Sir Keir Starmer wants you to believe he’s serious about bringing immigration down. Faced with the political threat of Reform and growing anger over record levels of both illegal and legal migration, Labour has finally begun to talk the talk. But ‘Restoring Control Over the Immigration System’, the white paper in which the government details its borders crackdown, is flawed.
The threat to the border doesn’t always arrive in rubber dinghies. Sometimes it comes buried on page 76 of a white paper
For all the tough-sounding language about control and fairness, the document is shot through with proposals that quietly liberalise the system and could incentivise more illegal immigration. Here are three of the most consequential changes, each of them likely to make it harder, not easier, to bring migration down.
1. A new bereaved parent route
The white paper introduces a new immigration route for bereaved parents, specifically, those who have lost a child while living in the UK without settled status.
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