This is an unsettling time to be a migrant worker in the UK. I am one, here on a skilled worker visa. The Labour government’s “A fairer pathway to settlement” proposal is performative policymaking, arising from troubling nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment. It is designed to make visa-holding migrant workers’ lives more cumbersome and expensive, delaying time to indefinite leave to remain as well as introducing unnecessary qualification criteria, which then impair integration.
Although we cannot vote for the government, visa-holding migrant workers are a constituency whose needs and contributions matter. We are now being used to appease the right, allowing the Labour government to create a (false) picture that they are substantively addressing migration challenges. In other words, we are treated as a convenient political football.
