Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, there is much in the Bill other than the asylum issues on which so many Members of your Lordships’ House have perhaps rightly concentrated. It is important to tell the Minister that he has a fairly substantial communications job on his hands to try to persuade the Members of this House that there are all those other things, many of which are quite admirable. I propose to speak partly on the educational aspects of the Bill, so I declare an interest as chairman of the advisory board of the London School of Commerce and of the Association of Independent Higher Education Providers. In that capacity, I serve on the Home Office joint education task force, and I must contradict the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, who is not in his place, who spoke about the Home Office not being receptive to outside advice. The joint education task force has now been sitting for almost three years, systematically going through everything that needs to be done to stop higher education being a conduit for illegal immigration into this country. The existing position, if we do not change to the points-based system, is that when a student from overseas gets their visa and arrives here, they can go anywhere or nowhere. Reference was made to the cockle pickers. However, the cockle pickers came on visas supplied for education, and because those visas were not specific to an institution the cockle pickers could disappear. If I were overseas and wanted to be an illegal migrant into this country, I would come here under the present system as a student, get my visa and then disappear. I would do it with dignity through the front door, rather than with the indignity of getting into the back of a tomato lorry and running the risk, as many of them did, of dying in the process. There is something fundamentally wrong with systems at the moment, and I commend the part of the Bill that deals with the introduction of the points-based system, tier 4 of which is the application to higher education. In the private sector, the only people who will be able to receive overseas students are accredited institutions and licensed institutions. Anyone who does not have the accreditation or the sponsorship licence cannot be the recipient of an overseas student. This is of fundamental importance. It cleans up the system, and it gives certainty to students whom we want to make an important contribution not only to education in this country but to the development of their own countries when they return. The college that I chair has students from 130 different countries pursuing undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral studies. All of them will go back to their countries of origin and make an important contribution to their development. The Home Office has done an important job in producing ideas that clamp down on immigration abuse, but it has not got it all right yet. As my noble friend Lady Warwick said, some of the decisions that are being imposed are quite arbitrary and will be a disincentive, not least the sudden decision that you must show that you have maintenance support of £800 a month if you are in London, or £600 a month anywhere else, and you must give evidence of that support before you arrive. The Home Office is even trying to apply that to existing students who have fulfilled all their requirements in this country for the past three years and who are applying for a one-year extension. They are being treated as if they were new people arriving in the system. An enormous amount of good is being done in the education system under tier 4, and tiers 1, 2, 3 and 5 are making similar improvements to immigration arrangements in other parts of the system. In the present economic climate, we should do nothing to obstruct the arrival of people who are making real and meaningful contributions to our economic development. In the remaining couple of minutes at my disposal, I have more general points to make. For far too long, we have created a false dichotomy when discussing the question of migrants to this country. There have been arguments over the years between those who talk about integration and those who talk about multicultural development, and we have posed the issues as though they were alternatives. There are imperative levels of integration for anybody who is going to settle in this country: language, obedience to the law and willingness to work are all parts of that process. That is why I welcome the idea that those are the pathways towards citizenship, the things that are real and necessary. But they are not an alternative to multiculturalism. My wife came to this country at the age of 15. I value her regard for, respect of and following of Jamaican culture. It is very important but not an alternative to the role that she has had to take on of integrating into British society and playing a meaningful part in it. Citizenship for most of us is acquired; for other people it must be earned. There is nothing wrong in specifying the rights that people can acquire and the duties that they will assume in counterbalance. I do not believe that we ever get rights without a parallel responsibility. That is an important part of the Bill as regards citizenship for people from overseas, and I welcome it. The efforts of Phil Woolas and his ministerial predecessor, Liam Byrne, in the area that we are examining in this Bill have been very useful and are to be welcomed. My final point, bearing in mind the request by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, that nobody goes over eight minutes, is that the Bill refers to combined customs and immigration powers. In discussions around the Bill, some of the questions about smuggling have been too restricted to arms and drugs, but there are much bigger smuggling issues to be addressed, particularly those arising from the abuse of the European Union transit system, which allows for the suspension of taxation as goods cover borders. Because of the inadequacy of the examination of some cross-border traffic, levels of fraud from smuggling are very high. I hope that my noble friend will look at that in the context of the Bill. If he wants some very good advice to follow, he can have the reports—they are about 10 inches thick—from the commission of inquiry that I chaired when I was a Member of the European Parliament, and on which we are still awaiting action from the British Government.