With the new clamp down on UK Visa's put into place it reduces the time foreign students are able to stay in the UK, both before and after their studies, unless they find employment paying over £20,000 per year. Until now foreign students have been able to stay in the UK for 2 years after their studies.
For many, myself included, due to the number of unemployed UK residents, and the number of foreign workers on student visas working in the UK this makes sense as it will stop many lower paid jobs being filled by international students and should allow UK residents to take these jobs instead.
You could argue that UK citizens have always been able to apply for jobs the same as international students, and they have equal chance of getting the jobs. However I'm sure a lot of larger businesses take on international workers as they recognise the reduced chance of them worrying as much about pension schemes, pay scales, pay rises, unions, strike action.. etc.
However, equally some are arguing that in more specialised areas there are not enough people living in the UK to fill these jobs, and external international workers coming from UK student studies are needed to fill these roles. One such person is James Dyson, the inventor and owner of the Dyson vacuum cleaner company. However I find this hypocritical to say the least. Firstly he moans about UK industry not making enough products in the UK, but has himself located his Dyson factories overseas.
He is quoted as saying: “Well, I am extremely concerned because already England is under-producing the number of engineers it needs by 50 per cent. There are 37,000 vacancies a year and only 20,000 graduates.”
However, in a prrevious interview he is quoted as saying: "Britain is very proud about the number of foreign students we educate at our universities, but actually all we are doing is educating our competitors"
So he is completely contradicting himself, saying on the one hand he wants to see more foreign students able to stay in the UK after their studies have concluded, so they can fill the more specialised job roles, but at the same time saying he shouldn't even be educating them because they will just take what they learnt home with them to start up competing companies in their own countries that will damage our own companies business.
Thoughts on this?
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