Read the UK government's immigration white paper, published yesterday. They are trying to make hiring of foreign workers even for the sectors you mention as hard as possible. A UK employer has to pay what is called an 'Immigration Skills Charge' to hire foreigners. That ISC has not been increased since 2017, but now they propose increasing it by 32%. They are also planning to penalise employers who, according to them, rely too much on foreign recruitment. That is especially the case in the sectors you mention. IT, construction and engineering are the ones they are focussing on to reduce net migration. They are even proposing to impose taxes on the universities (at a rate of 6% of international student fees), and they plan to redirect the money gained out of those taxes into initiatives for encouraging more British students to go to university. All this in combination with a reduction of six months to the amount of time an international student can stay in the UK on a Graduate Route (often known as PSW) Visa - earlier, it was 24 months, now it is 18.

Understand this: the net migration numbers (the difference between the number of people coming in and going out of the UK) recently have been far, far too high. It was 906000 in 2023, and 728000 in 2024 (after the previous government tightened norms). The new Labour administration continued with those tightened norms and the prediction was that those themselves would bring the numbers down to something like 340000 or something. The reforms published yesterday are forecasted to bring net migration to the UK down to 240000 by around 2027, at which rate it is kind of expected to become stable. At the same time, just under 1m British adults are 'economically inactive', meaning that they are not in employment, education or training. This is partly because of how the UK social security system works. At the same time, it is because of other factors. The UK government has increased taxes on businesses. They have a thing called National Insurance, which is basically a contribution scheme towards pensions. A working person contributes some money towards it, and so do their employers (these amounts contributed are known as National Insurance Contributions (NICs)). The government has increased the amount of NIC that an employer has to contribute by a not insignificant amount, which disinsentivises new hiring. They are also in the process of introducing new employment rights legislation, which would give new employees right to sickpay from day 1, among other things. In other words, another additional significant cost on businesses. Therefore, the jobs market is bad for everyone, not just foreigners. At the same time, a bad job market for the British means a disproportionately bad one for foreigners.

She is right. For most of the kinds of people from India who usually go there, it is not really the right place at this time. Unless you are willing to come for the undergraduate studies, or put in the time for a master's and PhD, don't come to the UK with any high expectation of getting a job. Sure, you can theoretically still play your cards right and be successful in that, even with only a master's, but that is getting harder by the day. Honestly, for her field, I am really astonished that she got a job at all. There are so many people in the UK with those kinds of degrees, that she must have had something quite unique to be able to land a job here.

Surely doctors, engineers and scientists are still in demand, especially on the research side? Same for US?

https://www.ndtv.com/feature/dont-come-indian-woman-warns-students-about-pursuing-masters-in-uk-8401894#pfrom=home-ndtv_lateststories