The government has outlined its plans to reduce net migration to the UK. The proposals are generally restrictive: scrapping social care visas, tightening work visas, longer residency requirements, tougher English tests and restructuring student visas.
While Reform’s recent success at the local elections hardened Keir Starmer’s rhetoric in announcing the changes, the thrust of this policy was to be expected. But will the political calculation pay off?
Immigration has long been a headache for Labour. It is a topic that cuts across the party’s ideological factions – its protectionist roots, its universalist values, and its market-friendly third way leanings. Each of these calls for a different approach on immigration.
Labour’s record on immigration is historically patchy. Previous Labour governments have been responsible for some of the most deplorable immigration acts, including the racially discriminatory 1968 act, which restricted non-white immigration in a betrayal of Kenyan Asians fleeing persecution.
Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox. Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.
The British public then was far more illiberal on immigration than it is today. Trade unions were historically anti-immigrant, perceiving foreign labour as a threat to wages and job displacement. Labour, like their Tory counterparts, mostly operated on a bipartisan consensus of limiting immigration, on the idea that this was better for cohesion.
This is exemplified in the Hattersley equation (named for former MP Roy Hattersley), a bipartisan political consensus that lasted from the postwar years up until Thatcher’s government. The compromise was between restrictive immigration policy and liberal integration measures (the Race Relations Act) to appease Labour’s liberal base.
New Labour embraced the Thatcherite, neoliberal agenda, with Tony Blair declaring that there is no alternative to globalisation and therefore immigration. Framing immigration as an economic good, and humanitarian mobility as the bogeyman, Labour’s regime radically transformed the immigration system from one of the most restrictive in Europe to one of the most liberal labour regimes. But this was never for the benefit of migrants – it was simply economic calculation.
We know what happened next: the political battleground, the cursed net migration target, Brexit and the lurches to the right ever since. In opposition, Labour has never been able to resolve this.
Starmer’s approach
A sticking point since 2010 has been traditionally working-class Labour constituents, viewed as “left behind” due to globalisation, and who now make up the red wall. The narrative goes that these voters have drifted rightwards due to dissatisfaction with immigration.
But overall, Labour voters are still more positive than Conservatives towards immigration. A regressive policy on migrant rights could lose Labour some of its voter base.
What’s more, net migration is likely to decrease over Labour’s term anyway, due to changes made by the last government and the tailing off of unprecedented migration from bespoke humanitarian schemes, like the one for Ukrainians. Arguably, Starmer’s reforms weren’t strictly necessary.
Starmer could have framed the same policies around a softer rhetoric, one that embraces multicultural Britain while making the case for reforming the labour market. The enemy could have easily been cast as the Conservative government that neglected investment in the people at the expense of global corporations.
Data from the Institute of Public Policy Research suggests that the UK public has become softer on immigration, but they want fairness. The easy way out here was to praise the benefits that immigration can bring while emphasising the need for control to maximise those benefits.
Denigrating the current system as a “squalid chapter” of history is playing to Reform voters – arguably a foolish move, given that evidence shows you can’t beat the far right at its own game.
Will the proposals work?
If these proposals do reduce migration, it will come at a high cost for the country, not least in the consequences for the higher education and social care sectors. It may even increase irregular migration, as more people go underground in their attempts to reach Britain.
The crux of the government’s problem is promising to reduce immigration in a system dependent on labour market flexibility. The proposals would make the UK extortionately expensive for both applicants and the employers who sponsor them, and make it economically unviable for the sectors that rely on foreign labour to recruit.
A more social democratic immigration policy would invest in training, skills and wages of domestic workforces, while providing rights to the migrants who already reside here.
Labour’s policy does not do this. It curtails rights significantly, for example in the doubling of the waiting period to apply for the right to stay indefinitely, and the plans to review how the right to family life is applied. Both of these are arguably counterproductive to the aims of integration and out of step with other countries.
The theory behind the government reforms is that migrant workers will be replaced by the economically inactive domestic labour force – a win-win. Aside from the suspect simplicity of this equation, it will require more than sticks on employers and migrants. It necessitates a radical overhaul of the system, the economic model and a more interventionist state to move towards a coordinated market economy, one with more organisation and regulation on the labour market.
Despite the government’s significant majority, a disciplined cabinet and an infighting opposition, the government appears reluctant to make such dramatic change, wedded to the existing paradigms of neoliberal free markets in a quest for growth in stagnating economies. If it wants its plans to work, Labour will have to be bolder and provide carrots to go with the sticks.
Erica Consterdine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
