In an ideal world, news that the higher education sector is attracting a significant number of students to study in the UK would be great news for a post-Brexit ”global Britain”.
But new figures that show that net migration in YE June 2022 reached over half a million (504,000) – driven to a considerable extent by international students – makes things very uncomfortable in a political environment where immigration appears to have returned as a salient issue both among the electorate and for the current government.
Public First/More in Common polling from earlier this month showed that most Brexit voters (73 per cent) and all voters (57 per cent) now think immigration has increased since Brexit – and most Brexit voters (78 per cent) and all voters (56 per cent) think it is “too high”. Only 30 per cent of all voters think it is “about right” or “too low”.
