Terina Hine on Labour’s cruel and nonsensical new anti-immigration rules
Labour’s plans for cutting legal migration are not only cruel but will plunge key services into a staffing crisis on an unprecedented scale.
Net migration to the UK fell by two-thirds in the year to June. Yet still, as part of its pandering to Reform, the government demands it fall further and recently set out plans to transform the legal migration system.
In 1948, over a thousand, mostly Caribbean, migrants disembarked from HMS Windrush, the majority to fill posts in the NHS. Our health service was built on the back of migrants. Today there are more than 200 nationalities working in the service, and a quarter of the entire NHS workforce is from overseas.
But this fails to show the NHS’s true reliance on foreign-born workers. Many thousands of NHS migrant workers have lived and worked in the UK long enough to gain British citizenship and are thus excluded from the ‘overseas-workforce’ figures.
But henceforth, the majority of migrant NHS and care workers will have to wait for fifteen to twenty years to obtain citizenship or settled status, that’s if they are allowed into the UK in the first place. Forcing migrants to wait for up to ten years even to apply for settled status, rather than gaining it automatically after five, will cause chaos.
Research suggest that up to 50,000 nurses could quit. According to the Guardian, almost one in ten of all nursing staff in the UK could be affected by these changes. In the care sector, the Home Office estimates that 616,000 care workers and their dependents, who arrived between 2022 and 2024, will be impacted by the new arrangements.
The fifteen to twenty year rule will also likely change the immigration status for hundreds of thousands of Skilled Worker visa holders who arrived in the UK prior to 2024 in mid-level roles, for example as chefs, welders, in tech, HR or marketing.
Similarly, our transport system will be severely impacted with as many as 300 TfL workers being affected by the rule changes. The minimum salary requirement for a visa is set to rise to £41,000 per annum, and with the removal of a number of roles from the Skilled Worker list, many current TfL employees are in limbo, unsure as to what their status will be going forward.
According to Maryam Eslamdoust, General Secretary of the TSSA, her members have been ‘betrayed’, many have built lives in London and are now being told they no longer belong.
The raising of the skills threshold to degree level and the standard of English to A-level will make the filling of vacancies from overseas increasingly difficult across all industries. The consequences will be dire.
Unsurprisingly for a government so in hock to the corporate elites, these changes will not be applied equally. Some migrants will be fast-tracked and gain the ability to apply for settled status in just three years.
According to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the ‘brightest and best’ will be offered more attractive terms. By ‘brightest and best’ she means those earning more than £125,150. For those on £50,270 or above the five-year path remains. It’s just the lower paid, those charged with looking after you when sick, who may save your life or provide your care in old age, who are neither ‘bright’ nor the ‘best’ and so are made to suffer.
Back to the NHS: after the pandemic, the NHS looked to international recruitment to fill unprecedented numbers of vacancies, just at it had following the Second World War. Our health and care services would clearly never have made it through Covid without migrant workers. Of the 50,000 nurses recruited post-pandemic, 90% were migrants. Rather than financial reward or even gratitude, these workers are being repaid with distress and insecurity.
This lack of security will do little to encourage inclusive relations between new and recent arrivals and the communities in which they live, neither will it lead to cohesion, but the exact opposite.
We currently have 150,000 vacancies in the NHS, and our birth rate is so low we will soon be dependent on inward migration just to keep the economy functioning. That’s before we think about our ageing population and the growing pension bill. Cutting migration in the way Labour proposes is tantamount to committing economic suicide to appease Reform.
But it’s not just for economic reasons we should oppose these plans. Basic humanity, something clearly absent from Labour’s front benches, should put a stop to this abhorrent racist scapegoating and immigration-led race to the bottom.
From this month’s Counterfire freesheet
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