Universities UK, which represents more than 100 higher education institutions, has warned curbing the number of non-EU skilled workers allowed to be employed in the UK would disproportionately harm the university sector, hampering institutions’ abilities to compete internationally for top talent.
UUK’s Scottish arm, Universities Scotland, says nearly 2500 staff in Scotland’s universities – about one in 10 of all academic staff in Scotland’s universities – are from outside the EU.
The fear is that the cap would “turn off the tap” of talent from the United States, China, India and Australia that has bolstered research and teaching at Scottish universities in areas such as life sciences in Dundee and Edinburgh and engineering at Heriot-Watt.
A sector insider compared the UK government’s proposals to “forbidding a Premiership football club from signing the best players”.
The Scottish Government has also criticised the proposals.
Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK, said: “The proposed cap will be difficult for universities as a significant proportion of the academic workforce is, and always has been, international. In the UK, over 10% of all our academic staff are non-EU nationals and many are working in key subject areas such as science, technology and engineering.
“We need talented people with highly specified skills to work in the sector and we’re competing for them with the US, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the EU. Without those highly skilled staff, it will damage the sector’s ability to research and teach in some key areas.”
A spokesman for the Scottish Government said it shared the sector’s concerns.
He said: “A cap on numbers is too blunt an instrument to address the complex needs of an economy growing its way out of a recession.
“In Scotland we are working hard to attract the brightest and best migrant workers to fill skills gaps and support sustainable economic growth. An arbitrary cap on numbers makes no sense and could have a negative impact on Scotland as an attractive destination for international students and staff.”
Last Monday, Home Secretary Theresa May unveiled a consultation paper on how the new annual limit on skilled migrants – due to come into force next April – might work.
The Conservatives came into power pledging to bring down the net flow of migrants down from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands.
There is currently little information on how the UK government may design and implement the cap, but it is expected to apply to migrants coming through tier one (investors, entrepreneurs, the most highly skilled) and tier two (skilled migrants taking a job that cannot be filled by a British worker) of the points-based immigration system. These tiers are used by international academic staff joining the higher education workforce in the UK.
With the spectre of job cuts looming over a number of Scottish universities, individual institutions were reluctant to comment directly on this issue. But a spokesman for Universities Scotland warned the Westminster government against making a “grave mistake”.
He said: “Universities are by their very nature international organisations. Ideas don’t belong to any one country and since the very first universities were established hundreds of years ago the movement of both students and academics across borders has been crucial to the development of human knowledge.
“Proportionately, Scottish universities are particularly international and they are the stronger for it. It would be a grave mistake if anything were to hinder the free movement of people and ideas, for the economic harm it would do to Scotland never mind anything else.”
The top five countries of origin of international academic staff in the UK are the US, China, India, Australia and Canada. At professorial level, 7.5% of staff are non-EU nationals; at senior researcher/lecturer level 14.1% are non-EU nationals; at lecturer level 26.3% are non-EU nationals and at researcher level 40.3% are non-EU nationals.
