Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

As I said at the start of the debate in introducing new clause 1, it is right and proper that Members should speak to the new clause and their assorted amendments specifically in relation to education, and that I should then respond. I do not seek to detain the House, but clearly many serious points have been made. In passing, those who observe our debate from afar would think that there was an unrelenting attack on the whole notion or existence of overseas students in this country. I caution Members to be slightly more temperate in their language. We are not about to lose every overseas student application as a result of the Bill, and those who claim that are highly misinformed. My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), who has just bothered to join us, talked about the huge changes that would be made in regulations governing overseas student applications. That is not in this Bill. My hon. Friend should either go and find the Bill that it is in, or desist from misinformed and ill-informed comment. This is a serious subject. No one demurs, in substance, from the notion of what overseas students add to our broader higher education community. No one in Committee, where we engaged in highly informed debate, said anything other than that, and for all the reasons given by the hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) we continue to welcome and positively encourage overseas students. No one at a reception that I attended—