After the pandemic the Boris Johnson government took a fateful and disastrous decision to suppress rising inflation by massively expanding migration. It was one of the worst decisions made by a British government in my lifetime, made all the more appalling because it followed a solemn promise that Brexit would bring a tough, ‘points-based’ migration system. Instead, we now know, we got the Boriswave. A vast influx of low-skilled migrants with many dependants, who would cost the country hundreds of billions once granted residency.
In a lengthy document published yesterday, the Home Office describe the scale and disaster of what Shabana Mahmood calls ‘this extraordinary open border experiment’. It describes how an effort to fill ‘between 6,000 and 40,000’ jobs in the care system resulted in 616,000 people arriving in the UK, with over half not coming here to work but rather being dependants of those who were working, often in low-paid social care positions.
The ‘skilled worker’ route has been abused in other ways too. Its scope has been widened far beyond what most people would consider to be skilled roles which the UK can’t recruit for from the native population. Jobs eligible for skilled worker visas now include yoga teachers, podcasters, dog walkers and bingo callers. While all of those jobs no doubt require particular skills and involve hard work, with over 15 per cent of young Brits unemployed surely it would be more sensible to hire and train them.
Meanwhile the ‘graduate visa’, supposedly for retaining the ‘best and brightest’ has also been abused. From 2021 to 2023, around 532,000 student visas were issued per year, as our universities acted more like visa merchants than places of learning. These were not the best and the brightest, nor did they generally take high-paying roles in the UK after graduation. After 22 months on the graduate visa scheme, only a quarter of migrants had switched to a skilled worker visa, indicating that they had found employment. In fact, of those who switched from a graduate visa to ‘skilled worker’, 20 per cent went into the care sector.
All these people would have been entitled to ‘indefinite leave to remain’ (ILR) after five years in the UK. That would have meant between 1.3 million and 2.2 million grants of ILR between 2026 and 2030. Every person on ILR is entitled to access benefits, and so just the Boriswavers would have cost British taxpayers hundreds of billions of pounds.
Now, Shabana Mahmood has set our her solution. Subject to consultation, she is going to significantly change how ILR works. It will no longer be a pathway under which everyone is granted leave to remain after five years. Instead the concept of ‘earned settlement’ has been introduced, which ‘aims to reward those who actively support the country’s social and economic fabric’.
Fine words. What does it mean? The tests will examine ‘character’, where the ‘expectation is that you should not be able to settle with a criminal record’, and ‘integration’, ‘contribution’ and ‘residence’. People will spend shorter or longer periods before being granted residence depending on how they do against those measures, with the ‘baseline’ moved from five years to ten.
At a minimum all those being granted ILR will have no criminal convictions, be going through no current litigation, have no outstanding tax payments or other debt and receive no access to the NHS. They must be proficient in English to ‘B2 level’, roughly equivalent to an A Level in a foreign language. They must pass the ‘Life in the UK’ test, and must have earned above £12,570 per year for a minimum of three years.
Many will argue that these minimum requirements are not stringent enough, particularly the earnings requirement. Much better to raise it to around £22,000 per year, equivalent to working full-time on the minimum wage.
The baseline can then be increased, if the person has been in receipt of public funds (plus 5-10 years), arrived illegally, on a visitors visa, or overstayed a visa (plus 20 years). Again, many will challenge these tests. Why should someone who arrived illegally, or chose to break the terms of their visa ever be entitled to residency in Britain?
Meanwhile people can be granted ILR sooner, should they earn over £125,140 a year for 3 years (minus 7 years), or over £50,270 a year for 3 years (minus 5 years). There’s a sense to this. Of more concern is that idea that someone who has volunteered ‘in the community’ might be granted ILR just five years after arrival, effectively replicating the current system.
However well-intentioned, this will be open to abuse, with pro-migration NGOs and charities almost certain to hire every migrant they can find as volunteers in order to speed their journey to residency. Equally, other communities might choose to help new arrivals from their homelands by having them ‘volunteer’. We do not have a shortage of workless people in this country. Volunteering should not be a path to faster residency.
There is also the risk that the consultation will drastically water the proposals down, especially the proposed rules under which dependants might wait many years longer than the main earner in their family.
As Rob Bates of the Centre for Migration Control told me:
It is welcome news that the Boriswave [migrants] will face a delay before obtaining settled status, but this plan does nothing to tackle the 1.3 million foreign nationals already placing strain on our welfare system.
These “proposals” which, although posted as tough, are not enough to tackle the scale of the crisis we are we facing, and will inevitably be watered down following a consultation with left-wing charities, immigration lawyers and those who benefit from open borders.
Little is likely to change for low-wage migrants working in the public sector and it is laughable that the government plans to allow a five year settlement route to those who volunteer. This provision is open to abuse and will inevitably mean that thousands gain settlement far sooner simply because they agree to going litter picking every once in a while.’
Despite the justified criticisms, this is a huge step which established two significant precedents. Those currently here will have their path to residency changed (although the Home Secretary has refused to consider whether it might be sensible to cancel ILRs granted in recent years), and the process of being granted residency will no longer be automatic. It will stop the great harm of the Boriswave migrants being granted leave to remain from next year, and is the best we could ever have hoped for from a Labour home secretary, while also being a far more serious effort to address migration than anything the Tories attempted.
This won’t solve the migration crisis, and doesn’t begin to address the need to remigrate many recent arrivals, but Shabana Mahmood has made a good first step.
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