Foreign students “vital” to UK prosperity
Business leaders in the UK have called for international students to be excluded from government immigration targets due to their huge contributions to the economy.
The UK’s Conservative government pledged to reduce annual net migration to below 100,000 within their parliament – a figure which currently includes international students.
However, an open letter to the Financial Times by senior business figures asserted that foreign students are "vital to the future prosperity of the UK."
It continued: "We do not want to lose […] talented people to our competitor economies as a result of ill-thought-out immigration policies."
The authors cited a poll conducted by the Institute of Commercial Management (ICM) in which 75% of respondents said that international students should be allowed to stay and work in the UK after graduating from British universities.
They also highlighted a report gathered by trade organization Universities UK which showed that international students contribute £7bn a year to the UK economy.
Arnaud Chevalier writes that retaining international students is an effective way to expand a country’s skilled workforce. He also suggests that concerns over brain drains in sending countries are overblown, because student migration has been shown to positively affect both sending and receiving economies.
Read more here.
Related articles:
How to attract foreign students, by Arnaud Chevalier
The brain drain from developing countries, by Frédéric Docquier