It is perhaps no accident that Rishi Sunak has rushed out his proposal for a cap on migrant workers and their dependants the day after Nigel Farage announced that he was taking over as leader of Reform UK. But you wonder how many votes there really are in a migration cap when Farage is already out there promising to reduce net migration to zero – a new interpretation of net zero, if you like. If you don’t like migration at all, Reform UK would seem to be your obvious choice. If, on the other hand, you are offended by illegal migration while accepting the argument that employers need the right to recruit some overseas workers, then the Tory policy announced today doesn’t seem quite right, either.
A better target for the Tories would be to focus on the kind of migration that really does upset people
The problem with a migration cap is how and when do you draw the line. Do you start each year liberally handing out work visas then suddenly stop when you reach the cap – so, that if, say, the NHS desperately needs a radiographer later in the year it will be forbidden from bringing one into the country? The Conservatives used to be in favour of a points-based migration system, which doesn’t set a finite limit but that favours migrants with particular skills. Trouble is, that is the system that we are supposed to have already – the system that Boris Johnson’s government introduced after Brexit. Only it doesn’t seem to have reduced migration, as it was supposed to – on the contrary we have had record levels of net migration over the past couple of years.
The migration cap announced today applies only to work visas. It does not apply to overseas students, which have been a big factor in the recent surge in migration. Neither does it do anything to counter the abuses of the asylum system and the Human Rights Act, which are the real focus of public anger. The Conservatives are promising a separate cap on asylum-seekers, but today’s announcement does not cover it.
If you look at the raw migration figures, you rapidly reach the conclusion that no government can make much of an impact on net migration without reducing work and study visas. In the year to the end of March, 605,000 foreign nationals came to Britain to work, 562,000 to study, while 79,000 family visas were granted. There were 87,000 applications for asylum (to judge by recent years around two thirds of these will go on to be granted) and 96,000 people were admitted through ‘safe and legal (humanitarian) routes’. This would include, for example, Ukrainians granted the right to stay in Britain.
Question is, though, is it really overseas workers that are bothering the public about migration? True, any migrant short of a billionaire bringing his own private physician is going to impose some kind of burden on public services. And even billionaires – in fact especially billionaires – place pressure on the housing stock (think how many bedsits you could create out of a mansion in Holland Park). Yet overseas workers are also propping up public services, and the public knows this. People tend to be highly ambivalent about migration. They might throw up their arms in horror when they see the raw numbers, but they will take a different view when they realise that the carers looking after their mum are foreign nationals with work visas. The health and care sector, indeed, is the single biggest source of growth in migrant numbers since the pandemic.
I can’t help feeling that a better target for the Tories would be to focus on the kind of migration that really does upset people: namely economic migrants cheating the asylum system by pretending to be Christian, gay or some other ruse. In any other context – say if I posed as a church-goer to get my children into a better state school – this would be called fraud. So why doesn’t the government use that term about asylum-seekers who cheat the system, and treat fraudulent applications for what they are, sending failed applicants swiftly packing?
Worse still are the cases where convicted criminals and terrorists have used the Human Rights Act to gain the right to stay in Britain – as several Albanian gangsters have done in recent months. Why not promise to rewrite the Human Rights Act to stop this kind of abuse? Instead of getting to the bottom of these issues – which involve taking on the human rights establishment – the government is lashing out at easy targets: namely honest workers who are coming here legally. A migration cap deserves to be seen as yet one more failed piece of centralised state planning that will harm the economy without addressing what really angers voters: the failure to deal with illegal migration.
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