Around the world, immigration has become a prime political concern. I hardly need to point to the number of countries where immigration has become a major electoral issue, whether in the United States, Europe, or Australia.
And, of course, immigration policy can cut across university policy, often in destructive ways. The U.K. has become a depressing example of precisely that point. A coalition government has come to power committed to reducing net migration to “tens of thousands"—the current figure is 216,000—by the time of the next election, in 2015. The only way that it might realistically do this, given that E.U. citizens have free right of access, is by bearing down on international-student numbers.
But at the same time, the government also realizes that higher education is one of the few points of growth (due to the influx of fees and indirect expenditures) in a fairly gloomy economy. It knows that fact very well indeed, and certain parts of the U.K. government are already convinced that they need to change immigration policy by taking international students out of the migration figures, as has happened in other countries. This may perhaps be the thinking that lies behind the most recent pronouncements on the issue by David Willetts, the U.K. universities minister.
Editorials and commentaries in The Economist (see the latest editorial) and the Financial Times (see a commentary as well as an excellent article by the University of Warwick’s chancellor, Richard Lambert) show what a good part of the British business establishment thinks while a new government-industrial strategy wants to make higher education into one of the main strands of economic growth.
However, there is another side in the debate, perhaps best demonstrated by those who have supported the U.K. Border Agency’s recent revocation of the license of London Metropolitan University to take international students.
Editorials in tabloid newspapers praising the decision are probably closer to a good part of the British public’s concerns and show why there is another element of the U.K. government that seems to want to go ahead with the immigration policy, come what may. That element seems to reject criticism with a kind of stubborn glee, almost as if the very weight of opposition shows that it is in the right.
The Border Agency’s decision shows the risks of that kind of view. London Metropolitan University is a British university with a troubled history, but it has been pushed to the fore by this controversy as if it were somehow typical.
Whatever the rights or wrongs, the decision to revoke its license, and the precise timing, is a real concern. The stain can go wider. Specifically, the fact that the university has “London” in its title has had immediate and unfortunate echoes, leading some international journalists to immediately confuse it with other major London universities. It is such reputational knockoffs that must be the biggest worry for British higher education.
The issue is important not just because openness to immigration is the mark of an open society and not just because international students are a key economic force, but also because they are at the heart of what modern universities are about.
All credible universities are now international universities. That is no surprise. Since the very time of their establishment, universities have been points of international contact and cultural interchange.
But now, in a cosmopolitan world, they are more than that: They are one of the key motors of international understanding. It follows that universities without international students are going to be bereft of an important part of their mission.
[Creative Commons licensed Wikimedia image by AIGA]
