UK Prime Minister to foreign students: go back home

British Prime Minister David Cameron has called on immigrants in his country to embrace British values, learn the language and urged foreign students to return home after completing their studies.

In a speech prepared for delivery today at a Conservative Party conference, Cameron said his government was implementing a variety of measures to control immigration in line with election promises he made last year.

The 44-year-old Cameron said immigrants’ inability and unwillingness to learn the English language “has created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness in some neighbourhoods.”

Between 1997 and 2009, 2.2 million more people migrated to Britain than left the country to live abroad, and Cameron is aiming to reduce the figures to the 1980s levels when Margaret Thatcher’s administration implemented strict controls.

Cameron blamed foreign students for the current surge in British-bound migration, saying “a lot of those students bring people with them to this country … husbands, wives, children. Indeed, last year, 32,000 visas were issued to the dependents of students.”

From now onwards, he said, only post-graduate students can bring dependants. “And we're making sure that if people come over here to study, they should be studying not working … and that when they've finished their studies, they go home unless they are offered a graduate-level skilled job, with a minimum salary.”

Whilst answering to the concerns of anti-immigration groupings within the Conservative Party and the broader right-wing movement, the speech has predictably been slammed as being “very unwise” by the Liberal Democrats, who are in a power-sharing government with Cameron’s Conservative Party.

Speaking to the BBC, Liberal Democrats' Vincent Cable, who serves as the coalition government’s Business Secretary, said the prime minister’s speech contained aims that were not part of the coalition agreement between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats.

The speech also “risked inflaming extremism" and is “very unwise”, said Cable, adding that immigration from outside Europe “is crucial to British recovery and growth".