The UK’s immigration system must be ‘fair, consistent, legal and sustainable’, proclaimed the new Home Secretary as he presented his ‘five-point plan’ to reduce legal migration in parliament. James Cleverly billed these changes as ‘more robust action than any government’ has taken before to reduce the headline net migration figure.
They involve increasing the skilled worker earnings threshold from £26,200 to £38,700 from next spring; increasing the NHS surcharge (paid every time most migrants secure or renew their visa), from £624 to £1,035; ending the 20 per cent salary reduction for shortage occupations (as well as reforming and reducing the list); increasing the minimum salary for a family visa to £38,700; and a review of the graduate route that allows students to stay and work in the UK for two years after they have completed their studies, with no recourse to public funds, as they try to find a company to sponsor them long-term.
‘This package’, including the previously announced plan to crack down on health and social care workers bringing dependents, ‘will mean around 300,000 fewer people will come in future years than (came) to the UK last year’ said Cleverly – falling from a record high of net 745,000. But do these changes meet his own criteria?
Many of the government’s immigration announcements these past few weeks can hardly be described as ‘legal’ or ‘consistent’. Indeed the government’s Rwanda policy – the centerpiece of its agenda to crack down on undocumented migrants – was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court. This has forced the government to go back to the drawing board to address the long list of both domestic and international law that stands in the way of loading some of the most oppressed people on earth onto a plane and shipping them off to Rwanda.
Nor can today’s announcements be described as ‘consistent’. This is the third wave of Tory reforms to immigration rules since the party came to power in 2010. Cleverly’s announcements are almost a complete undoing of Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit reforms, which were designed to undo the damage Theresa May did as Home Secretary when she cracked down on non-EU migration in a bid to get numbers down.
It feels an awful lot like history repeating itself: focus is on the headline net figure (and how those numbers might impact the party electorally) which is determined to be ‘far too high’ – as voiced by Cleverly today – and ‘needs to come down’. For May and David Cameron, it was an inability to do anything about free movement from the EU that set her sights on reducing other groups as much as possible. For Cleverly and this government, it seems to be a response to their failure to tackle illegal migration.
In both cases, it’s led to a set of changes that are laser-focused on reducing the headline rate, rather than on who the UK will be deporting and rejecting and what that means for public services. It’s also likely to lead to the same consequences: a crackdown on tax contributors and vital roles in sectors like healthcare.
Cleverly all but admitted this when he noted that the increase in the NHS surcharge would bring in £1.3 billion pounds for the NHS – that’s additional to the income tax paid by migrant workers. The Johnson reforms deliberately reformed the points-based system so the vast majority of people coming to the UK were putting more into the system than they were taking out – the exception over these past few years being the refugees fleeing places like Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan, for whom there is almost universal support.
Yet listening to Cleverly’s speech in the House today, you could easily have thought in moments the Home Secretary was talking about illegal migration. ‘When our country voted to leave the EU, we also voted to take back control of our borders’, he said, as if the UK has not been setting its own immigration policy since the start of 2020. This meant it was time for a crackdown on those who would ‘try to jump the queue and exploit our immigration system’ – one that is only counting the number of legal migrants coming to the UK. The word ‘abuse’ was bandied about over and over again, which in every usage seemed to be referring to migrants using the latest system set up under the Tories to pay their fees and secure their visa to come to Britain.
What will happen now? Today’s policy announcements will almost certainly reduce the headline figure as intended – and as was already projected to happen by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which forecast last month that net migration would balance out post-pandemic, falling substantially over the next few years. But now as a point of law, rather than organic movement, fewer graduates will be able to stay and work in the UK. Tax receipts may take a hit, as people who would have been hired into jobs between £26,200 and £38,699 will no longer qualify for a work visa. Meanwhile, many more partners are likely to remain separated, as the threshold to bring over your spouse now requires a British citizen to earn more than the median salary in the UK.
Already in the Commons there is a big debate going on about shortages in health and social care, with industry bosses in the care home sector warning that today’s move risks making the homes less viable. Cleverly has insisted that while ‘an individual with a family might be dissuaded’, single foreign healthcare workers should not be put off from coming to the UK – a point that has not wholly convinced his peers that vacancies will be filled. The Home Secretary is expecting the most recent set of welfare reforms to do a lot of the heavy lifting, referencing in his announcements the changes made in the Autumn Statement to get native Britons back into work.
It feels an awful lot like history repeating itself
All this marks yet another shift in the Tory party; more evidence of what this latest iteration of Conservatism represents. Early feedback suggests the right of the party has been satiated, with The New Conservatives’s group praising the changes, showing that ‘common sense has prevailed’.
As that side of the party is embraced, the further the Tories drift from any sense of liberal thinking. The evidence of this drift was already there: hiking taxes and public spending to record highs, and ushering in a smoking ban for the next generation. But today perhaps solidifies it, as some of the only truly liberal, supply-side reforms implemented by the Tories since 2015 were expunged today.
The obsession MPs and the commentariat have with the headline figure has ushered in another crackdown that will result in many of the same, destructive outcomes we saw during May’s ‘Go Home’ vans era. Once again, countless individuals will be caught up in blanket, blunt policy designed for purely political purposes.
It’s not unthinkable that policy might change again in the coming years, when the other criteria of being ‘fair’ and ‘sustainable’ also proves hollow. In the meantime, a lot of avoidable economic and social damage is about to take place.
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