It hasn’t taken long for the backtracking to get under way. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced this week that the Government would not, in fact, be raising the income threshold for migrants to bring a spouse into the country for fear that it might “damage the economy”.
So, instead of immigrants being required to earn £38,700 before they can bring their family here, the level remains at £29,000 a year. That at least is an improvement on the Tories’ previous threshold of £18,500, if you can dignify a basic income as a threshold. But even the present £29,000 is just below the average income in the UK and well below the average in London.
In other words, one of the very few effective means of curbing the present astonishing net migration levels — 685,000 last year — has now been abandoned, at least, for now. Taken together with scrapping the threat of deportation for illegal migrants arriving by boat, it rather looks as if Labour is going to be at least as rubbish as the Tories in bringing down migration numbers.
During the election campaign there were two planks to Labour’s plans; one was Sir Keir Starmer’s boast that he, personally, took down terrorist gangs as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, so he’d have no trouble seeing off people traffickers. In fact, there was a brief period when it appeared the threat of being flown to Rwanda sent a number of asylum-seekers to Ireland (the Irish government was far from pleased) but now the numbers are up again to more than 16,000 this year.
It rather looks as if Labour is going to be at least as rubbish as the Tories in bringing down migration
The other plank was to ensure that British workers were trained in the skills for which people are now being brought into the country: that is, the far greater problem of legal migration. These migrants are not, as you’d suppose, physicists at the Francis Crick Institute or opera singers; nope, they’re mostly care assistants and medical staff including nurses. Those, folks, are jobs for which people living here are perfectly equipped to do... with training.
To put it another way, of the 660,000 increase in non-EU immigration that took place between 2019 and 2023, almost half resulted from people arriving for work purposes (21 per cent) — mostly health and care work — and their dependants (27 per cent). Health and care workers received access to the immigration system in February 2022, a disastrous mistake. Note that the number of dependants exceeds the number of migrants — as is natural with families. International students and their dependants accounted for a further 39 per cent of the increase in non-EU immigration.
There are a few short-term levers the Government has to control these astonishing figures; one is the blunt instrument of wages. And the Home Secretary has just abandoned it, in the interests of the economy if not of society.
She’s looking to the Migration Advisory Committee for recommendations on numbers. But kicking this crucial question into the long grass of a committee of experts isn’t what the Government should be doing. It should know its own mind; from the election it certainly knows what voters think.
The obvious point is that immigration itself carries a cost. The people coming in to fill gaps in the care sector, who are no doubt mostly excellent individuals, have needs of their own. They need housing for one thing, and one reason why Angela Rayner is riding roughshod over local feelings and environmental concerns (Dig First is her policy) is to build enough houses for a population swelled by immigration; housing demand is a symptom of rising numbers. You can’t deal with housing without addressing migration.
The academic and campaigner Matthew Goodwin doesn’t believe that immigration numbers are actually needed to bolster the economy. “Over the last five years,” he wrote before the election, “about two million people from outside Europe arrived in Britain through net migration. But how many do you think came for work? Just 15 per cent...The rest entered Britain as the relatives of workers, international students, the relatives of these students, or as asylum-seekers and refugees.”
The Government has an unimpressive mandate in terms of votes: just over one in three people voted Labour. It should therefore, I’d say, on vexed and contentious issues like this take pains to consider popular sentiment.
Why bring in social care workers from outside Europe? Why not spend some of the money that Rachel Reeves is merrily chucking the way of hospital doctors at the sector that needs a big increase in funding: social care. If care workers were trained and paid more, there would be more of them. We wouldn’t need to bring in people from the other side of the world to look after old people in their own homes.
Yvette Cooper has asked the Migration Advisory Committee to look at the skills shortage list of occupations for which employers can bring in people from abroad to fill vacancies: it includes, weirdly, engineering and IT. Does anyone really think there aren’t enough IT specialists here already?
Labour has the inestimable advantage on immigration that the Tories botched things so badly it can only look good by comparison. But this won’t work long term. It must bring numbers down, not duck the issue as it’s doing now.
