Don Flynn examines Starmer’s Immigration White Paper finding it concedes the ground to Reform UK
There was a shocked response from many at the centre-left end of the political spectrum to the publication in late May of the white paper Restoring Control over the Immigration System. In presenting it to the public, Starmer appeared to reveal a dog-whistling passive racist language to characterise the movement of people into Britain underway since the end of the Second World War.
The Guardian condemned it for using “the kind of language that generated criticism from Labour politicians when used by the Reform UK leader more than a decade ago.” The white paper’s narrative that migration has made the UK poorer is described as a challenge to “a central tenet of Labour’s economic policies for decades: that immigration is broadly good because it helps the economy to grow.”
The New Statesman saw it as further evidence of this “Labour government’s willingness to take radical steps many Conservatives supported but considered impossible when they were in office”, such as scrapping NHS England and slashing the international aid budget to bolster defence spending.
Opinions across the commentariat identified the purpose of the white paper as reflecting Labour’s need to respond to the challenge of Reform UK, made critical by its success in the recent local authority elections. In searching for a message that will appeal to the insurgent party’s new voters, Keir Starmer has stumbled on the spurious assertion, made in his introduction to the white paper, that Britain is becoming “an island of strangers”. All of this is happening, he claims, because of “a one-nation experiment in open borders”.
Not just rhetoric – the white paper concedes intellectual ground
As much as these statements were a mirror reflection of positions taken by right wing politicians and journalists for decades, what the white paper really shows is the extent to which the new Labour position has now placed itself firmly on the strand of intellectual territory which sees immigration as nothing less than a disaster for the nation.
Nothing remains in the stance now taken by Starmer and co that allows the migrations of previous decades to be celebrated for their contribution to the Britain of today. As recently as 2018, Labour spokespeople were loudly proclaiming migrants of the Windrush generation as a people who came to Britain in its time of need to help build its NHS and keep vital industries fully staffed. Now, this has been ditched by claims that migration is responsible for the skills crisis because it has allowed supposedly cheap, unskilled labour to substitute for investment in capital and training.
The “island of strangers” comment has been the subject of much angry comment based on comparisons with similar sentiments expressed in Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in Wolverhampton in 1968. The evidence is mounting of a chronically unhappy British population, afflicted by mental and physical illness, often living isolated lives and enduring economic hardship, but it is unconscionable that the blame for this should be directed at the immigrants who have been settling here for generations.
When profiles of “left-behind” Britain are sketched out, they typically involve towns and cities where industry and commerce folded back in the 1980s and 90s and where young people left in droves in search of better job opportunities in the areas of remaining relative prosperity, usually confined to the south-east of England. Migrants did come to work and settle in the “Red Wall” towns most afflicted by decline, but did so to work in professional-level jobs in the health and educational services or to fill the sectors which had become depleted because of abandonment by native workers who were hunting better prospects.
The migration-negative rhetoric of the early sections of the white paper frames specific proposals which are intended to drive down the numbers of newcomers. Being so focused on disparaging migrant contributions the white paper says nothing about the fact that, prior to the recession of that followed the 2008 crash, migration had featured as a strong component of the economic growth – on average accounting for 20 per cent of GDP growth up until the point when the banking system collapsed.
Migration – a port in a storm that was wrecking the British economy
Even after the onset of the recession, when the British economy settled into its long period of stagnation, migration functioned as the sort of port to which all ships turn when a storm is brewing. The hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, proliferating in areas like social care, construction, food production, warehousing and hospitality, many getting by on low levels of profitability, were able to cling onto a precarious existence because of access to the skills migrants brought with them. The white paper suggests that without this resource, employers would have responded to labour shortages by heavier investment in job-saving new technologies and apprenticeships and training programmes. But given the failure of British capitalism to attract investment for most of the past twenty years, the more likely outcome in the absence of the recruitment of willing migrant workers would have been massive business failure and a spike in unemployment levels.
The white paper talks as if the one barrier to improving vocational training has been the presence of migrants and, if their numbers can now be driven down, we can hope to see entrepreneurial employers swinging into action. This thinking informs one of the paper’s most eye-catching proposals, which is the immediate curtailment of visas for social care jobs. With vacancies in this sector of 131,000, this is magical thinking in the extreme. This is a sector already starved of income because of the low fees paid to care providers by local authorities using their services. With zero chance of an improvement in rates of return on investment, the bulk of the small and medium-sized companies running care homes will continue to struggle with inadequate staffing levels and a steady erosion of care standards.
No other sector faces the outright ban which is proposed for social care, but barriers to recruitment will be raised by the new requirement of skills levels at RQF 6 (degree level qualification) from the current RQF 5 (roughly, A-level). A higher wage level is also touted for migrants, and news on what this will be is expected. This will pose challenges for employers in areas like construction, food production and processing, which already register difficulties in recruiting across all skill levels. As with social care, it is wishful thinking that ending access to migrant recruitment will transform these industries and create a utopia of apprenticeships and higher wages. The investment needed to achieve this state is dependent on the prospects for profits, and these are becoming more depressed by the wider uncertainties across the economy. A dip in the direction of recession, or at least a further prolongation of nil-growth stagnation, seems more likely than an abundance of well-paid jobs for British workers.
International students are seen as prime targets for cutbacks if they are less than the sliver at the top end who are designated as “exceptionally talented”. They make up around half of all the entrants to the UK and therefore, according to the logic of the white paper, have to be reckoned with for cutbacks in these numbers.
The white paper feels it has a lot of reasons to grumble about this group. Often searching for courses with fees less than what is charged in the top universities, a large proportion head for higher education institutions (HEIs) that are in the 600-1200 world ranking for quality. The UK has a lot of those, and they are often in unfashionable places like Northampton, Coventry or Huddersfield. That alone is enough to require a closer look at their basic compliance assessments (BCAs), which these establishments need to go through to get the licensed sponsor status, which allows them to recruit students from abroad.
The 600-1200 HEI range often markets its services to rising but still relatively impoverished middle-class families in developing countries. Their sons and daughters have already done very well in school systems where large class sizes and poor teaching resources are common, which is very much to their credit. But leaping onwards to undertake degree-level courses in countries far away from family support structures and entailing high costs is a whole other matter.
It might be thought that a sensible component of development aid would be doubling up on the education of lower-middle-class students, keen to learn but beset with problems on all sides as they struggle to achieve. Cutting them some slack, considering what might be done to build resilience, helping with the support structures that get us through hard times, all seem like good ideas, but they are anathema to this white paper.
The preference of many international students for HEIs which aren’t lumbered with the extra costs of Russell Group standards is itself a reason for suspicion on the part of the white paper. It recommends toughening up the BCA criteria and stronger mechanisms for intervening with HEIs which begin to show higher-than-desirable drop-out rates, or switching to immigration categories where work is possible. If being put on notice on a red-amber-green banding system with regard to BCA concerns doesn’t thoroughly destabilise the ability to recruit international students, then the ultimate power of curtailing a sponsor licence ought to bring at least a few of the more financially precarious universities and colleges crashing to the ground. Okay, so this might cause some harm to a HEI sector which currently depends on international students to provide £40 billion a year to run the system (and bear in mind the UK contribution is a mere £10 billion) then so be it, such is the overwhelming importance of driving down net migration figures.
Beyond cutting back on the demand side – for workers and fee-paying students – for migrants, what else can be done to deliver an immigration control system that might satisfy voters thinking of voting for Reform UK?
Doubling up on the hostile environment
Well, we can double up on making the experience of being a migrant in the UK more miserable and precarious than it is already and hope this sends back the message that people should really think twice before coming to the UK at all.
This strategy acquired notoriety during the days of the Conservative government as the hostile environment option, and the Labour white paper wants to see more of it. International students not deemed to be high enough in the added-value category will have the ban on being accompanied by immediate family maintained, as will the small numbers of migrant workers admitted in designated labour shortage schemes. The white paper notes that this measure, introduced in the final days of the Sunak government, has already had a significant chilling effect on international student numbers and earnestly hopes that this trend will continue.
What else? Well, there’s the business of moving from a temporary residence status to one of full settlement. To complete that currently takes five years for someone like a social care worker during which time they must remain in the employment of their sponsor and will normally be ineligible for the sort of welfare benefit enhancements to their household income which their fellow workers in an identical situation might be able to rely on. Also, unless they are working in a social care or health service job, they will be expected to pay an international health surcharge currently set at £1,035 for each of those five years.
For the white paper, this is not enough. It signals an intention to double this requirement to ten years before the migrant is able to acquire settled status, which is itself a precondition for qualifying for British citizenship. What this amounts to is a considerably less attractive prospect for a migrant who will find career development prospects considerably impeded by having to remain with one employer for a period of ten years when his or her colleagues would expect to move on to better-paid jobs and more prestigious ones during that span of time. If their salary, though adequate in terms of immigration requirements, was still low enough to make them eligible for a housing benefit, local government tax benefit, child benefit or low income support – all elements included in Universal Credit – then forget any relief and continue to depend on your pay check-to-pay check for subsistence. And as for the international health surcharge, as things stand, that will rise to a bill for £10,350 if you are to secure your tenuous place in the UK.
Working hard and getting less back in the way of benefits might not add up to the full monty of modern-day slavery, but having employment sectors with hundreds of thousands of people corralled by these conditions paints a grim picture of the UK labour force for anyone who stops to think about it. More so when you consider that this will be a disproportionately black ethnic minority component, with young families to support, encumbered in their early careers by employment contracts that they will come to feel as more oppressive as the years go by. But again, think about the chilling effect on the UK’s immigration statistics.
Numbers down possibly, but will Labour be thanked?
So, the white paper outlines measures that will prove onerous and unfair (and there are more included in the proposals which we haven’t discussed in this piece) for large number of workers and international students. It will probably shave off another hundred or thousand or so off the net migration statistics which have already come down from a high of 900,000 in 2022 to half of that in 2024, meaning that we might be looking at a reversion to a net positive figure in the range of maybe 200-300,000 which was the level which prevailed over the course of the Tory years from 2010 to 2020. (Maybe not though. An exodus of highly skilled US workers fleeing from Trumpian chaos or a further round of tensions and warfare in central Europe might keep the numbers at a higher level.)
Assuming Sir Keir Starmer is able to report progress in bringing down numbers to lower levels in current years, does this mean he will have shot Mr Farage’s fox? Don’t bet on it. The populist right is an industry as much as a populist current and it consists of workshops churning out mendacious fake news material that will challenge any mainstream party’s claim to making satisfactory progress. In the early 2000s, migrant solidarity campaigners had to deal with the outsized influence of groups like MigrationWatchUK and the tabloid media, who were intent on manufacturing a crisis out of what in reality were nothing more than mundane facts about refugee numbers and the new presence of Polish workers in the UK economy. But, in the absence of a coherent response from the Labour Party at the time, this was sufficient to fuel the rise of Farage, UKIP and lead to the Brexit vote in 2016.
Sensible money in the coming period will be on net immigration, still in the region of 200,000 people, with sufficient additional noise coming from the right to support a spurious claim that the real figure is actually twice, three or even ten times that number. The likelihood that the housing situation, state of the NHS and other public services will remain much as they are, together with wages still eroded by inflation and sky-high energy costs, will provided future Reform UK with all the arguments that it was the immigrants what done it, and only Nigel can be trusted to get the job finally done.
The very worst thing is that, with the sort of arguments set out in this white paper, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party will have conceded any case that might have been made that this simply isn’t so. Dangerous times indeed.