Legal luminary chastises UK visa policy

A questionable new visa scheme launched in the United Kingdom (UK) recently, that seeks to attract the best graduates from the top 50 non-UK universities around the world, continues to come under fire for its glaring exclusion of Caribbean, Latin American and African universities from the group that is being targeted for fast-track placement to live and work in the United Kingdom.

Dr Kamille Adair Morgan, a Jamaican Rhodes Scholar who recently graduated from the University of Oxford with a PhD in law and who topped her class in international economic law, has joined a growing chorus of critics who have lambasted the policy for excluding graduates of colour from the UK visa opportunity.

“It is unfortunate that the UK’s newly launched ‘high potential individual’ visa is restricted to graduates from universities from the top 50 global rankings only. The policy does not account for those brown and black graduates who may have phenomenal potential, but who are products of universities in Third World countries which do not have the resources to compete for top 50 global rankings. Placement on the list factors metrics such as research output and impact, and the ability of the schools to attract international staff, students and massive funding,” Adair Morgan stated.

FALLING SHORT

The visa scheme will allow eligible graduates from designated colleges and universities around the world and their dependents to relocate to the UK without a prior job offer. It is hoped that this Brexit-era expedited route will bring some of the brightest and best intellectual talent to the UK. But Adair Morgan, who is currently working at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, as the University of Oxford’s nominated candidate for the court’s Judicial Fellowship Programme, has described the UK scheme as “falling short”.

“Graduates from the developing world continue to face monumental challenges in seeking to access the best opportunities, and the UK’s new policy is just another example,” Adair Morgan lamented. She pointed out in an interview with The Gleaner that it is inconceivably difficult for students from the developing world to attend the world’s best universities to begin with, due to astonishingly high fees and very few available scholarships.

“This simply means that many brilliant students will never meet the eligibility criteria for the high potential individual visa,” she complained.

The strategy was also criticised by Dr Donovan Stanberry, registrar at The University of The West Indies, for its exclusion of The UWI despite the university’s dazzling global accomplishments in several key areas of development. Stanberry also pointed out that The UWI is ranked by the Times Higher Education among the top 1.5 per cent of universities in the world.

“During my time at the University of Oxford, currently ranked No. 1 on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, many of those who were graduating at the top of the class and doing groundbreaking research were students who previously studied in Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. There isn’t one university from these regions on the current list of eligible institutions. If the UK is interested in attracting the ‘best and brightest’ as the UK chancellor stated, the policy certainly falls short,” Adair Morgan concluded.

Adair Morgan is a graduate of Ardenne High School in Kingston and she currently serves as associate legal officer to Judge Patrick Robinson, prominent Jamaican jurist at the International Court of Justice.

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