What you will find is that those are white British students who think that going away to University means party time. International students tend to be a bit older, and get their heads down and study. If anything, they miss out on the Social life
Agree with this. Its not just about students being stereotyped a certain way though. Brits have a real problem with how they are stereotyped too. I spent some time in Australia on a working holiday visa a few years back. Most jobs came with a strap line 'working holiday visas need not apply'. What I found worse, was the jobs which were open to those on a holiday visa often refused to take on British staff - it was something I heard from Australian employers first hand - favouring everyone else who was the same visa - even if their first language was not English (this included Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Canada, The Netherlands mainly though there were other countries involved in the scheme and it wasn't all EU countries). This was because the British were felt to be unreliable and lazy. They were thought to go to Australia to party and not to work so would go out drinking and not necessarily turn up for work. As someone who didn't fall into this category, this was deeply frustrating and I found frankly hugely embarrassing on a personal level.
In the context of the immigration debate, I find this personal experience perhaps isn't just restricted to my experience in Australia, but also seeps into Britain and adversely affects some and certainly I think comes into the thinking of others.
One of the themes repeated over and over has been the phrase 'hard working' and there does seem to be this particular perception of young people as somehow being lazy and unwilling to do certain jobs. Its a general attitude that those who are struggling aren't trying hard enough.
Of course its not that simple, but this attitude I do think drove the Brexit vote in no small part. There is a real generational divide on this, with the baby boomers not fully appreciating that the age they grew up in, gave more opportunity.
If there is opportunity then workers are motivated in the first place. At a time when there has been no real wage growth, its less about workers being lazy and more than they are demotivated and less incentivised to work harder. Cracking the whip harder won't help that. Nor will simply slamming the door in the face of immigration here.
Olenna Or you might only see that rents have gone up, the house next door is now a student let and keeps you up all night, the bus is full and you can't always get a seat, and the folk you bump into in the local shop don't seem to speak very good English so you don't think that they are genuinely here to study.
Nothing to do with local government cuts to the numbers of buses then. Its just there is more people. Obviously. (Oddly I can rarely remember being able to get a seat on the bus at university 20 years ago either).
The international students in years gone by tended to be in dedicated student accommodation whatever year they were in (British students tended to be in halls only for first year). However, the number of university owned student accommodation has declined over the last twenty years. I believe that my old university has less spaces than it did when I was there. This is a combination of old accommodation reaching the end of its life and not being able to build more due to planning issues, often including Nimbyism which fails to grasp that if student accommodation isn't built then students will still live somewhere, and much better it be in a managed block than in residential housing, and lack of available - and affordable - land.
The result being that overseas students are more likely to be in private housing now than they were, thus 'more visible' as well as there being an overall increase in numbers. Overseas students definitely are there to study more than British ones, yet are now tarred with the same brush, due to British culturally accepted and expected views.
Culturally we drink more younger, though the trend is for younger people today to drink LESS than when I was a student and when my parents were students. I can't help thinking there is a certain amount of projecting how we behaved when we were young on a new generation who are less able and don't want to do that.
There is also plenty of anti-social behaviour due to drink outside university towns, its just viewed in a different way. Its perfectly acceptable on a Friday and Saturday for someone to be piss in locals gardens after a hard week at work at a dead end job in some provisional backwater. Yet when students do it on a Tuesday, its the crime of century. And its find to behave like animals on holiday in Magala as 'its just once a year'. Except its not for the locals is it? This is acceptable anyway, because we spend all our money there and give them all jobs as a result (unlike those students who spend a fortune living here all year).
Culturally the British are far more anti-social both here and abroad yet we do not see this as a problem in any way. The standards we expect are hugely hypocritical and different for different social class and division.
We do not like looking in the mirror as a nation. There are lots of cultural issues driven by policy where WE are the problem. Not people coming here. We do not like having our own behaviour and prejudices pointed out.
Strangely, Germany which has had far more immigration has also had considerable wage growth.
Its not just Schrodinger's immigrant. Its Schrodinger's British young person.
If you are young, you are lazy and spoilt. If you are foreign you are taking all the jobs from those lazy and spoilt.
This goes DEEP into our collective identity, thinking and behaviour as a nation.
No one is really looking at it. Nothing will change ultimately post-brexit whatever Brexit is, if we don't address these exclusively BRITISH cultural problems and stereotyping.