Today, after three days of constant headlines on the matter, a disturbing parallel between the ‘immigrant crisis’ and UK research occurred to me. Not as disturbing as the content of some of those headlines you’ll understand, but familiarity with that has bred the necessary indifference you need to read them without being in a constant state of anger.

The parallel I noticed is between the perception of who we are in the UK (particularly England), versus the reality of who we are.

When emigration questions arise, we seem to portray ourselves as a beacon of hope to all citizens of the world necessarily are responding. The figures don’t back this up. The Guardian yesterday listed 10 facts about the ‘immigration crisis’ which show that in fact very few people want to come here, and those that do don’t come due to handouts, but because they speak English, as we do, and our colonial past means that there are some parts of Britain where they will feel culturally more comfortable, or they may have relatives or friends already in the country. The Guardian article states that in 2014 26,000 people sought asylum in the UK, versus 97,000 in Germany and 68,000 in France. So it seems we aren’t quite as popular as we think.

It is also true that many researchers would like to come and work in Britain. My own research group benefits from this greatly. We currently only have three UK citizens, the others are from Italy, Mexico, China, Greece, Bangladesh, Brazil, Iran and Spain. Some of them are students, paying significant fees, some of them are visitors and some of them are post-doctoral students bringing expertise from abroad and applying it in the interests of UK companies. Again we like to portray ourselves as a research-led society. Unfortunately, when it comes to investment the facts don’t bear this out. While there is a core of excellence within UK Universities, neither our industry or our government seesm much of value in investing in research. The 2015 ‘Bis Growth Dashboard’ presenation shows that the UK is behind Japan, Germany, USA, France in terms of research investment. We aren’t just behind these leading nations, but we are also behind the average for the EU 28 and the average for the OECD. estimated to have spent 1.7% of In 2010 the UK Council for Science and Technology estimated that UK industry spends half as much on research as the industry we’d like to see as our peers (US, Japan, Germany). We like to claim that these researchers come to the UK because of the high standard of our facilities, because of the quality of our Universities. also like to portry ourselves as a beacon of quality

It seems that , because I have some serious doubts about the extent to which these views are held by our sister countries … ) and who we actually are. When the emigration question arises, it seems to me that we are portraying ourselve as some form of island paradise, where the inhabitants are enjoying the fruits of their labours. Those that wish to enter do so because we are so infected with generosity, that once they cross the threshold of our island we will be unable to resist plying the newcomers with

help ourselves are a beacon of hope for a high standard of living established lifestyleFruits that would be spoilt by those that didn’t particpate in their creation It seems to me that our perception is that we are some form of island paradise where

In research we seem to have a similar national misconception. The quality of our research