The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford have released a report (they call it a primer) about the way the Points Based System, here and abroad, assess immigrants. It looks at the criteria used to attract “the brightest and the best” and analyses whether this is an effective way of attracting the best immigrants. Their findings show that there is often a disparity between the qualifications of immigrants and the jobs they do. And they highlight some of the difficulties countries have in assessing migrants – most notably with qualifications and previous earnings.

One of the main purposes of a Points Based System is to attract highly skilled workers to a country. This often involves only letting people in who have a job offer. But Australia, Canada, and the UK work, or worked, on a “human capital” approach – allowing people in without an offer. This seeks to widen the knowledge and skills base of the workforce, which in turn promotes innovation and growth.

However, the UK then moved to the Points Based System in 2008 – which made the assessment of skills very difficult. the breath of qualifications from BA to PhD is a complicating factor (as  is the vexed question of whether a professional qualification should be accorded the same status as an MA).

There are also difficulties in trying to assess skill based on pervious salaries. All of these factors are relative – well skilled or highly paid in one sector might be less impressive in another. That has led the UK to try to attract migrants from a highly specific pool. Only four main criteria were assessed under Tier 1, compared to nine for Australia.

As well as being the country that uses the narrowest scope of criteria, we also offer the least flexibility for “swapping” relevant criteria. After looking at the range of factors that are important to market integration of migrants, the report states:

it is important to point out that, despite careful selection of admission criteria, some studies indicate that the immigrant mix appears to be mainly driven by the self-selection decisions of migrants … McHale and Rogers (2008) have embarked on a statistical approach to predict how potential migrants might fare in the domestic labour market. One of the findings is that ‘even using a relatively larger number of theoretically plausible criteria … even the best possible combination of criteria explains only a relatively small amount of the variation in immigrants’ lifetime earnings.’ Immigrants’ success might thus be mostly determined by unobserved factors … Therefore, selection criteria do not necessarily lead to desired policy outcomes and are difficult to implement in practice.

Look closely at that last sentence. Selection criteria are difficult to use, and don’t lead to the desired result.

One good example of this is that the UK places high regard on education – but many employers find it difficult to understand the relationship of foreign qualifications to domestic ones. (An anecdotal example is that a degree in India getting a mark of 60 is the same class as a UK degree getting the mark of 70: employers who don’t know this might inadvertently mark degrees down in their assessments.)

A problem that results from this is that highly skilled migrants are let in who end up in low skilled jobs: more than 33% of Indian nationals were overqualified in Canada in 2000, many working as cab drivers. But this is balanced by the fact that over qualification rates in the UK are high amongst immigrants and amongst natives.

The result is a move towards a “demand based policy” – this requires a job offer for people to be allowed in. Such schemes have been introduced in Australia and Canada too.

However, other factors identified in the report that led to over qualification were:

• a lack of human and social capital specific to the host country (e.g. proficiency in the language);
•  the local labour market situation; and
• various forms of discrimination.

The fact that natives are also overqualified suggests that this is not a problem of migration, but of an imbalance in the economy, or the education sector more generally. It may well be that the policies of government give a fake impression of the market for skilled labour, or that the economy has a surfeit of skilled labour and needs to export some.

The report draws no conclusions, but offers a detailed and interesting introduction to the facts and figures in this complex area of immigration policy.

It’s Friday … and that can only mean one thing …

All the headlines in Immigration and Employment, the Best of our Blog, and our favourite stories from the fringes.

Headlines

The Lille Loophole was exposed by the BBC. Thousands of trains a year bring people into the UK with no passport checks at all.

The largest commercial court in the world opened in London.

A Home Office report shows that the police don’t perform thorough checks on most foreign criminals.

Australia has extended its Post Study Work Visas, and arrested 50 illegal workers.

Best of the Blog

Monday Mouthpiece: Gemma Hyslop examined the relationship between Hyat and Chickwumba in detail in our weekly office talk.

Thanigaikumaran: five years’ leave to remain is a legal grant for refugees.

Trouble and Strife: it is possible to be discriminated against because of who you are married to.

Are some more equal? Paying a man more than a woman in a comparable role might not be against the Equal Pay Act.

Home Sweet Home: domestic workers who are treated like family ar not entitled to the Minimum Wage.

Wrong Way: our piece on the Adam Smith Institute blog about immigration policy.

Friday Fringe

Trial by Twitter

Should jurors be allowed to tweet (answers to @HenryOliver3)? The answer was a resounding “No” from the Supreme Court of Arkansas. Because a juror ignored the directions of a judge, who told him not to tweet, the murder conviction of a death row inmate was quashed and a new trial ordered. One of the tweets read, “If its wisdom we seek. . . We should run to the strong tower.” Quite.

Kindling a fire across the pond?

Whilst American jurors are being admonished for sending impenetrable tweets, English ones will be given kindles to help them handle evidence more easily. Although this will reduce the amount of paperwork used in court,  of the seven million pensioners aged between 60 and 69 around 70 per cent of them have never even used the internet. This has raised concerns that they will struggle with the Kindles.

Hard times for postman

A postman in Essex was put under surveillance after he was seen opening parcels. Investigators watched him open a package of  VigRX – a penis enlargement supplement – which he proceeded to steal. He also took cash. When confronted he resigned. He has been found guilty of theft and unlawfully opening a Royal Mail package. With a reputation as a hardened criminal and no job, he’s going to find the next few months to be a stiff winter. Some think his community service is a soft sentence.

Dickens and Downton

In a discussion of the law on marital discrimination a judge used cultural reference to Dickens and Downton Abbey to try to clarify his point:

We are aware of no example of a man suffering detriment (in the legal sense) for being married. One wonders why the protection was extended to men except simply as a matter of formal equality; and not extended to women who were not married to the fathers of children by whom they were pregnant, as a reader of any Dickens novel or a viewer of Downton Abbey (a popular ITV1 costume drama of the 1900′s) would understand.

Till Death Do Us Part

C. P. Scott, founding editor of The Guardian, famously said that of television, “the word’s half Latin half Greek – no good will ever come of it.” And it seems there is truth to what he said. A 50-year-old woman killed her 73-year-old husband by fatally stabbing him in the back of the leg after a row about what to watch on TV. When her husband wanted to watch football Leonora Sinclair, who had been “getting pissed” (as she text her friend) on white wine stabbed him in the leg. She was jailed for ten years.

Till Debt Do Us Part

Divorce rates rose by 5% this year. It was the first time they did so since 2003. The most common age for divorcees was 40 – 44, with a rise in divorces for the over 60s. The most popular reasons have been attributed to the recession, with the financial strain that falling incomes puts on families being at the root of the problem.

It isn’t just in the UK where officials are arresting illegal immigrants found as  workers. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship has detected fifty people in Australia during the last week who are in breach of visa rules; forty four of them are currently being detained.

Fourteen illegal workers have been detained as well as alleged overstayers and fraudsters. A family of four was found in Victoria, and ten Malaysian nationals were found working on farms.

Of the ten workers a spokesman said,

Seven of them had overstayed their visas while the remainder were working in breach of their visa conditions. All were taken to the Adelaide Immigration Transit Accommodation pending their removal from Australia.

Fourteen illegal workers were found in New South Wales, working in restaurants and car washing businesses. And fifteen overstayers were working illegally on a farm near Alice Springs.

The spokesman added that it was the responsibility of employers to ensure that their workers were in the country legally.

This has been the focus of policy in the UK recently, with announcements that illegal workers are being arrested across the country. In Spring 2012 a new online system will be set up for employers to more easily check whether potential employees are in the country legally or not.

And in Alabama, in America, there has been a strong crackdown on illegal immigrants. This has led to a huge drop in productivity in the construction sector and tomato crops being left to rot on vines as there is a shortage of workers.

More Post-Study Work Visas are going to be available to international students after their Australia student visa runs out in Australia. Starting in 2013 the Post-Study Work Visas will be available to graduates of Bachelors degrees and higher. The government ministers responsible for the change said this was being done to “enable education providers to offer a more competitive package to international students.”

Bachelor graduates can currently use a Temporary Skilled Graduate Visa to stay for up to eighteen months. But this requires them to meet the skills of a job on the Occupation Shortage List.

The new arrangement allows Bachelor graduates to stay for two years; Masters graduates can stay for three years, PhD graduates can stay for four years. The Temporary Skilled Graduate Visa will be available as well as the Post-Study Work Visa.

The basic requirements for a Post-Study Work Visa will be:

• Graduates must have completed a Bachelor degree or higher level course in Australia in the last six months;
• Graduates must complete their degrees after at least two academic years’ study in Australia;
• Applicants must demonstrate competent English language abilities.

A piece in the Financial Times has shown that the removal of Tier 1 Post-Study Work visa in April 2012 is already having an effect on admissions of overseas students to MBA courses.

What’s changing?

Tier 4 student visas are more difficult to get as they are issued at consulates in the countries of application, and the Tier 1 post-study work visas are being abolished in April 2012. The effect of this is to make the UK a less attractive, less competitive place for international students.

The Manchester Business School has seen an 18% reduction in enrolments on its MBA course this year. The director, Michael Luger, said the removal of post-study work visas, “makes it harder for non EU graduates to stay, which reduces the attractiveness of the UK as a place of study.”

As professor Mozier from the Leeds Business School said, the market here for international students is “a £1 billion industry creating goodwill for Britain across the world.”

France is seeing a similar effect on its international student population, with enrollment numbers declining in response to strict immigration laws. But the University of Navarre in Spain has seen a rise in applicants: 36% of their MBA students were foreign in 2007, now it is 53%.

By not restricting immigration laws Spain has managed to attract the talent that is not coming to Britain and France.

When Australia saw a drop of 25% in applicants it changed policy: applications were sped up, and the right to work was reinstated.

What will the changes mean for students who want to work?

Under the Tier 1 post-study work visas graduates were allowed to stay in the UK and look for work without a job offer, or sponsorship from an employer, for two years. Once this is revoked in April, graduates will have to apply for Tier 2 General visas as skilled workers. This requires a job offer from a sponsor employer.

This will introduce much greater difficulty for graduates trying to obtain work in the UK. There will now be salary thresholds, and occupation demand requirements, to meet. Employers offering the jobs will have to have sponsor licences.

It’s Friday … and that can only mean one thing …

All the headlines in Immigration and Employment, the Best of our Blog, and our favourite stories from the fringes.

Headlines

Making rude comments about your employer online might get you the sack, and that won’t be unfair dismissal.

The High Court has ruled that people who miss the deadline at the Employment Tribunal for bringing equal pay claims can bring breach of contract claims at the High Court instead – thus extending the time limit for bringing such claims.

Australia is introducing new fees for visa applications. They will come into effect on 1st January 2012.

The UK Border Agency is arresting suspected illegal immigrants - and fining their employers.

A former UK Border Agency employee has gone to prison for seven years for issuing ILR to people who were not entitled to it.

Best of the Blog

At home…

Monday Mouthpiece Varuna Askoolum discusses variations to student visa applications.

Nowhere like home A new report shows attitudes towards immigration improving – but people are still mistaken about where migrants are coming from.

Looking After No 1 Health and Safety regulations might be changing for the self-employed.

Detention – two cases A piece about two recent cases and the period of time the Home Secretary can detain migrants before deporting them.

…And Abroad

Wrong direction! Our piece on the Adam Smith Institute about why immigration policy is moving in the wrong direction

On the Fringe

Pooch Precedent

The George Mason University School of Law has introduced a puppy day to try to help it students cope with the stress of exams. Puppy parties were thrown to help students relax during their revision. Yale Law School used to have a similar provision whereby students could check a puppy out of the library for half an hour. The puppies were foster puppies, provided by the West Virginia shelters – as one of their volunteers said, “There’s nothing like a puppy to make someone smile.”

Mile High damages

The model Katie Price has paid an undisclosed amount of damages to her former husband Peter Andre after making allegations about his fidelity. In 2009 she accused Andre of sleeping with another woman, and said he didn’t have genuine feelings for their son. She apologised in open court today, and agreed to make a payment into their son’s trust fund.

A nursery school teacher has been given a community order after drinking a pint of whisky and then sexually assaulting a steward on an aeroplane. She was fined £1,500 and given an 11 month community order. The judge did not want to give her a greater punishment because that would have involved putting her on the sex offenders’ register, which would have ended a promising career. She has been suspended by the school.

Unions deflated in court

A group of trade unions and public pension bodies have failed in their application for judicial review. They were challenging George Osborne’s move from the RPI to CPI measure of inflation for pensions. But the Lord Justice said, “The use of RPI has in the past been merely current practice. Looked at objectively it could not properly be asserted therefore that any promise of its continued use had to be assumed.”

Modern Man

A lawyer who deals with celebrity divorce cases has been accused by a former employee of threatening to kick her baby out of her womb. Ms Van Rossum is claiming discrimination and unfair dismissal. She alleges that he made a series of rude and upsetting comments about maternity pay being given to people for “sitting on their ar*e”. He is also accused of delaying a consultation with her after she returned from maternity leave to make the redundancy process drag on after they had stopped paying her wages. In response to the allegations, Mr Tooth said, “I do sometimes lose my temper and shout at the office but I also have a sense of humour and can engage in office banter.”

The changes will generate $613 million of revenue in the next four years. The aim is to remove the cost of visa applications from the tax burden. Chris Bowen said, “The user-pays approach means that taxpayers will no longer need to subsidise visa applicants.”

The cost of a student visa will decrease by 5%, in order for the international education market in Australia to maintain competitive rates. Fees for skilled worker and business visas will rise by between 5% and 15%.

There is also going to be a new fee for dependent applicants. There is no  fee for student dependents at the moment, but all visa applicants’ dependents will now have to pay a fee.

Four groups will not be affected by the changes:

• Refugee and humanitarian visa applicants
• Citizenship applicants
• Postgraduate research students
• Australian sponsoring businesses

The original deal that was scuppered by the Court was to send back 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia and in exchange, accept 4,000 refugees over a period of 4 years. This was considered unlawful and many thought this to be the end of any kind of deal with Malaysia, especially as Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention. Gillard’s stubborn pursuit of the implementation of the Malaysia deal speaks to much broader considerations at work. Since those travelling to Australia on boats accounts for a mere 3% of the total number of migrants but it can be argued the Malaysian “solution” is probably no longer about fixing the “immigration problem” but more about political stubbornness from a Government no longer considered popular.