The debate over the £30,000 "skilled worker" threshold reveals everything wrong with our attitude to immigration

How much is a “skilled” worker worth? The latest government white paper on immigration continues many of the principles of the hostile environment—unsurprisingly, given that many of those principles were established and underlined while Theresa May was in charge of the Home Office. One of the key areas that has attracted attention is the proposed £30,000 salary threshold for workers wishing to come to the UK.

Those earning under this threshold—dubbed “low skilled workers”—would only have the right to enter the UK to work for a maximum of twelve months, with no access to public funds and no right to family reunion.

In many ways, the document is a response to the imagined realities of a post-Brexit world. It ends freedom of movement as a principle, sets targets for immigration figures and will require EU citizens to apply for settled status if they want to live in the UK (although visitors from the EU will not need to apply for visas, with the hope that the EU will reciprocate for UK citizens). The document is intended to be implemented in January 2021, the current date for the end of the transition period.

But this document is not only shaped by Brexit, but also by much longer discourses around rights, migration and borders in the UK. British border policy has been increasingly hostile to migrants since the 1960s; the language around immigration has become increasingly febrile and violent and hysterical for at least a decade. It was not the Brexit referendum that created this hostility to migrants, whatever commentators might like to believe: the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony did not mark a moment when the British embraced multiculturalism with open arms. Hostility to migration, racism and xenophobia have been embedded in British politics as legacies of imperial policies; in many ways, they created a context in which the referendum could take place, not the other way around.

The £30,000 salary threshold has provoked outrage from a variety of sources. Apparently, even the Treasury thinks this is set too high; it is, after all, higher than the average family income in the UK. Lots of organisations—businesses, but also museums, universities, architectural firms, care providers, hospitals and schools—have pointed out that starting salaries in their professions are well below this threshold. Some people have worried that setting the threshold at this level might lead to major problems in the provision of healthcare or childcare, two low-paid professions that recruit heavily on migrant labour. Meanwhile, the cultural industries have bemoaned a political context that stops young, sparky, creative people bringing their talent and developing their craft in the UK.

The equation of salary with skilled or unskilled jobs is always tricky, and the language around recruiting “specialists” from overseas does not help with this. At one point, the proposed threshold was £50,000: significantly higher, for instance, than the top of the starting salary band for an entry-level position as a university lecturer, a job that requires a PhD in the field. It’s hard to think of a more specialist set of skills. Setting the salary band too high makes it impossible for industries to recruit internationally at anything but the very highest paid, most senior roles. It’s not a surprise that businesses have tried to push back against this.

On the other hand, setting a salary threshold at a low level is a tacit endorsement of the low wages paid in these sectors. It was notable that many of the employers raising criticisms of the £30,000 threshold were in the arts and cultural sector. Museums, galleries, studios and universities all regularly recruit talented, enthusiastic workers to do jobs that need a high degree of specialisation, and then pay them very poorly. We should reject or at least challenge the claims made by these institutions to value their staff if they are unwilling to pay salaries that would enable a decent quality of life, or offer contracts and working conditions that would make their workers feel valued. Likewise, the argument that a £30,000 salary threshold would unduly impact the provision of healthcare should be as much an argument to pay care workers more, as it should be to change the visa terms.

But quibbling over the level of the salary threshold is itself problematic. This imagines a world in which there is a fair income that could be used to determine a person’s right to migrate to the UK. The clinical economic language of salary thresholds skates over an unpalatable truth which equates a person’s worth to their earning power and supports the idea that poorer people are “lesser” migrants who should not be allowed to come to the UK at all. The argument that migration is a net benefit to the UK economy is often cited to refute this position, and that is a sensible use of evidence. But we should also think critically about our attitude to migrants that means that we do not see them as people, with hopes and dreams and families and histories, but as economic units—a plus or minus on a spreadsheet. For just as the debate over immigration didn’t start with Brexit, it won’t end with it, either.