The UK has been forced to
launch a global charm offensive to convince foreign students it is not
against immigration, Damian Green has said.
The Home Office minister said it was "essential" to shift the
perception, after recent rule changes, that the doors were closed to
non-EU students.
"Please come, we have got some of the world's best universities," he said.
Mr Green is under pressure from business and university chiefs to relax visa restrictions.
They want foreign students to be exempted from the
government's target of reducing net migration from its current level of
about 250,000 a year to "tens of thousands" by 2015.
But MPs on the Commons business select committee were told it
was too early to say with certainty that the government's policy had
significantly damaged UK universities.
'Stringent'
And it was often the perception that Britain was now tough on
immigration - rather than the reality of its actual policies - that was
acting as a deterrent to elite foreign students.
Simon Walker, director general
of the Institute for Directors, said: "Remarks that are made in
Westminster, or around the country, that go do down quite well locally
are often on the front page of The Times of India and the New Straits
Times the next day, because of the internet, and the impacts on this on
perceptions of Britain are quite strong."
Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of UK Universities, said
she could "live with" with any one of the government's immigration
policies taken in isolation even if some, such as a minimum salary of
£20,000 for post-study work visas, appeared overly tough to some
potential undergraduate or graduate students.
But, she argued, it was the "aggregate" of the changes and
the way they had been implemented that was in danger of putting Britain
at a disadvantage to its major higher education competitors such as the
US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
"We are viewed as being at the more stringent end of the
spectrum and that's a question of substance as well as perception," she
told MPs.
She said there had been a 10% increase in applications from
non-EU students to British universities this year but future projections
and "anecdotal" evidence from recruitment fairs suggested the rate of
increase would slow.
"The 10% increase, or whatever it may be, is of course
positive and it's wholly welcome but that's against the background of us
having had a very dominant and wonderfully successful market position
and we are slipping.
"The international student market is growing and we want to be part of that."
'Atmospherics'
She said a lot of the increase had come from Chinese students
"which is completely wonderful" but they tended to study business and
management and there were signs that students from Brazil and India, who
tended to study scientific and technical subjects, were increasingly
choosing countries that appeared more welcoming.
"We cannot say it's only the government's policies but the
atmospherics, the way this is playing internationally, which is, I
think, causing real problems," she added.
Mr Green insisted that Britain's universities would not be
harmed by the government's visa restrictions, which he said were mainly
aimed at closing down bogus colleges and preventing students without a
job from staying in the country and claiming benefits after they had
finished their course.
But he also appeared to concede that the government's
anti-immigration rhetoric was going down badly in Britain's target
higher education markets.
Asked how much work was being done by the government to
change the perception that the UK had turned against foreign students,
he said: "A lot."
"And it's slightly swimming against the tide because, if the
thought is out there that we have changed the system to make it more
unfriendly, then reversing that perception is important and difficult
but very, very essential.
"We have changed the system to cut out the abuse, we have
changed the system to skew it towards the best students, skew it towards
universities.
"But doing that at the same time as cutting out abuse is a nuanced message to send out."
He said now that the changes were in place "I think the
sensible thing to do is to let the system bed down while we relentlessly
go round the world saying the brightest students and the best are as
welcome as ever to Britain".
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