The Brexit deal finalised at the end of last year went to the wire over fishing rights. But it was another issue that spurred the modern Eurosceptic movement. Between 2001 and 2016, increasing numbers of voters named immigration as the most important issue facing the country: the figure peaked at 56 per cent in September 2015. From 2012 to 2016 one could hardly watch TV news without a vox pop on immigration from a regional English town.
Immigration was the key driver of the Ukip “purple wave” and then the Brexit vote, linking directly to the “take back control” slogan. It was also captured in the oft-repeated “money, laws, borders” mantra. The UK has now ended freedom of movement and introduced new rules for both EU and non-EU immigrants. This legislation came into force on 1st January in what Jonathan Portes of King’s College London calls the “most fundamental change in at least 20, maybe 40 years” in this area of policy.
To understand the changes I spoke to academics, union leaders and politicians. Though their assessments differ, it is clear that immigration is not going to disappear as an economic or political issue in the immediate future.
The new rules are a revision of the “points-based system” first unveiled for non-EU migrants by Liam Byrne in 2007 and frequently touted by Nigel Farage since then. The main corridor for immigrants from all countries (except the Republic of Ireland which retains a common travel area with the UK) is now the Skilled Worker visa. To qualify, applicants must have a job offer, speak English, have A-Level equivalent qualifications and meet a salary threshold of £25,600 or the going rate for their profession—whichever is higher.
The salary threshold is lowered to a floor of £20,480 for occupations the UK has shortages in, such as education, and the specific Health and Care Worker Visa also uses this figure for many NHS jobs. There are narrower routes for accomplished and entrepreneurial individuals (the Global Talent and Start-up visas), a Youth Mobility visa for two years for 18-30 year olds from specific countries mainly in the Commonwealth and East Asia, and a graduate route which allows two years’ residence after a university course.
The “government promised to end free movement, to take back control of our borders,” and has ensured “employers can recruit the skilled workers they need,” Minister for Future Borders and Immigration Kevin Foster told me. The new rules do lower the requirements for skilled workers outside the EU, who were previously required to have graduate-level skills and a higher salary. However, the principal economic concern around the rules is the absence of a general low-skilled visa, which was included in Theresa May’s 2018 plans but did not make it into the current government’s policy.
“Certain sectors have become reliant not just on relatively cheap EU labour but also the flexibility, the fact that people could come and go and there were no bureaucratic hurdles to pass,” Portes tells me. “So that flexibility will go and that will be a shock.” The largest numbers of European migrants work in social care, construction and hospitality, with 230,000 EU migrants working in hotels.
But specific sectors like vegetable and meat processing take around half their workforces from EU immigrants. As National Farmers’ Union Vice President Tom Bradshaw warns: “It’s very, very challenging because they haven’t got anyone on the shortage occupation list,” which would allow for the lower salary floor. “When you look at the points threshold, it’s going to be just about impossible for workers to meet the requirements.”
This case study could reveal what lies in store for other low-skilled areas of the economy. Eight in ten current EU care workers in the UK would not have been eligible under the new rules. Bradshaw predicts that in food processing, the issue may not arise immediately thanks to pre-settled and settled workers, but a labour shortage could emerge over the next few years.
These sectors have been instructed to “adapt and adjust.” Apart that is from agriculture, which uses seasonal workers for crop harvests. It has received relief from the expanded Seasonal Workers visa, allowing 30,000 migrants to work in horticulture for six months in 2021. “It’s hugely welcome, because it’s been very political,” says Bradshaw. “There is no real immigration problem with seasonal workers as the returning rates at the end of their period of employment are incredibly high. If you asked me, I would say I prefer 40,000, but 30,000 is a fantastic start.”
While industries used to recruiting under freedom of movement will generally suffer, the macroeconomic effect of these rules is less obvious. “There’s no reason to think it will lower British-born unemployment,” says Portes. “Will it raise wages in some sectors? Possibly, but not overall.”
Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, agrees: “The main impact in the long run is to change the composition of certain industries rather than necessarily any of the aggregate outcomes like productivity or GDP per capita. It’s not likely to have a massive impact on wages.”
However, another concern raised by trade unions is around the rights and treatment of the workers who do continue to come.
Rosa Crawford, TUC policy officer for migration and trade, said that they predict greater exploitation of migrant workers now that the only low-skilled routes of any kind are the limited Youth Mobility scheme and provisions for seasonal agricultural workers. “Either of these only gives you two years or six months, after which you can’t claim employment rights,” she tells me.
She explains, “We know employers are already taking advantage of migrant workers who are in that situation because they know they are going to leave the country soon and aren't likely to leave exploitative employment,” for another job in the UK. “This leads to them living in caravans of multiple people, in unsanitary, unsafe conditions where recently Covid has been able to spread very easily.” The TUC is calling for employment rights to be granted to undocumented workers to protect them from unscrupulous bosses.
In short, the economic consequences of these new rules are predicted to be mixed—neither affecting the supposed suppression of wages by immigration nor cutting the UK off from immigration’s economic benefits. They will not address existing issues of migrant exploitation. The political question remains whether these rules solve the immigration issue which has blighted British politics since at least the New Labour era, if not long before.
Indeed, with net migration still running at 270,000 in 2019, one might have expected the backdrop to the new policy to be fraught, reflecting the febrile rhetoric of the referendum. Though the government has quietly dropped the ten-year-old pledge to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands,” in the 2019 election it still campaigned to lower immigration.
What is more, while immigration from the EU collapsed to a little above 50,000 in 2019, it was statistically counterbalanced by non-EU immigration (immigration on the whole has collapsed since March 2020 due to the pandemic, and whether it will return to pre-Covid levels is unclear). The exact causes of this fall and rise are also uncertain, and compared to the freedom of movement era, the new rules are more restrictive. But given that the new rules are generally more liberal than those which had been applied to non-EU applicants, this doesn’t suggest a very large reduction in net migration will take place.
So why has this not been fastened on with the aggression of the early 2010s? Dominic Grieve was formerly attorney general and became a prominent figure in the Brexit debate. He sees the ebbs and flows of the EU immigration debate as more driven by emotion than a straightforward response to ONS figures.
“The main problem in my view,” he tells me, “was not the number of people coming into the United Kingdom but the perception that the European Union had lost control of its external borders. It was the images of desperate people trying to cross from Turkey to Lesbos or dying off Pantelleria in the Mediterranean, or Angela Merkel’s decision to accept one million plus refugees.”
“Note, for example,” he adds, “that in the populist press at the moment, the agitation is over the very few thousands of people who are now turning up on our beaches from France.”
Might there be another anti-immigrant backlash? “Brexit and achieving it brought together Leavers who had contradictory agendas,” Grieve says. “The libertarian Conservatives see Britain as lean, mean, buccaneering, bringing in talent from the rest of the world, undercutting the EU’s red tape bureaucracy. And the rest essentially want to turn the clock back because they think globalisation, of which the EU is a manifestation, has gone too far.”
It seems the former has won out with these immigration rules. “This administration has placed more weight on the idea that skilled migration is desirable,” says Sumption, also observing that, “if you look at the polling data, for voters immigration is less salient.” Whether the charge and toxicity that anti-immigrant sentiment brought to British politics will return and whether these rules will make a Global Britain or a Little England, only time will tell.
