In politics, decisions are often made whose impact is impossible to know – and all too often Whitehall doesn’t even try to predict outcomes using data. I was party to two such policy changes when I worked as Boris Johnson’s home affairs advisor – and the results have certainly been surprising.
Before the pandemic shut borders and countries turned in on themselves, the newly elected Government was striking a very different tone: Britain was open and our future depended on attracting overseas talent. Technocratic rule changes that were made around this time were barely noticed by MPs and the media, but look like being seismic in their effect. The first was to extend the ‘post study period’ from 6 months to two years. This is the grace period that international students are given to apply for other educational courses or for jobs, or in practice just to travel and see the UK before returning home.
The second change was to reduce the cost and bureaucracy imposed on visa holders by allowing in-country switching, so students could transition to skilled worker visas without having to exit, apply from outside and then re-enter. This was the type of friction that the Home Office had come to rely on to keep some downward pressure on numbers.
We knew it was a liberalisation that would encourage more migration from outside the EU, and we knew that the offer would be especially appealing to certain countries, where we had a historic association and for whom living in the UK and legally working in a tolerant, English-speaking country, being paid in sterling, was almost as appealing as moving there to study at a British university in the first place.
However there was no way to predict this behaviour and so no proactive modelling was done, let alone any debate over projections that came close to what has actually started to happen. The latest migration statistics begin to tell us the real world effect. To get the proper perspective, we can consider just three major non-EU markets that have seen big increases in visa applicants, and compare to the years before the changes were made.
Firstly, India, which had shown steady increases for several years before the pandemic, with total applicants (for work or study visas) reaching 72,535 in 2019, up from 44,089 in 2016, reflecting changes in the appeal of British higher education and the continued growth of the Indian middle class. Volumes were depressed slightly by restrictions on travel during the first pandemic year, but after Priti Patel’s visa changes took effect in 2020 they have surged, reaching 110,979 in 2021, driven largely by increases in student visa applications.
Not all of these applications will be approved, and some of this will be pent up demand from students who put off applying to study overseas in 2020, but nonetheless, this now means India outpaces China (105,446) in terms of total volume, when it was half the volume five years ago. After a decade of over-reliance on China, India is becoming the most important overseas market for the UK’s university sector.
Secondly, in terms of applicants, Nigerian nationals went from 10,845 in 2019, to 14,259 in 2020 to a record 29,100 in 2021, again largely driven by students. And there were just 7,105 applications from Nigeria in 2016.
Thirdly, Pakistan’s total was just 4,553 in 2016, rising to 7,378 in 2019, before jumping to 16,436 last year. For Pakistan, the number of study visas actually granted by universities and colleges increased from 4,927 before the visa changes and the pandemic, to 17,533 last year.
With the popularity of English, the appeal of the UK as a destination for study and work is clearly very high, and seems largely unaffected by the disruptions of Covid and Brexit. If voting to leave the EU was meant to make the UK an isolated, unwelcoming place for young people abroad, most of the world didn’t see it this way. The higher education sector has continued to recruit overseas very successfully and even the pandemic did not depress total non-EU student enrolments.
The right to stay on after graduation could be driving a lot of the student growth we are seeing. And allowing people on student visas to switch to a work visa while still living in the UK, has clearly made Britain even more attractive. There is no example in recent decades I can find where total migration volumes have fluctuated so dramatically in just a year or two.
The impact of such spikes in migration will be counted in the university towns and the Vice Chancellors’ coffers, but they will also be felt in years to come in new start-ups created, new families settling and in stronger economic and cultural ties with many countries in Africa and Asia – and with it ‘soft power’ leverage for the UK that is impossible to quantify.
However the lasting impression of the 2021 migration statistics is of a shift – possibly a permanent one – from Britain being a high migration economy pre-Brexit to being an even higher migration economy now, albeit one with a more diverse pool of applicant countries and more control over what skills we demand, including having proficiency in English.
The strongest economic growth rate in the G7 will encourage even more migration in 2022 and the debate about that reality has barely started. How will Leave voters respond to this new development? What, if any, controls or caps on overall numbers are likely to be effective, let alone reasonable politically? The Home Secretary has that power but it is held in reserve, and there is no political pressure to use it just yet.
But the numbers matter. These levels of economic migration when layered on top of the sudden influx of tens of thousands of Afghans for settlement, the uncontrolled and unregulated migration of thousands more across the English Channel claiming asylum, not to mention the likely increase in refugee applications from all over Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly going to result in record levels of migration to the UK for years to come. This in turn will see migration return as a top voter priority ahead of the next general election, whatever the political consensus currently is around the UK’s new internationalist posture.
It is ironic that as the pandemic raged, borders were closed and the world debated whether international mobility would ever be as free and easy again, the UK was quietly implementing a handful of rule changes that in practice flung open the doors to skilled migrants everywhere. And without much delay, the welcome call has been answered. Global Britain is no longer some lofty goal or rhetorical abstraction. It is real, and it is already here – arriving daily at Heathrow, visas in hand.
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