Studying the shifting sands of immigration laws

AS the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the plans of countries to reopen their economy or close their borders by restricting entry to only a few select categories, one visa classification remains a darling of the federal, state, territories, provinces and local governments: international student visas.

The billion-dollar question is why this shift?

Let us count the ways. In 2019, the ABS estimates 57 percent of the A$40 billion that international education contributed to the Australian economy, or A$22.8 billion, came in the form of goods and services spent in the wider economy by 956,773 international students.

In an opinion article in the Sydney Morning Herald last February 19, John Brumby, chancellor of La Trobe University, wrote that “since education is Australian’s fourth-largest export, international students should be welcomed and encouraged to attend institutions of higher education in Australia. Additionally, he wrote that Chinese international students stimulate the Australian economy and support at least 250,000 jobs in Australia.”

Generating jobs from tuition fees and spending also benefited another former British colony.

International students represent more than 20 percent of the total student population of Canada. As they pay three or four times the tuition of local Canadian students, the Canadian government research estimates that international students contribute some C$22 billion annually to the country’s economy and help to sustain over 170,000 jobs. That was in 2019 alone.

A recent study by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) showed that international students are worth £20 billion to the United Kingdom economy. This does not include tuition fees, which are much more than their local counterpart pays.

HEPI’s director, Nick Hillman, confirms in a BBC news report that “international students bring economic benefits to the United Kingdom that are worth 10 times the costs of hosting them,”

“Fewer international students would mean a lot fewer jobs in all areas of the UK, because international students spend money in their universities, in their local economies,” he says.

“Without international students — approximately 230,000 arriving each year before the pandemic — some of the local companies might go bust. Some of the local resident population would lose their jobs,” Mr. Hillman concludes.

As global leaders in higher education, UK universities are heavily reliant on international tuition revenue, with the most important recruitment markets for the UK being China (120,385); India (26,685); the United States (20,120); Hong Kong (16,135) and Malaysia (13,835).

Indeed, international students make up 20 percent of the United Kingdom’s undergraduate student body and a staggering 35 percent of all postgraduates, meaning there are close to half a million international students in the country at any given time.

A million students and a million immigrants a year

The United States receives the greatest number of international students each year, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE). The “more than 1 million international students contributed almost $45 billion to the US economy in 2018 through spending on retail, dining and transportation.”

In 2019, the number of international students and student exchange visitors based on the US Department of Homeland Security Yearbook of Statistics was 2,527,655.

During the last years of the Trump administration, the US higher education sector took “big economic hits.”

IEE data reveal that “international student enrollment in US universities has stalled and retreated in the past three years because of high costs, barriers to immigration and employment pathways, political rhetoric and perceived crime.” —https://www. voanews.com/student-union/ fewer-foreign-students-enrolling-us-college-and-universities

The slowdown is attributed to “the high cost of tuition at US colleges and universities, difficulty in getting visas or the insecurity of maintaining a student visa throughout a student’s education, students feeling a lack of welcome in the United States, negative political rhetoric and news of crime in the United States,” and now the Asian American hate crimes.

About one-third of the more than 1 million international students in the United States come from China, according to IIE’s annual Open Doors report.

For the fall 2020 semester, IEE exhibited an “accelerated decline” due to the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in a 43 percent drop in the rate of international student enrollment for the period.

And trade wars between the United States and China projected up to $1.15 billion in lost tuition revenue to US universities, according to a study from the University of California, San Diego. https://www.cgdev. org/sites/default/files/trade-liberalization-and-chinese-students-us-higher-education.pdf