“There is abundant evidence from the experience of centre-left parties on the continent tracking in the direction of right-wing populists on this issue and it all points to a unreservedly failed strategy.”
By Don Flynn
The similarity of the language used in the recently published White Paper on immigration policy with Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech back in 1968 has made it the butt of negative comment on the part of Labour supporters who always hope for something better.
Locked into a battle with Nigel Farage to win the votes of wavering Red Wall constituencies, Labour has decided that its best option is to concede the argument that immigration is more trouble than it’s worth, and to promise native citizens that it is the party to bring the inward movement of people to a decisive end.
How far it is willing to stoop to achieve this end is spelt out in the text of the new White Paper, ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System’. The Prime Minister’s foreword revives the lament from ages past that immigration is making us an ‘island of strangers’ despite the evidence nothing of that sort is happening. The neighbourhoods of the country’s most multicultural towns and cities are better described, in sociologist Paul Gilroy’s famous analysis, as spaces of conviviality where people, by and large, manage to get along.
Yet Britain is a place of growing anxiety about the present state of things and where it all might be going in the future. Inequality and financial hardship are endemic across communities and drive the real divides between political factions. The left calls for firm action to check the deprivations inflicted by exploitive employer and rent-maximising asset owners; the right instead says we should blame the immigrants.
The White Paper makes it clear where is stands on these issues. It rests heavily on an economic analysis which is relentlessly negative about the role migrants have made to the well-being of the UK.
Starmer’s summary of its arguments pulls no punches: “Britain became a one-nation experiment in open borders,” he opines. “The damage this has done to our country is incalculable.” Public services and housing groan under the pressure. “Our economy has been distorted by perverse incentives to import workers rather than invest in our own skills.” It seems we would all be so much better off if immigrants had not come in the past to work in sectors like social care and health services, construction, food processing and hospitality.
This is an argument that chimes with the economic orthodoxy that always makes the performance of wage earners the reason by things are doing so badly wrong. Just as in the 1980s the role of trade unions in the private manufacturing sector had to be curtailed to encourage workers to be more productive so as in our present time migrants need to be removed from sectors where they are currently propping up a swathe of inefficient capitalist firms.
White Paper proposals
The White Paper promises to achieve a reduction in the employment of migrants by two means.
The first of these is to either ban overseas recruitment to the sector altogether, such as with social care work, or to make it more difficult by raising required skill and salary levels.
The second tactic is to double-up on the measures commenced by the Tories during their last year in office which made the prospective of employment in the UK much less attractive by withholding eventual settlement rights for people considered low-skilled and extending the period to gain permanent leave to remain rights from the current five to ten years for the skilled.
Add to that higher hurdles for migrant workers who want dependent members of their families to reside in the UK with them and sense of all-pervading hostility to migrants becomes complete. Yet was these measures which have done the heavy lifting in bringing net migration down from its record high of 906,000 in the year to June 2023 to 431,000 in the 12 months to December 2024.
The White Paper proposes to add reductions in the number of international students admitted to the UK to the government’s plans to bring down migration, despite the fact that the high fees paid by this group and the support they give to sustaining higher education establishments, particularly those ranking in the middle range of university standards, shows up as a positive to UK trade statistics.
More hurdles will be set up to impede overseas recruitment for institutions in 600-1,500 world ranking, less opportunities to be accompanied by family members, and a cut-back from two years to 18 months for the post-study work scheme are all in the proposals.
Are these measures likely to achieve the goals set for the White Paper? The first of these is the reduction in net migration figures and the answer is a likely yes. Ramping what has come to be called the hostile environment for migrants does work to some degree and there’s a good chance the current high will fall back to the 200,000-300,000 net positive figure which was the norm during the Conservative’s 14 years in power.
The second goal is whether it will stymie the support currently going to the unashamed anti-immigrants of the Reform UK party. There’s no reason to feel that will work out well. There is abundant evidence from the experience of centre-left parties on the continent tracking in the direction of right-wing populists on this issue and it all points to a unreservedly failed strategy. The populists claim any success in cutting back on migrant numbers as a consequence of their advocacy and promise the electorate that, with more votes stacking up behind them, even more will be achieved in the way of their xenophobic objectives.
Meanwhile, the mire into which Labourite social democracy is stuck will continue to suck it down.
So much has been conceded to the right – pensioners winter fuel needs unaffordable, social security to families with more than two children an ask too far, and welfare support for disabled citizens a utopia beyond our means.
Immigrants being people who can help us out during hard times? Forget it – more trouble than they are worth. As someone once said in a lively Parliamentary debate on the Windrush Scandal – you lie down with dogs and you wake up with fleas.
- Don Flynn is an established commentator on migrants rights matters and can be found on x here.
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