But while every recent government understood the political advantages of pledging to reduce immigration, none have actually managed to do it. This mismatch between the rhetoric and the reality is one of the main reasons why trust in Westminster politics is at an all-time low.
If the politics behind the immigration crackdown makes sense, what about the substance? There is much in Labour’s plan to commend. The focus on integration, in particular, is long overdue.
But at the core of Labour’s plan is a fundamental flaw – one that could amount to another enormous act of British self-sabotage. The Government is cracking down on people coming to the UK to do what Whitehall wonks deem, often wrongly, to be low-skilled jobs, before any plans are in place to replace them. That is a potential disaster in the making.
There is just one, very large problem: who will do the jobs instead? Ministers claim that their plan to cut the number of low-skilled worker visas and completely end the hiring of foreign care workers will force employers to train more British workers instead. The suggestion is that people coming to the UK to look after our sick and care for our elderly are somehow stopping British workers from doing so.
If they did, those jobs would already be over-subscribed. Instead, despite a massive influx of foreign workers, there remain 131,000 vacant jobs in social care and 40,000 in construction. That they are not being filled is proof that the Government’s assumptions are wrong: there are already plenty of jobs in those sectors like care for British people who want them. The problem is that not enough do.
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Quite how care agencies only just making a profit, or councils already facing impending bankruptcy, are going to find the money to give their workers a hefty pay rise is a detail that ministers do not seem to have bothered to concern themselves with. Instead, they are making matters even worse by refusing to exempt social care from their national insurance hike, as they were being loudly urged to do.
Even if we could find unemployed Brits to fill all the jobs currently being done by migrant workers, would we really want to? I would much rather my elderly or disabled relatives were cared for by a trained, experienced and skilled foreign carer than an unemployed graduate who had no interest in the job.
We know all this, instinctively. We see how reliant our health and care sectors are on people who weren’t born in Britain. It’s why most people tells pollsters that they while they want immigration to come down, they do not think this should apply to care workers. Polling for the Migration Observatory found that just 12 per cent of people think it should be made harder for care workers to come to Britain. Fifty-four per cent think it should be made easier.
These are the trade-offs that politicians must have the courage to be honest about. Cutting immigration is a legitimate aim. But doing so at any price, even if it harms public services and makes people’s lives worse, is not what voters want. The Government may be about to do it anyway.
Ben Kentish presents his LBC show from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and is a former Westminster editor
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