Awale Olad Archives - Migrant tales

Migrants’ Rights Network: Out with the old, in with the new: 2014 ends as it began

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Migrant Tales

It seems that 2014 will end with yet more news on immigration. This time it involves the Home Secretary, Theresa May, and her push to change the immigration rules in order to require that all international students graduating at UK universities leave the country on completion of their course.

Read full story here.

MRN closed the year a full 12 months ago with an account of a ‘rag, tag and bobtail’ Parliamentary debate on immigration which took place in Westminster Hall.

At that time it involved the MP for Amber Valley, Nigel Mills making a last minute attempt to stop the lifting of the transitional controls which had prevented Bulgarians and Romanians accessing jobs in the mainstream labour market for the previous seven years. He lost the vote and the Immigration Bill accelerated towards the becoming law.

It seems that 2014 will end with yet more news of jostling and elbowing within the ranks of the government parties on immigration. This time it involves the Home Secretary, Theresa May, and her push to change the immigration rules in order to require that all international students graduating at UK universities leave the country on completion of their course. At the moment they are permitted to remain in the country to apply for jobs under the terms of Tier 2, or setup a business in Tier 1, extend their PHD in Tier 4, or gain work experience in Tier 5, of the Points-Based Scheme (PBS).

Mrs May thinks that by ending these routes to an extension of residence permits will address a problem she says exists which involves international students staying on without permission and thereby adding to the numbers of irregular migrants in the country.

It is hard to credit the sense of this idea. The students who are permitted to remain under the terms of the PBS are not adding to the numbers of people breaking the immigration rules for the simple reason that they have been told by her government department that they can remain in compliance with those rules. The actual numbers affected here would be around 6,000 students, a mere 3 percent of the overall 176,000 that came to the UK in 2014.

Plenty of critical voices have spoken up to protest against the daftness of an idea that hits at the interests of one of Britain’s most successful service industries – namely higher education – which has a poll position to maintain in the highly competitive global race to attract fee-paying students to its universities and colleges. Her partners in the coalition government, the Lib Dems, have rushed to brand it as a ‘silly’ idea.

One suspects that there will be others as equally alarmed. International students have provided a rich flow of talent to many British businesses looking for employers who will help prise open access for their goods and services in overseas markets. If recovery from the deepest recession in a century is to continue it will be because these companies have the skills in their staff teams which can access business opportunities aboard and do the sort of deals that allow small and medium sized enterprises to grow stronger and win more orders.

There is also the sense that this proposal is purely a cynical political attack on foreign students as part of the cat and mouse game between key players jostling for the leadership of the Conservative Party with the Prime Minister and as a result Theresa May is deliberately undermining David Cameron on the issue of student migration. The Prime Minister has been part of a search party sent to India on many occasions to calm anxieties about Theresa May’s student rhetoric, which is hurting UK universities, and this latest announcement will certainly be viewed as a clear shot at Downing Street in response to the cull of special advisors linked to May, who are currently seeking safe Conservative parliamentary seats.

Major problems arise from this verbal jousting:

It only caters to the mainstream media who like to stir up the Westminster bubble. Politicians will look silly, public trust will continue to plummet, and students, universities, and SMEs are the only real victims.
This latest announcement will do more damage to the current declining popularity of UK universities. It will give succour to Australia, the UK’s main competition, which is currently attracting higher levels of Indian students that would have at one time scrambled for the UK. The closure of the previous Tier 1 post-study work visa has done much damage to the UK’s attractiveness abroad.

The Tory backbench revolt on the issue of Bulgarians and Romanians failed at the end of last year, and, even with 50,000 people from these countries registering in the UK labour force, the evidence is clearly on the side that they slotted into the jobs market and have been doing their bit to help the country grow out of the doldrums.

This time the insurgency has come not from the Conservative backbenches, but one of its most prominent ministers in government. We have to hope that Mrs May’s colleagues will see that it is, like her previous attempts to introduce the visa bonds and go home vans, a non-starter for SMEs and the UK’s ability to be a global competitor.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

*Awale Olad is the Public & Parliamentary Affairs Officer at MRN, coordinating the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Migration, supporting parliamentarians and policy makers on establishing a cross-party consensus on immigration policy.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Immigration statistics to be debated for 3 hours in the House of Commons

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Awale Olad

MPs are set to debate the political minefield of migration statistics this Thursday, 26 June. The Lords will also debate the right to work for asylum seekers.

Read full blog entry here.

The Westminster Hall debate will be led by Bernard Jenkins MP, the Chair of the Public Administration Select Committee, which looked into migration statistics last year and published a critical report of how the government was recording statistics and ensuring a proper mechanism to manage migration numbers in the UK existed.

The committee’s inquiry considered various factors that record migration and took oral and written evidence from key experts including Dr Scott Blinder from Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford and Professor John Salt of the Migration Research Unit at UCL. Civil servants from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) and the Home Office also faced questioning from MPs.

There was an appeasing attitude from the cross-party group of MPs who looked at migration statistics with an open mind, especially at around the time of screaming and scaremongering by backbench MPs who wanted to close the borders to Romanian and Bulgarian (A2) migrants. Some newspapers said that the UK was set to be flooded by millions of EU migrants and the United Kingdom Independence Party filled the vacuum when the government refused to release projections of potential arrivals from the A2 countries.

So it was somewhat unsurprising that the government took almost a year to respond to the committee’s report, which was published in July 2013. It gave the government an opportunity to pour cold water over any suggestions that the UK was set to receive a disproportionate number of A2 migrants. The committee was particularly critical of the government’s dependence on the International Passenger Survey; they also urged the government to rapidly move on to the e-borders scheme, and improve the ability of the ONS to gather accurate estimates of migration data.

In terms of the net migration target, the committee’s recommendations are congenial to the government’s efforts, however, it falls just short of saying that a net migration target is both confusing and unnecessary – the committee recommended that the government ‘should do more to enable better public understanding of migration’, which the government agreed to.

The debate on Thursday will bring together hostile as well as friendly voices on immigration. The ever thorny issue of immigration numbers – something that shouldn’t be misconstrued with migration statistics in general – will certainly be the instruction that could potentially take this debate into hostile territory.

The government, however, has an opportunity to engage with a committee of highly informed cross-party parliamentarians who will be able to debate constructively with them on the factors that create the hostility around migration numbers. Three hours of debate on statistics alone could suck the energy out of both ministers and others, but a central figure could raise the tempo of the debate if one calls for the dropping of the net migration target, potentially wrong-footing both the Coalition and the Labour party on how best to deal with immigration policy post next year’s general election.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Is a new Immigration Bill to be announced in the Queen’s Speech?

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Migrant Tales insight: Events in the United Kingdom resemble a self-fulfilling prophesy for white English and an ever-worsening and ever-hostile place for migrants and visible minorities. The treatment and approach to immigration of Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is shameful. It reveals more cowardice than sound judgement.

The worst matter in the United Kingdom isn’t migration, but parties like the UKIP, Conservatives and Labor that feed the country’s self-fulfilling prophesy. Scapegoating is easier than sound leadership.

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Awale Olad*

The ‘hostile’ Immigration Act 2014 was indeed a flagship piece of legislation and we are, it seems, set to see a second tough immigration bill announced in the Queen’s Speech this coming Wednesday.

The first Immigration Bill, which became an act in May 2014 after a long battle with Conservative Backbenchers who believed it was not tough enough on EU migrants, introduced new measures that reduced the appeal rights for migrants, access to private housing, ability to access driving licenses and bank accounts, and new powers to strip the citizenships of migrants the Home Secretary deems unworthy of British citizenship.

Now, however, rumours are circulating that Iain Duncan Smith, the Work & Pensions Secretary, will team up with Home Secretary Theresa May, to introduce a short new bill that aims to respond to the United Kingdom Independence Party’s (UKIP) recent popularity in the European and Local Elections, where they topped the vote in the UK.

According to the Telegraph, the new measures in the bill will include extending powers on deportation and targeting EU nationals who are not employed, discouraging businesses from solely employing EU migrants, reducing the ability of unemployed EU migrants claiming benefits, and a new ‘wealth test’ that will ban migrants from new poorer EU accession states from entering the UK.

Theresa May is also set to lock horns with David Willetts, the Conservative universities minister, as further measures in the upcoming bill continue to drip out into mainstream media. May wants to stop international students reuniting with foreign spouses/partners in the UK, moreover, the Home Secretary will introduce greater sanctions on universities whose foreign students disappear, and allow for immigration officers to have greater access to universities who they suspect to have bogus students.

The last Immigration Bill was meant to be the most accelerated piece of legislation since the Coalition came to power in 2010. Starting its Commons stage in October 2013, the Bill was meant to receive Royal Assent by the beginning of this year but was slowed down by Nigel Mills’s amendment to stop Bulgarians and Romanians from entering the UK in 2014. The amendment received almost one hundred Tory backbench backers and stalled the legislation’s progress in parliament.

Given the scare UKIP delivered to the mainstream parties at last week’s local elections by campaigning primarily on the impacts of EU migration in the UK, a response from the Conservative Party would seem apposite. However, Paddy Ashdown, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and their current election coordinator, has said that the Liberal Democrats will block the bill if it is not to their taste.

This new bill will certainly have EU leaders looking closely at the proposed measures although the government will be at pains to point out that the proposals are consistent with German legislation. The crucial obstacle for May and her colleagues is whether this bill meets the demands of despairing Tory backbenchers who are under threat from a UKIP surge.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Migration statistics are difficult reading for Cameron but prove critics right

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Awale Olad*

The latest quarterly statistics from the independent Office of National Statistics found net migration soaring to 212,000 by the year ending September 2013. The Home Office’s response was that it was cracking down on the abuse of ‘freedom of movement’.

The figures show a statistically significant increase in Western European (EU15) citizens arriving in the United Kingdom for the long-term, an estimated increase of 65,000 on the previous year. The sluggish economies across Europe are driving young EU15 migrants, in particular from Spain and Italy, to find work in the UK. This has damaged significantly the Coalition’s commitment to drive immigration down to ‘tens of thousands’ by 2015, a Conservative Party red-line in the 2010 general election, which now seems to have damaged David Cameron’s credibility in his perennial battle with the United Kingdom Independence Party. The Liberal Democrats immediately distanced themselves from the net migration target. Less people are leaving the UK as well.

24,000 Romanians and Bulgarians came to the UK, a three-fold increase on the previous year, with the majority of them working and the rest studying.

The income threshold on the family route and tough visa assessments for relatives of UK residents seems to have helped reduce net migration by 7,202. This is coupled with 25,000 Commonwealth citizens rejecting an opportunity to study in the UK, a significant drop on the previous year, although study visas were still up.

Refugees have also added to the increase in the statistics with Syrians, Eritreans and Albanians driving up asylum applications.

The figures are good reading for an economist who would put it down to the UK’s economic resilience attracting migrant workers from across Europe. It’s bad reading for David Cameron and Theresa May who are hell-bent on reducing net migration without hurting the economy. Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader, has said he’d happily let the economy take a nosedive if it meant driving down immigration by pulling the UK out of the EU and introducing a moratorium on all immigration.

The fallout from the statistics and the unlikelihood of achieving the net migration target will very much give Farage a new platform to suck votes away from the Conservative Party with some knock on effects on Labour and Liberal Democrat voters. UKIP will stir up anger by claiming they are the only party able to control immigration, just the way the Conservatives backed Labour up against the wall in 2010, by promising greater measures to reduce immigration to the UK in order to bring numbers down or to a complete stop.

Economists, NGOs, and other experts have all said that the net migration target of 99,000 is impossible to achieve given the variable factors that determine why people migrate. But the Home Office’s response of ‘we’re tackling the abuse to freedom of movement’ is not aimed at a nervous public with unremitting anxieties about migration but potential Tory voters flirting with UKIP.

More often than not, public opinion about migration is multi-layered, so a message about stopping EU migrants from claiming benefits in the UK is less likely to resonate with the public when most of the economic migrants remain employed, as the statistics show. However, a debate about the labour market in general, wages, and conditions could start a series of discussions about the impact of migration, a position generally championed by the Labour Party and some Conservatives.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Immigration is an important factor in Conservative rise in the polls

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Migrant Tales

MT comment: Solid analysis by Awale Olad on what role the anti-immigrant message will play in the polls and upcoming elections in the United Kingdom. The delicate balancing act involves anti-immigration rhetoric, which could be ignited by the government’s Immigration Bill, and scaring away those votes it needs to capture, according to Olad.

With Euro MP and parliamentary elections coming up in Finland in 2014 and 2015, respectively, will parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) beef up their anti-immigration rhetoric to capture voters? That is what is exactly happening at this moment. Why did the PS’ new party secretary, Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo, “demand” right after she was elected that Finland should tighten immigration policy?

The interesting question to ask is how much of a boost will the party’s anti-immigration message give the PS in both elections?

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By Awale Olad

The Conservative Party has spent the best part of the past two years lagging behind the Labour Party in the polls until the most recent ICM poll. Most political commentators agree that the budget delivered by Chancellor George Osborne in 2012 was a critical factor in the reduction in Tory fortunes.

Read full story here.

Now that parliament has gone quiet for the summer recess, a cheery bunch of Tory MPs will be heading for their summer breaks riding high in the polls having wrested some support back from UKIP, which has put them neck and neck with the Labour Party. With two years to go, strategically, this is the best an incumbent government, trying to manage a sluggish economy, can hope for.

The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour adds:

The fall in the Ukip share may reflect the recent comparative decline in publicity for the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, and Downing Street’s persistent efforts to neutralise Ukip’s appeal by countering with a series of strong messages on immigration, welfare and a referendum on UK membership of the European Union.

With recent events, some could argue that a catalyst for a further rise in support for the Conservative Party is a mixture of the Tories toe-poking Labour on their links with Unite the Union coupled with Theresa May’s final showdown with Abu Qatada, who managed to successfully secure a treaty with the Jordanian government, and send him home. This undoubtedly could be a contributing factor to their fortune in future polls and has been ‘good news story’ for the Tories in recent weeks.

Number 10 will continue to try and neutralise UKIP’s support but it will certainly fall short of electoral success. The reality, as Tory pollster Lord Ashcroft often points out, is what really matters to voters is the economy and jobs.

Both Ashcroft and Wintour agree that these salient issues would ultimately give the Tories a chance of winning the next election. Seducing Tory/UKIP swing voters by going hard on immigration will only win back support in constituencies the Tories need to hold. The Conservatives will need to expand their reach by campaigning on more potent issues, and in particular, raise their game in courting migrant and BME voters. Ashcroft writes:

All in all, the first half of 2013 represents a time of stagnation that we could hardly afford. We have a good case to make on many of the policy areas on which we have lost ground, including crime, immigration, welfare reform and the economy. But people will only hear that case if we use the available air time to make it. The latest round of parliamentary scandal will make people all the more resistant to what we have to say, and the spending review later this month makes it all the more necessary to show we are doing what people expect of us. There is no more time to waste.

Ashcroft is clearly irritated by his Party’s internal squabbles and the cyclical one-upmanship with Labour (generally not the greatest indicator of public mood and feeling) as time-wasting exercises. Tough immigration rhetoric braced with harsh policies will not win the Conservatives the general election but it will consociate the UKIP appeal, which is the first step towards building a coalition of supporters, according to Tory strategists.

The government’s upcoming Immigration Bill will be an interesting dog-fight internally within Conservative MPs and externally with the Labour Party. If the Coalition manages to find time to debate this Bill, the government would need to be careful not to ignite drastic anti-immigration rhetoric that will do little to attract exactly those votes it will increasingly need to capture.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.