The immigration dilemma Labour hopes will go away
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It’s quite an achievement for a policy to be cruel, ineffective and expensive in one go, but the UK Conservatives’ asylum-seekers-to-Rwanda plan managed it, and the Labour government rightly ditched the scheme on its first day in office. The rest of Sir Keir Starmer’s policies on immigration, however, are less convincing.
Governments in advanced economies have faced common challenges on immigration and evolved a fairly standard response. There’s an economic imperative for foreign workers to ease labour shortages and reduce fiscal pressures from ageing populations. But the politics are often toxic, foreigners variously being blamed for stealing natives’ jobs, bringing in alien cultures or overcrowding housing and schools.
The outcome: a sustained exercise in hypocrisy. Governments say they are tough on immigration and make a big song and dance about crackdowns on some small element — usually asylum seekers or undocumented migrants — while quietly admitting large numbers of workers and turning a blind eye to illegal working.
The Conservative government followed this standard routine, admitting a surge of non-EU immigrants after Brexit while trying to distract the electorate with its absurd Rwanda plan. But its ineptitude, including unfeasible promises to stop small-boat migration across the Channel from France, meant the deception became clear. Rightwing Tory backbenchers ended up forcing genuinely damaging restrictions on economic migration, such as on visas for overseas students and care workers.
Early indications are that it’s unlikely the Tories will face up to the contradiction in opposition. The stab-in-the-back thesis — that the government sabotaged its own strict immigration targets — already seems to be popular.
Labour starts in a less politically precarious position. Its supporters, at least in pre-election polling, didn’t consider immigration much of an issue. But the public as a whole is much more worried. Plus the party faces challenges from the anti-immigration Reform UK, which came second in 89 of Labour’s 411 seats in the general election.
To give credit where it’s due, Tony Blair’s Labour government after its election in 1997 practised the hypocrisy with less than the customary fervour. True, it was constantly promising crackdowns on an alleged crisis of asylum seekers. But Blair did also overturn decades of the UK’s net zero migration policy and officially recognised the economic importance of immigrants.
Yet by the time Blair was succeeded as prime minister by Gordon Brown in 2007, this argument was in retreat. Brown adopted the slogan “British jobs for British workers”, previously used by the extreme-right British National party, and talked about an “Australian-style points-based system” after Downing Street focus groups associated Australia with being tough on immigrants. His successor Ed Miliband was so keen on tightening up on migrants that he infamously put his slogan, “Controls on immigration” on a commemorative mug — an item owned by many a Labour party member as an ironic souvenir.
This rhetoric has more or less continued under Starmer, who has said immigration is too high, though without giving a firm target for reducing it. A shadow Labour minister last year suggested a “couple of hundred thousand” annually, compared with levels above half a million in recent years, but was swiftly forced to make clear there was no numerical goal.
Labour’s election manifesto had only a short and vague section promising better enforcement of labour laws and preventing employers and agencies abusing the visa system. It also pledged to train more workers in immigrant-intensive sectors such as social care, health and construction. But that’s a long-term project — it’s probably less urgent than raising pay to prevent existing doctors and nurses moving abroad.
The Office for Budget Responsibility says that UK net immigration is already likely to decline to just over 300,000 over the next few years. But a chunk of that is the impact of Conservative restrictions on migrant care workers feeding through. Any resulting labour shortage in the social care and health sectors and the country is back to square one; since they tend to be younger and more likely to work, fewer immigrants would also worsen the already stretched public finances.
It would be easier to run sensible immigration policy with EU freedom of movement. Better to have migrants with good employment rights who can respond to shifting demand by switching employers and moving back and forth from the UK rather than vulnerable workers trapped by company- or sector-specific visas. It’s unlikely the UK would be flooded with cheap European labour: incomes in central and eastern European countries have rapidly converged with those in western Europe. But anything related to the EU and free movement of workers remains toxic. Depressingly, Labour this year ruled out the European Commission’s suggestion of an EU-UK youth mobility scheme.
Labour might get lucky. Net immigration is already dropping and the salience of the issue may fall now there is no dysfunctional Tory government screeching about small boats and Rwanda. But without an honest conversation about trade-offs between economics and politics, it’s all too possible Labour will be back here in five years’ time, 10 if they’re fortunate, with the economy suffering from labour shortages while the Tories and Reform cry that immigration is out of control. A game composed of iterations of organised hypocrisy becomes wearying after a while for both players and audience.
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