Here Comes The Boldest Change To Immigration In Decades – And The Riskiest

It’s a sign of the times that a party whose leadership hails from the realms of human rights lawyers and Labour centrists is about to undertake a U-turn which is going to make it sound like it has adopted the Fortress Britain vision it once disdained as parochial or even subliminally racist.

Pre-briefing on the Immigration White Paper, which is due to be released on Monday, left us in no doubt about the tone.

Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, will describe persistently high figures of incomers as “a failed free market experiment” – and radically change the rules on who can enter the UK, for how long and at which qualification level.

Effectively, this means a curtailment of immigration numbers and a more rigid approach to asylum to signal that Britain will be a harder country to get into.

The result will be the most decisive intervention in a political generation – and a massive gamble for a Labour leadership anxious to see off the Reform UK-led agenda and bleeding control of local politics to the Right.

It’s an additional twist of political fate that Starmer – whose jobs as a human rights lawyer and former Director of Public Prosecutions entailed applying the EU Convention of Human Rights – will now end up fielding proposals designed to change how judges apply the most controversial section of that legislation. The “right to a family life” holds up removals of people who arrive under asylum of “leave to remain” categories and cannot easily be removed, even if convicted of crimes.

There is, however, a looming gap between the desires of large parts of the public to have greater control of who comes and stays in the UK and clearer terms on asylum process – and what follows in terms of remedies and unintended consequences. Both previous Labour and Conservative governments essentially made up arrangements on the hoof on immigration to feed the labour market.

Voters still overall welcome people coming from countries such as Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan where the UK had a stake in conflicts and has made commitments to welcome those fleeing a risk to their lives. Sections may react badly to local circumstances with agitation against refugees – the Southport riots are the prime example and one which shocked a new government into how to handles outbreaks of anti-immigrant feeling. But the main, consistent ire that drives policy changes  are targeted at those who reach British shores by unofficial means and are a strain on housing or hotel space, until their appeals can be heard in a long backlog.

The difficulty Cooper faces is the gap between legislation’s intentions to “restore control” (it’s striking how many of the Vote Leave messaging about control, derided by Labour during the 2016 referendum are now re-purposed in its rhetoric) – and making more stringent immigration work in practice for a labour market which has evident gaps. 

There is also an unspoken but obvious complexity in finding or training British workers for jobs they have stopped doing or do not currently show much appetite for. Speaking to Kent acquaintances who run farming, fruit and veg and and quarry businesses, all have similar experiences – regardless of their personal politics.

Attempts to hire local labour often founders when workers don’t show up after being recruited “so you end up building accommodation on site for dozens of Moldovans,” says one local business figure. “Because they are reliable seasonal workers, you get to know them and they deliver.”

Hiring UK workers for low-skilled jobs from the local town – let along the next step of training them to operate machinery or semi-automation feels like “a big experiment”, says one farmer, compared with the relative certainty of incomers.

Possibly, a squeeze on disability and benefit reliance will change this calculation. The problem for Starmer and Cooper is that it takes years to manifest, whereas shortages show up immediately and depress productivity as well as frustrating consumers who can’t get a good builder or plumber, where local supply is scarce.

It also hits Labour in one of its prime policy commitments – a jumbo expansion of house building. Not only does it divide communities in the frame for a large number of new residences, the policy could be hamstrung by a lack of planning officials and builders to deliver it.

We will undoubtedly see a plan to punish employers who can’t show efforts to recruit UK-based staff. Again, this looks good on paper. But for a government whose prime declared aim is restoring  growth, it will also be seen as another unwelcome intrusion of government into how people run their businesses.

Like more criteria which demand that an employer shows X in order to do Y, it is also prone to being gamed by those who can take legal or business-plan advice to show a distant government department that its needs can’t be met locally.

Ideally, as the White Paper will point out, changes will be delivered by a “quad”  – employers, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Home Office and its migration agencies,  alongside a diffuse bunch of skills bodies. As such, it relies on breaking silos and very different levels of knowledge and capabilities in official agencies –  which is, to put it in Sir Humphrey Appleby speak in Whitehall matters in the “very brave, minister” category.

So the likely outcome, given the urgency of Labour combating Reform UK in its heartlands and a battered Conservative Party whose electoral relevance was finally destroyed by a surge in post-Covid immigration figures under Rishi Sunak, is that the Labour take on immigration and asylum will end up tougher and blunter.

That doesn’t mean that delivering a result that works will be easy. Expect new rules that sends a “British jobs for British workers” clarion call – with a wing and a prayer of how that works when businesses and consumers just want stuff done.

Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and co host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s