Treat foreign students as an export market, not an immigration threat

Here’s your starter for ten: what is Australia’s third largest export industry, behind coal and iron ore? The answer is education, which contributes the equivalent of around £11 billion a year in foreign exchange earnings, mostly fees from Asian students in Australian colleges. Even during the great commodity boom, education earnings have grown faster than exports as a whole. All those foreign students are also a boost to tourism, because families like to visit; and a diaspora of two million graduates of Australian institutions is a benefit to trade and diplomacy as well as a guarantee that the education income stream is unlikely to run dry for many years to come.

The UK has three times the population of Australia and 1.7 times the economic output. Our education export earnings for 2008-9, according to research commissioned by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, were £14 billion. Not bad, but you might still conclude that this is a sector in which we’re underperforming, despite obvious historic advantages.