Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The UK government’s plan to curb legal migration was in preparation long before the breakthrough of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party in English local elections on May 1. But the language used at its launch seemed a calculated response to the nationalist-populist surge. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s talk of preventing Britain from becoming an “island of strangers” and ending a “squalid” experiment was disturbingly Farage-esque. Unlike the Reform leader, however, Starmer has to deal with the tricky trade-offs of governing, and the consequences of a clampdown that is fraught with risk.
Immigration has, it is true, boomeranged back into voters’ top three concerns after a few years when many believed Brexit would enable Britain to “take back control” of its borders. The previous Conservative government deliberately whipped it up into a political issue — as did Reform — even while allowing net legal migration to soar to an unsustainable 906,000 in the year to June 2023. Some of that was one-off factors such as refugees from Ukraine. Yet voters in many areas understandably blame spiralling housing costs or the scramble to secure a doctor’s appointment on an influx of newcomers, even if the truth is more complex.
Starmer is under pressure to take a tough stance from dozens of his own MPs who have Reform snapping at their heels. But his about-face from making the case for legal migration, with controls, to a Reform-lite narrative carries dangers. Labour projects that its steps could cut arrivals, which are already falling, by 100,000 a year, but that may not satisfy voters most animated by the issue. Some of those steps could, meanwhile, harm Labour’s central mission of fixing public services and reviving growth. There is a glaring hole, too, in the government’s white paper, which does not address the “small boat” migration that drives much anti-immigration sentiment.
There are positives in the plans. Requiring all migrants and adult dependants to learn a higher standard of English will help their integration into society, though it may not cut the numbers by much. Scrapping visas for care workers will close a route that has been plagued by abuses. Yet with the government not due to adopt plans to properly fund social care until 2028, care providers may struggle to recruit enough staff in the UK — further squeezing a beleaguered sector, and by extension the NHS.
The graduate visa route for students has been subject to abuses, too, and needs better policing. But a mooted levy on income from overseas students, albeit to be reinvested into higher education and skills, could damage a vital source of funding for universities.
The overall aim to rebalance migration away from lower-skilled workers towards higher-skilled graduates makes sense. Employers will be allowed to recruit foreign workers in sectors that face labour shortages only if they can demonstrate they are increasing recruitment and skills training among the UK workforce. Many sectors, though, lack a body that could lead a workforce strategy. And doubling the path to settlement and citizenship to 10 years — one of the longest in the developed world — unless people can “show a real and lasting contribution” is likely to push some of the most talented migrants towards other, seemingly more welcoming, destinations.
Making an economic success of these reforms will require the government to bring more of the UK’s large economically inactive population back into work, and significantly boost skills training in partnership with employers. High immigration was a symptom of skills and labour shortages, not a cause. To bring it down, Labour will have to address those causes.