President of EU-funded university warns EU citizens won't be able to afford his courses when he doubles their fees

The president of University College London (UCL) has joined Project Fear, claiming that UK universities could lose tens of millions of pounds when we leave the EU.

Professor Arthur's logic takes a bit of getting your head round so pay attention.

Universities in the UK have lots of students from the EU and EU law requires universities to treat them as if they were UK citizens. That means that in England they only have to pay the £9k university tax, £6k in Northern Ireland, £3k in Wales and nothing in Scotland rather that the international rate. It also means they have to have the same access to grants and loans. Professor Arthur says that when we leave the EU EU students might not be able to afford the international rates which can be as high as £32k a year at his university.

There are a few flaws in Professor Arthur's logic.

Whilst the university tax is limited by law for UK and EU citizens, universities are free to charge whatever they want to other international students. Here's the big flaw in his logic. If his university wants to carry on charging EU citizens £9k a year after we leave the EU they're perfectly entitled to do that. There's nothing forcing them to charge EU citizens more than they charge an English student.

In Scotland, where the taxpayer foots the bill for any Scottish or EU citizen, only 60% of students are Scots. There are thousands of EU citizens studying for free in Scottish universities, every one of them costing the taxpayers tens of thousands of pounds.

EU citizens have also failed to repay £43m of taxpayer-funded loans given to them to pay the university tax by disappearing back home when they've finished studying. However, if Professor Arthur's university or any other university in the UK wants to offer loans to EU citizens so they can afford to study at their university then there is absolutely nothing stopping them doing that. They won't have the bank of the taxpayer to subsidise them when their students do a bunk but if they're that valuable it's surely a price worth paying.

UCL have received over 100 EU Research Council grants and has participated in over 650 EU-funded projects, totalling tens of millions of pounds.

MigrationWatch claims immigration costs £22m a day

MigrationWatch UK has published a report claiming that immigration has cost the UK £22m a day between 1995 and 2001.

The MigrationWatch report uses the same data an methodology as a recent report by UCL that claimed immigration made a positive contribution to the economy but they say they have used more realistic assumptions about immigrants claiming benefits and haven't covered up some inconvenient findings that they say UCL did.

There's no doubt in my mind that immigration costs the economy money. It is inconceivable that when unemployment is so high, the contribution an immigrant worker makes to the economy is greater than the cost of providing their own services and the services and benefits paid to someone who already lives here that could have been doing that job and the cost of providing for their family as well. Whether that cost amounts to £95bn over 6 years I don't know but the more I think about it, the more plausible it sounds.

UKIP policy is to freeze economic immigration for 5 years and then introduce a points-based system to ensure that the immigrants we do allow into the country have skills we need, money to pay their bills and a house and job to go to when they arrive. This will allow people who already live here to fill the vacancies that arise during those 5 years rather than sitting at home on benefits whilst 9 out of 10 new jobs go to newly-arrived immigrants. This policy is about space, not race and would apply equally to everyone rather than discriminating against people who don't live in EU countries as current rules do. Refugees and asylum seekers would of course be unaffected by this policy as immigration and asylum are two completely different things.

It's good to finally see some open debate about the cost of immigration to our economy and to a lesser extend the impact on society. The media will of course side with UCL because criticising immigration gets you denounced as a racist by the Guardian-reading elite but it's important that people continue to put their heads above the parapet and keep the debate going.