Immigration crackdowns are like those portraits above the 10 Downing Street staircase: every prime minister has one. You would need to go back many years to find a British leader who hadn’t at some point looked down the lens of a camera, adopted an expression somewhere between pained and angry, and promised to take back control of our borders.
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.
When Sir Keir Starmer insists this time will be different, he needs it to be. Unlike his predecessors, Starmer is facing the threat of a hard-right, anti-immigration party snapping at his heels. In Reform UK, there is now a natural outlet for voters’ anger about immigration. The stakes have been raised: the success or failure of Labour’s immigration plan will play a big role in determining whether Nigel Farage ever becomes prime minister.
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.
Britain has become a country where too many communities live alongside each other but not together. It is completely reasonable to ask that people coming to live here learn English to enable them to become part of society. The Government is also making it easier to deport foreign criminals, stopping more people who have broken the law from claiming asylum and lengthening the time someone must have lived in the UK to gain the right to stay permanently. All of this makes sense.
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.
It is obvious why ministers have these workers in their sights: immigration has soared in part because Britain’s economy is so dependent on foreign labour. In England, for example, a staggering 21 per cent of all payrolled employees are non-UK nationals, and the number of low-skilled workers arriving has shot up in recent years. Stem that tide and you will succeed in cutting overall migration.
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.
Hardly. The truth that few of our leaders dare admit is that foreign workers are often doing jobs that, for all sorts of reasons, British people simply do not want to do. Young people are not spending a fortune on university degrees to fulfil their dreams of becoming care workers. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t seem to want to be bricklayers, or fruit pickers, or HGV drivers.
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.
How, then, will the Government make these jobs more attractive to British workers quickly enough to plug the holes left by their decision to stem the flow of foreign workers? Astonishingly, it seems to have no idea. Instead, ministers are absolving themselves of responsibility by demanding that individual sectors come up with “workforce strategies” explaining how they will recruit more UK workers by paying them more and improving their working conditions.
square KITTY DONALDSON Just admit it, Keir - this is all about Farage
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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.
The impact of all of this could be profound. While most of us may not be directly affected, we will all feel the reverberations. We will notice when the carers we or our loved ones rely on are no longer there, or the tradesmen we need are nowhere to be found. We will suffer when the staff coming here to keep the NHS running find that they can no longer get work visas to work in Britain. We will know it when our local pub or café or bar is forced to close because they simply cannot find enough staff.
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.
Caring is a vocation – vulnerable people have the right to be looked after by people who know what they are doing and doing it for the right reasons. Lower quality care is not a price the elderly and disabled should have to pay, just so the Government can say it has cut net migration.
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.
It is very possible that, come the next election, Starmer will be able to boast that he, unlike so many of his predecessors, has reduced immigration. But at what cost? If the overall migration numbers are down but the crisis in social care has deepened even further, and shortages in construction stop us building the homes we need, will it have really been worth it?
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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