SIR Keir Starmer is unveiling a sweeping immigration overhaul — vowing to “finally take back control of our borders” and close loopholes that let foreign offenders dodge deportation.
The Prime Minister said the system will be “controlled, selective and fair” as he set out a major shake-up aimed at cutting legal migration and restoring confidence after Reform UK’s surge at the local elections.
Prime Minister Sir Keir StarmerGetty AlamyHome Secretary Yvette Cooper[/caption]Speaking from Downing Street, he said: “We will deliver what you’ve asked for time and again.
And we will take back control of our borders.
And let me tell you why, because I know on a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics, targeting these voters…
“No, I’m doing this because it is right, because it is fair and because it is what I believe in.”
The PM said the UK needed strict and understandable rules on immigration or risk “becoming an island of strangers”.
He said the pre-existing immigration system was “almost designed to permit abuse” and had to change.
“I believe we need to reduce immigration significantly,” he added.
Migrants will now have to spend up to ten years in the UK before applying for citizenship.
English language tests will be toughened across all visa routes, and for the first time, family members of migrants will also need to speak the language and show a “commitment to integration”.
The care worker visa will be closed to new overseas recruits — a route ministers blame for contributing to record levels of migration.
Only “high-contributing” migrants, such as doctors and nurses, will be eligible for fast-tracked settlement.
Sir Keir will also promise to stop foreign criminals using human rights laws to block deportation.
He told The Sun last night: “If you break British law, you give up your right to be here.”
He added: “Sun readers are right to wonder what’s going on when migrants with no right to be in the UK are allowed to arrive and stay, based on spurious reading of the immigration rules.
“We’re going to get a grip. As part of the Immigration White Paper that I will say more on today, we will make sure it is parliament that makes the rules on immigration.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper yesterday also confirmed the care visa route would be shut, telling Sky News: “We will be closing the care worker visa for overseas recruitment.”
The Sun says
ALL of a sudden, the PM and Home Secretary are talking tough on immigration.
Stricter language tests, degree-level qualifications for skilled jobs, a clampdown on human rights loopholes and an end to visas for foreign care workers.
It could be that the Government has had a remarkable conversion and now accepts that people’s concerns about the impact of mass migration on public services and our way of life are valid.
Yet the facts suggest otherwise.
Sir Keir Starmer’s first act as PM was to bin the Rwanda scheme — the only credible deterrent to the Channel boats — and his woolly promises to “smash the smuggling gangs” weren’t convincing.
So isn’t it much more likely that it’s Reform’s surge in the polls that has changed his mind?
People are fed up with being ignored.
They want Labour to stay the course — not just pay lip service to the Reform surge, then quickly revert to type.
So today’s white paper laying out the plans to slash net migration is a pivotal moment.
Nigel Farage warns it is doomed to fail, saying the measures are “tinkering around the edges”.
They also run contrary to Labour’s every instinct for open borders, so will they even be seriously enforced?
Sir Keir should know that voters will be watching — and any back-sliding will be punished heavily at the next election.
She said cutting “lower-skilled” routes could reduce visas by up to 50,000 this year.
And speaking to the BBC, she added: “We will allow them to continue to extend visas and also to recruit from more than 10,000 people who came on a care worker visa, where the sponsorship visa was cancelled.”
The plans come after net migration stood at 728,000 in the year to mid-2024, with most arrivals entering legally through work, study or family routes.
Despite the crackdown, critics said Labour was not going far enough.
The Tories accused Labour of pinching their plans, with Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp saying: “Starmer is the same man who wrote letters protesting against deporting dangerous foreign criminals and has overseen the worst ever start to a year for illegal immigrants crossing the channel.
“The idea that Starmer is tough on immigration is a joke.”
The Reform party added: “Labour’s announcement today merely tinkers around the edges. This plan is doomed to fail.”
Finally, a Labour leader gets migrant problem. What about the rest of the party?
By HARRY COLE, Political Editor
THE Home Secretary spent the back end of last week personally writing a fiery foreword to help today’s 80-page immigration clampdown plan land with a thud.
Legal migration chancers in the university and care sectors are in her sights and she is calling time on “my kids don’t like foreign chicken nugget” type excuses for criminals and illegal immigrants to dodge deportation thanks to the absurd European Convention on Human Rights.
All good stuff, if Labour can get it through the legion of wokies and hand-wringers on their own backbenches.
But it appears there is another blocker to migration reform in Yvette Cooper’s sights: Chancellor Rachel Reeves and two decades of Treasury group thing.
She certainly had something to get off her chest on the eve of publication, taking aim directly at the fairy tale belief that more foreigners is a magic pill for Britain’s economic woes;
“If that approach was right we would have seen, when we saw that soaring level of net migration, that soaring level of overseas recruitment, well surely we would have seen soaring growth alongside it and we didn’t.”
She told the BBC: “Actually what we saw was the economy flatlined because by failing to invest in UK workers that also undermines productivity, it undermines the ability to get people back into the work who are currently not working, so alongside those record highs of overseas recruitment, we also have this big increase in people just not working here in the UK. Those things are linked.”
By jove, I think she gets it.
Finally someone in this Government is willing to shoot some sacred cows of the progressive mind.
No one ever leaves the Home Office more left-wing than they entered, so like Tory Home Office minister Robert Jenrick before her; it appears Cooper has been on a bit of a journey in the last ten months.
Long may it continue, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and there are plenty of battles for the Home Secretary ahead.
I hear there has already been significant kickback from the Treasury at today’s Immigration White Paper that will now go through months of consultation and yabber before being legislated over.
A good opening salvo from Cooper, but one already attempted to be strangled at birth by the Treasury still addicted to the sugar rush of cheap imported workers as they battle to breathe life into already anaemic growth forecasts for the coming years.
And the Treasury has other plans for growth too, namely unpicking Brexit in return for better access to European markets.
Yesterday the Home Sec was talking in terms of tens of thousands for what these new plans could do to reduce legal migration in the coming year or so… just as the Government finally admitted – after months of lying – that they will offer up similar numbers to the European Union.
In a bid to unblock the PM and Chancellor’s quest for a Brexit reset and a new defence and security deal with the bloc, free movement is back on the table.
Ever since the EU’s request for a Youth Mobility Scheme for the under 40s were revealed last August the Government had insisted they had “no plans” to engage with such a proposal.
A return of free movement for the under-40s is the basic gist, allowing younger Europeans to once again pour into the UK to study and work.
Again and again ministers and spinners insisted on the record there were “no plans” for such a scheme, yet all the while they were secretly and misleadingly building negotiations with Brussels around accepting it.
Now they tell us “a smart, controlled youth mobility scheme would of course have benefits for our young people”.
The plan all along.
Leaving aside the rampant dishonesty, what is this going to do for legal migration figures?
What is the point in taking away with one hand, only to dish out tens of thousands more visas with the other?
No10 insiders insist that such a scheme will be tightly capped, but we all know the British state is pretty useless at keeping a track of this stuff.
Remember when we were told there were only three million EU citizens in the UK during Brexit, only for closer to SIX MILLION to apply to stay after the Leave vote.
The bungling Office of National Statistics has no idea how many foreigners are really here, dramatically scaling up their predictions last year after finding an extra 166,000 migrants down the back of the sofa.
Or what of the news that the bill for asylum hotels was actually not the £4.5 billion projected, but was some £10 billion more?
The British state is crap at counting this stuff, so be very wary of promises of strict oversight, control or watchful eyes and caps.
Yvette Cooper may be on the right path, but her biggest fights are still to come.
If we are simply going to cave to Brussels and let tens of thousands of Europeans back into the country, this must come at the price of even tighter restrictions on visas elsewhere.
Anything less than that renders today’s migration “clampdown” purely performative.
Someone better tell the Treasury though…
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