UK sees huge drop in visa applications after restrictions introduced

21 comments

1. “The care industry could struggle to cope with the consequences”

   Well here’s a whackadoodle idea – hire people who already live here? The NHS is overwhelmingly populated with imported workers. Hire some British people! (And no I don’t mean just white, calm down, I mean anyone already here who needs work)

2. How is this surprising, or even news?

   Me, at the station: ” train cancelled due to crew shortage ” 🤣

3. I’ve just finished my PhD, and my supervisor has taken voluntary redundancy. So have a couple of others in our department. I will probably struggle to stay in academic work, at least in the short-term, because the money for hiring early careers academics is basically non-existent.
   Also, in my viva (final assessment) they wouldn’t sanction coffee in the meeting because it was a new internal expense.

   All of this because applications from foreign students have plummeted since these restrictions came into effect, which has butchered university revenues across the country.

4. We should replace low paid visa work with ai waifu robots. I need that robot harem by the time I’m in a carehome.

5. All my father’s carers were from India, cheap labour that the PRIVATE care industry were crying for and the Conservatives obliged, it was totally abused.

   I’m British Indian, before anyone accuses me of anything, my main issue was the increase in cheap labour from the 3rd world, lack of training, and my personal thoughts of why are we importing people to do the jobs that can be done locally.

   The answer to the latter is probably because shareholders want their dividends and bury their heads, none of the care industry actually want to train and pay decent wages

6. Wages need to go up to attract and retain domestic workers.

   Bottom line. The cheap labour market has been exploited by industries for a long time and it drives wages down.

   Pay people better, they pay more tax and spend more.

7. Such a dump policy. We need targeted visa schemes, eg for Care Workers etc.

   The Tories were really determined to crash and burn everything just to prove a point

8. Someone I know worked (not for long) in HR for a private carer company with an NHS contract. I think what they did was illegal.

   They’d advertise jobs abroad only. They’d target certain countries which I’d describe as poor enough to have loads of keen applicants but with okay education.

   They’d be on minimum wage but would require a car for their job so the company would conveniently offer a car loan. They couldn’t leave until this was payed off. If they turned down any overtime etc then they’d risk losing sponsorship. It’s almost like slavery.

   Also I don’t know how these companies can sponsor anyone they like for care yet some companies struggle to import great engineers and scientists.

9. After being so colossally stupid as to approve Brexit, the UK now moves to reduce immigration, tourism, foreign students, etc. What a bunch of idiots.

10. It’s shocking how wrong people are here about student visas. My job is issuing the document they need to be able to apply for their visas and it’s not as simple as just ‘doing a short course and joining the labour market’. Short courses don’t allow students to work nor can students apply for post study work visas after studying them. People just need to shut up when they clearly know nothing about a particular subject.

11. My heart aches for those unable to apply for a spouse visa due to the increased minimum income required. Apparently only those who make over the national average deserve to be united with their loved one(s).

12. how do other countries do care? is there something we’re missing as a country ?

13. My experience as an immigrant in the UK (now settled) talking to native born citizens has been that they have very little if any idea how the UK immigration system even works. Most are entirely ignorant of the hostile environment policy and don’t understand the difference between skilled worker visas, student visas, ILR, dependants, or citizenship. Most have never even heard of a healthcare surcharge. Most don’t know how much a work visa costs, who pays for them, and what types of jobs typically sponsor visas. Most don’t know about the skilled work+5years to ILR to citizenship route.

    Due to this widespread ignorance, the government has very little incentive to be sensible with immigration policy because changes to these things can easily draw unflattering headlines from the press, which the uninformed public then swallows up. That’s how we’ve gotten to a point where boat crossings, a largely irrelevant contributor to UK immigration, are consistently a front page story.

    Conservatives have taken advantage of this ignorance by touting blanket restrictions on all immigration across the board. However even some on the left have taken advantage of this ignorance by selling the idea that “cheap labour from abroad” is keeping down domestic wages and therefore the working class benefits from immigration cuts.

    “Why not hire British workers???” The fertility rate of the UK is <2, [there literally aren’t enough people of working age in this country for government revenue from domestic workers’ wages to sustain the large population of pensioners](https://youtu.be/LBudghsdByQ). That’s to say nothing of the economics of actually finding workers qualified to do jobs like in the NHS (NHS consultant is definitely not a “low wage” job). It’s a lot more complicated than a slogan.

    When you have policy driven by the desires of a largely uninformed public, you start to have “unforseen” negative consequences such as the collapse of university funding and an NHS labour shortage. Both solvable problems that smart policy can fix, but where the fixes don’t poll well at all.

    It will never cease to baffle me how little Britons understand about an issue that is repeatedly listed as one of the most important to them in polls.

14. Unfortunately this country has been built on mass immigration over the last few decades.

    Because we actually wanted it ? Fuck no…..it’s because we are so shit and poor and lost so much industry and buying power we simple cannot survive with the indigenous population.

15. I’ve lost one member of staff and in danger of losing another because of this. Both educated to post-grad and PhD level.

16. The Tories Brexit net migration number was obviously way too high, but the new government need to be careful where the number is cut. The number needs reducing but reduce the wrong part of it and it just creates other problems for the country

17. They don’t need to restrict visas for everyone, just the problem countries, and we all know which ones.

18. My uni has brought itself to its knees spending stupidly. They over budgeted by 10 MILLION POUNDS for foreign students who simply don’t exist, and now they’ve shut the library, stopped ALL field trips and residentials, and they announced over Christmas that they’ve closed the SU bar.

    I wonder if these idiots realise that instead of taking a pay cut for their own stupidity, and passing the buck onto an extremely hostile and left wing student body, they’ve ensured their own destruction

19. All this talk about students and the poor universities in here and yet the reality is that they aren’t being prevented from coming. They’re just not allowed to bring unlimited numbers of non-students with them, burdening the schools and NHS with short-term costs from low or non-payers. I guess they’ll have to learn in their own countries then if they have families. This is not a problem.

20. The ones that are a problem aren’t applying for Visas ☕️🐸

21. No more cheap labour for the owner class to exploit. Boo hoo.

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