Winston Peters makes it so easy for migrant communities, especially those from India, to hate him.
Every now and then, he issues statements that rile people, although very few pause to consider if they have merit. Many of his statements do.
Consider for a moment what he said last week.
“Thousands of Indian students are coming to New Zealand to find work. Their goal is not to study. Low-skilled jobs are being taken over by foreign students desperate to earn to pay off debt. There is an absolute rush to get to New Zealand,” he said.
According to Mr Peters, there were 8300 applications to Immigration New Zealand in Mumbai in the two months before a new English language requirement was made effective.
If you were to examine Mr Peters’ statement, you would find the lurking truth.
The Vicious cycle
A substantial number of students from India have one common goal: find a job, become a permanent resident, acquire New Zealand citizenship and hop across the Tasman.
It took the John Howard government to swallow the hard pill in announcing changes to Australia’s immigration policy which now does not allow ‘automatic benefits’ for New Zealanders. And there is no exception to the rule that foreigners crossing the age of 50 years can never seek and get Australian citizenship.
It is very convenient to criticise Mr Peters but those pausing to think will find some harsh realities. Indian students are led to believe by education agents before they leave India that the simplest and fastest route to citizenship is to become a student. A number of them therefore do not even consider attending classes at educational institutions.\
Employer exploitation
Indian students are also routinely exploited (mainly by Indian employers) at work- they are overworked and underpaid and the vicious cycle of ‘you-complain-you-lose-your-job’ seems to be eternal.
Please do not get us wrong. We do need international students from India. They add value to our system and community. But it should not be at a price – especially to them.
New Class
The argument that ‘students from India poach jobs and bring down wage levels’ may lose weight as the new, expanding class of ‘educational entrepreneurs’ begin to make their impact across the world. As the Economist mentioned, foreign universities crave access to India’s booming higher-education market. Less well known is how some Indian institutions are venturing overseas.
“Atul Chauhan, Chancellor of Amity University, rattles off a list of countries, including America, Britain, China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, where his Indian outfit has so far opened operations. Amity, a non-profit which, unusually, is owned by a for-profit conglomerate, AKC Group, will open its latest foreign outpost, in Romania. Next on its list are Australia, Germany, Brazil and Japan, among others. “Our target is 50 countries in the next ten years,” Mr Chauhan said.
Global expansion
Amity’s original campus is a set of red-brick-and-glass towers, east of Delhi, whose media-studies department is better equipped than professional broadcasters’ studios nearby. It offers more than 240 courses (engineering and business dominate) and says it has 125,000 students, most at 20-plus sites in India, with roughly 10,000 now enrolled overseas.
Going gangbusters excites Amity’s bosses, though some competitors say throwing up campuses does not mean embedding a teaching culture, getting capable faculty or achieving high academic standards. “Go to too many places too quickly and you spread yourself too thin,” sniffs the boss of a rival Indian private university.
According to the Economist, Amity has had missteps.
It postponed a planned £100 million ($US152 million) investment in a London campus, after Britain tightened its visa rules, putting off many would-be foreign students.
He said that the money was used instead to pay for a 15-acre site in Dubai, where it now has 2000 students; proof, he says, that “we are here for the next 100 years.”
IIT expansion
India’s well-regarded institutes of technology, which are state-run and thus less nimble than private organisations, are so far staying at home. However, Shobha Mishra Ghosh of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), notes that there are a number of private university groups with deep pockets to expand abroad as a number of them are now doing.
The home market is expanding rapidly, by some estimates, as many as 42 million Indians may be in further or higher education by 2020. But the field is crowded: more than 35,000 colleges and 700 universities vie for students. So it makes sense also to pursue the 28 million people of Indian heritage who live abroad, and the 200,000 Indians who go overseas to study each year.
