Prime Minister Keir Starmer says the country is becoming “an island of strangers”. Sir Starmer’s words leave international students feeling betrayed by the government.
By Arya D’Cruz
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, at a press conference on April 19th, introduced the UK’s new immigration White Paper proposals. During the press conference, he said that the number of immigrants entering the country is causing “incalculable damage” to the country. Some of the proposals included in the White Paper are reducing graduate visa length from two years to 18 months, making it more difficult for universities to accept international students by introducing tougher compliance rules to keep their licence to sponsor their visas, increasing the standard qualifying period for permanent residence from five years to 10 years and also exploring levying a tax on universities for every international student they accept.
The new White Paper proposals for changes in immigration are ones that have left international students feeling betrayed and disappointed. Masoma Akter is an international student of Bangladeshi nationality who moved to England from the UAE and is a second-year undergraduate law student at the University of Chester. When asked about the new proposals, Ms.Akter said, “It actually makes me feel really discouraged and demotivated because we are literally all coming here paying so much fees, we are juggling with the fact that we’re away from home, we’re going through all this hard work so that we can build a career here and then you find out that all they want to do is just get rid of us. It just feels like you’re not wanted. It feels discriminatory, and it’s about our future careers, so it feels scary as well because now we’re just like ‘okay, what do we do? Like, what do we do next if these laws actually come into force?’ Like, it just puts our future plans into jeopardy.”
When talking about the potential increase in the standard for the qualifying period for permanent residence, Ms. Akter said, “That’s a lot of time, and it’s just like for that entire time you feel like an alien in the country where you’re still working, still contributing to the economy. For example, working in the legal sector is contributing to the community not just economically but like on a civil level as well, but for a decade, I’m still going to be an alien figure, sort of like I’m not still accepted.”
An international biomedical science student, Dodi Naran, from Mongolia, said that it was unfair and confusing for Prime Minister Starmer to use an umbrella term and to refer to all immigrants as damaging to British society. She said, “Especially as Prime Minister, you have to be careful of what words you use, because you do have power. As an international student, I feel that statement threatens my safety.” Dodi said that, especially with the pre-existing “right-wing propaganda” about immigration, the Prime Minister’s statements are “adding oil to the fire”.
46% of visas that were granted in the year ending March 2025, excluding visiting or transit visas, were student visas. Starmer’s press conference riddled with anti-immigration statements comes after the Office for Students (OfS) reported that more than four in every 10 universities in England are expected to be in deficit by the end of July. Universities are facing a dire financial crisis that is mostly the aftermath of the decrease in international students who were once pouring into the country and were pouring in extortionate tuition fees into the universities.
Emily Withrow is an international student studying psychology at the University of Chester. Emily, who is American, has always seen the UK as more “progressive than the United States”, but having lived here for two years, she feels that the UK is heading towards the US’s similar path and becoming less liberal. “I do worry about the students and people who want to come to the UK and start a life here. Because that just makes it harder, even though they do have money, like if you’re throwing money at the government and they’re saying, ‘No, no, no, we don’t want that.’ What do you mean? Yes, you do.” Ms Withrow said about Keir Starmer’s shockingly anti-immigration proposals.
International university students in the UK pay double, sometimes triple, the amount of fees compared to their British counterparts. The new immigration White Paper proposals are targeting international students in multiple ways. As Sir Starmer phrased it as “because they are the right thing to do“, the Prime Minister’s plans for the “right thing to do” seem to be currently pointing fingers at not only the wrong demographic but also an unsuspecting one.
