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Despite promising to reduce immigration since 2010, we learned this week that the government expects the number of work visas granted to almost treble by 2028/29, going from just over 200,000 to just under 600,000. Dare we say, it is just as we forecast would happen. Alp Mehmet, our chairman, wrote this in TCW in November 2020, just before the new immigration system was introduced: “The throwing open of our borders to an unlimited number of workers from all over the world could see the numbers spinning out of control…”
We had been warning for some 18 months about the folly of introducing a loose immigration system that did little more than pander to big business, academia and the proponents of mass immigration and open borders. Read the article here. According to the Daily Telegraph, the rise in work migration will be driven by jobs on the shortage of occupation list (see Alp’s quote below in the media section).
The immigration system is of course beset by fraud. The Guardian, of all papers, reported this week on the hijacking by unscrupulous agents of the visa process and how they were raking it in by controlling who secured an appointment and then helping applicants through the system.
The Guardian’s angle was of course to bemoan the lot of the poor old migrant. But what we found galling was the naivety of ministers and senior Home Office officials to be surprised by such abuse, which is hardly novel. It has been going on for years and remains rife throughout South Asia, sub-Sahara Africa and doubtless elsewhere.
Another story that caught our attention this week was a report in the Daily Mail that in 2021/2022, around 3,000 overseas students claimed asylum in their first year here, some of them within months. Indeed, the Home Office has pressed universities to suspend course offers to students from Bangladesh. The remarkable Poppy Coburn wrote in The Critic about student visa abuse in Bangladesh back in February and recorded the below video for us.
Actually, the abuse of the student visa process is as old as the system itself. Despite this, what have governments done over the past 15 years, starting with Gordon Brown’s government in 2008? Well, they made the system laxer, first by abandoning in-country interviews, then doing away with entry clearance officers at embassies and high commissions, followed by virtual interviews (after a period of no interviews), then box-ticking and finally caving to the powerful student lobby in parliament and the universities.
The latter now effectively decide who will come, with no limit on numbers. As universities have become increasingly strapped for cash, their dependence on the higher fees that go with overseas students has also increased. This is why the number of foreign students enrolled has shot up to over 600,000. Add to this the further incentive of two years to work in any job on completion of studies and one can begin to see why we have problems with the student visa route.
Whichever way one looks at the issue of immigration, it’s impossible not to conclude that it’s an out-of-control sorry mess. Both illegal and legal immigration are in total chaos with serious consequences. Net migration is currently 20 times the number crossing the Channel in small boats and is pretty much the sole driver of our burgeoning population – 7 million out of an overall increase of 8 million people in just 20 years.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. You can read the full version here.
Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every Friday as soon as it is released.