There is talk, yet again, of the UK and EU agreeing some kind of youth mobility scheme, increasing the opportunities for under-30s from the EU to work in the UK. This has been proposed repeatedly over the past couple of years, especially because of similar schemes being agreed between the UK and Canada and Australia.
In opposition, Labour was adamant that it had no interest in such a scheme, seeing it as too close to the return of free movement. But now it is in government, seeking a ‘reset’ in relations with the EU, something has to give. And it appears that a youth mobility scheme – along with the Erasmus education and sport scheme, and something on fishing – are what the EU wants.
Is there really a case for the UK making it even easier for foreigners to come here?
This could be trickier territory for Labour than the EU appreciates. Mutual migration schemes with Australia and Canada are just that – mutual. People move both ways. Canada is of similar wealth to the UK, and Australia much richer. By contrast, migration schemes with the EU have for decades been a matter of how many EU folk the UK lets in, in particular from the lower-income parts of Europe.
Is there really a case for the UK making it even easier for foreigners to come here? Was 1.4 million net immigration in 2022 and 2023 not high enough? The Tories said they were going to address that, and to be fair in the latest immigration statistics, released on Thursday, the number of visas provided to dependents of students in the year to June 2024 was down 81 per cent. So it isn’t that they did nothing whatsoever. Yet the number of people gaining British citizenship was up 37 per cent and the number of settlements granted was up 17 per cent. The total number of work visas issued is more than double the 2019 level (and it wasn’t as though immigration in 2019 was widely regarded as low). Some 1.2 million visas, altogether, were granted for work, study or family reasons (including dependants) – equivalent to about 1.7 per cent of the UK population in a single year.
There are a lot of people in the UK who would not see themselves as at all anti-immigration, including many who were very relaxed through the mid-2010s when there was great excitement at net immigration figures of 200,000 or 300,000 per year (figures that seem nugatory by current standards), who now quail at figures in the millions every couple of years. They worry how sustainable this can be, especially given the lethargy policymakers consistently display about building houses or infrastructure. They worry about what this means for our social norms or our democracy. Britons aren’t historically averse to changing their social norms or their understanding of politics, but in the past they’ve done that because they chose to change themselves, rather than because the average opinion changed through sheer weight of numbers from abroad.
In this context, is Labour really going to be able to sell relaxing the immigration rules even more? Schemes with Canada and Australia may not mean any extra net immigration into the UK. People might even go mainly the other way. But EU schemes mean yet more coming in. Can we cope, even if we wanted to?
Maybe in a decade or two, as low birth rates drive population decline across much of the rest of the world, we will look back on this era of huge immigration into the UK as clever and long-sighted, placing us strongly in geopolitical terms for the rest of the century. But we have to get from here to there. And the combination of truly large immigration volumes and infrastructure stasis, with cultural and political tensions building, is challenging to say the least.
Are we really so unhappy with our current arrangements with the EU that even more immigration is a price worth paying for changing them? We already have the most comprehensive trade deal the EU has with any non-EEA country other than Switzerland.
Starmer’s denunciation of the UK’s ‘botched deal’ with the EU is obvious politics-playing. Fair enough, I say. But it’s a risky game if he wants to play it through to the end, because the politics of where it will lead – even looser immigration rules – could prove so toxic for Labour that they will regret ever having played the game at all.
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