SIR Keir Starmer is certainly talking a tough game on migration. And at first glance his package of measures seems to back that up.
But will the PM really be able to succeed where so many of his predecessors have failed and end decades of near-unfettered arrivals?
Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Downing Street announces the proposals contained in the Government’s Immigration White Paper[/caption]
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper listens to the immigration speech by Sir Keir Starmer alongside Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds[/caption]
The sight of a British premier standing in Downing Street making a big promise to rein in immigration will not be unfamiliar to voters.
Sir Keir insists that this time will be different, and that he has a “comprehensive” plan to see it through.
This flagship Immigration White Paper includes:
- Ten-Year Wait for UK citizenship: Foreigners must now live here for a decade before they can call Britain home.
- Pay In, Get In: Those who graft and pay taxes could jump the queue for residency rights. Public service workers and top-skilled pros to be fast-tracked.
- Speak English or Stay Out: Language test bar raised across all immigration routes
- No Degree? No Deal: Migrants will require a uni degree to gain a skilled worker visa.
- Skills Shortage Jobs No Longer a Shortcut: Loopholes shut. Firms can’t just cry ‘skills gap’ to bring in cheap labour.
- Care Jobs Closed to Foreigners: Overseas hiring banned in the care sector. Roles must go to Brits first.
- Digital IDs For All: Every foreign citizen will need official digital ID to stay in the country.
- Criminals Face the Boot: Foreign crooks hiding behind “family rights” to dodge deportation will be kicked out of the country
The million-dollar question is – having staked his political reputation on a big cut – will it work?
Luckily for Sir Keir, net migration is almost guaranteed to come down anyway, and would have done even without the measures announced today.
The figure hit a record 906,000 in 2023 and 728,000 last year, and is projected to fall every year.
Visa curbs implemented by the Tories were already due to see the number settle at around 300,000 by the end of the decade.
But for many that is not enough.
Today, the PM insisted his new measures will make a huge difference in bringing down numbers.
New, stricter English language requirements will be introduced for migrants and their adult dependents.
Skilled workers will now need to meet a higher B2 level under the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
Meanwhile, adult dependants must start at A1 (Basic User) and progress to A2 for visa extensions, eventually reaching B2 for settlement.
The Home Office thinks this will improve integration prospects and ensure progression over time.
The PM is also staking getting a grip on migration through employing digital ID systems.
New eVisas will provide real-time access to a person’s immigration status and enable migrants to prove their right to work and live in the UK to landlords and employers.
The Home Office will harness advanced tech including artificial intelligence, facial recognition and age assessments to gather data on who is entering and leaving the country.
On deportations, the process for kicking out criminals will be “streamlined” to speed up removals.
Minister pledge they will “take targeted action against recent arrivals” who commit crimes, aiming to prevent repeat offending.
Efforts will be focused on simplifying deportation rules and removing legal and diplomatic barriers to ensure the process if speedy.
For every international student coming to study in Britain, a 6 per cent levy will be slapped on the university taking them in.
The Tories say net migration should be “substantially lower”, while Nigel Farage is pledging net zero migration.
Responding to the white paper, Mr Farage said: “This government will not do what it takes to control our borders.
“Only Reform UK will leave the ECHR and deport illegal migrants.”
Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: “Labour won’t set a migration target because they know they’d blow it.
“When it comes to immigration, Starmer doesn’t back workers, he backs down.”
Key proposals in the immigration white paper
- No More Automatic Citizenship: Migrants will now need to spend 10 years in the UK before applying to stay, scrapping the five-year rule. Key workers like nurses, doctors, and engineers could still be fast-tracked.
- Tougher English Requirements: All migrants, including their adult dependents, will need to prove a higher standard of English across every immigration route.
- Care Worker Crackdown: International recruitment of care workers will end, with the Home Office claiming rogue providers brought in 40,000 staff.
- Foreign Criminals Face the Boot: The Home Office will now be alerted to all offences committed by foreign nationals, not just those leading to prison. Wider powers to deport and cancel visas are coming.
- No More Loopholes: Changes to how the European Convention on Human Rights is interpreted aim to slash “exceptional circumstances” claims over family life.
- Higher Costs for Migrant Workers: Firms sponsoring migrant employees will see the immigration skills charge soar by 32 per cent.
- Back to Basics for Work Visas: Skills thresholds for work visas will return to degree level, reversing a rise in lower-skilled visas issued between 2021 and 2024.
- Strict Rules for Shortages: Lower-skilled occupations will get strictly time-limited access to the immigration system, only if there’s evidence of labour shortages.
- Limited Refugee Access: A small group of refugees recognised by the UN will be able to apply for jobs through existing skilled-worker routes.
- Crackdown on Foreign Students: Colleges and universities will face stricter tests for offering places to overseas students.
- Graduates Get Less Time: Foreign graduates will see their post-study stay cut from two years to 18 months.
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…
