UK Home Secretary has said he wants to see an end to tough rules on overseas students being allowed to stay in the UK to work, arguing for what he called a more "flexible, sensible attitude" to immigration.
"If they're coming here, studying in our great universities, if they want to work afterwards we should make it easier for them to stay and work, and not say, you've got to go back home, just for the sake of it. We need a more positive attitude to this. I think the country would welcome this."
"It makes no sense to send some of the brightest and most enterprising people in the world straight home after their time here."
"I've already said I would not have the target," he said. "I just think it's nonsense to set a target that you're never going to meet. Also it should be led by what you think the country needs, and that changes over time as well."
He spoke more broadly about the benefits of immigration, and how he felt that the control over numbers following Brexit could change public attitudes.
"I think it's been fantastic for Britain. I think we'd be a much worse society today - I don't just mean economically, but I include that, and culturally, every way - if we didn't have the approach to immigration we've had of successive governments over the last few decades."
He added: "But I don't think it's about being obsessed about the overall numbers, as long as the number is controlled by your own government, about what you feel it needs."