions. This Lagos article tells us that the demand or need to immigrate for Nigerians is not too hard to diagnose as high poverty, unemployment, poor human capital development, insecurity and poor education are some of the many reasons its young population are bailing out of the country to greener pastures.

According to Oludayo Sokunbi, chief executive officer at Japaconsults – a firm which helps place students in foreign universities, “An average Nigerian is more concerned about not coming back home than the academics itself. Ninety percent of them are using academics as a way to ‘never return’ (japa) home or at least establish them overseas”.

The delusions, it seems, come from our masters, and fellow travellers in academia. If nothing else, we need clarity of vision on this.