Anybody who has ever struggled to kick an addiction must sympathise with the Government’s fitful gestures toward reducing immigration. Whatever the long-term benefits of quitting your vice, the short-term impact is unpleasant – and the means to make that unpleasantness stop always available.
Mass immigration, as I argued last week, is not a problem which can be tackled in isolation or outsourced to the Home Secretary to solve. It is driven by the structure of large parts of our political economy (I used universities as my example), and can only be remedied via root-and-branch reform of one or more of them.
But that would be really hard, and involve taking on a lot of vested interests, and even if embarked upon by the most determined of governments could not bear fruit in the last year of a parliament. So, we get yesterday’s announcements instead.
Before getting into the details, it’s worth noting the big-picture problem James Cleverly’s proposals highlight: that a commitment to cut net immigration by 300,000 would not even take it back to the level it was at under David Cameron, when it was a running sore for the Government and the “tens of thousands” pledge was first devised.
(In fact, the 2010 figure – then “the highest calendar year figure on record” – was 252,000; imagine how pleased ministers would be with that figure today.)
The scale of the cut draws attention to the extraordinary scale of the problem, and then to the fact that net inflows have risen to such heights under the Conservatives, party due to special cases such as Hong Kongers and Ukrainian refugees but also because the Johnson Government used its Brexit freedoms under the points-based system to open the gates. Not great, politically speaking.
Anyway, details. Some of the measures announced yesterday are good. For example, removing the 20 per cent discounted minimum salary for jobs on the shortage occupation list at least removes the most egregious way that system rewards employers who fail to invest in domestic recruitment and training by letting them shop for cheap labour overseas.
Other measures have provoked an outcry but do at least have a rationale. Raising the salary threshold for the skilled worker and family visas to £38,700 seems to represent the rough break-even point for the Exchequer on a family, and adjusted for inflation remains considerably below the level recommended by the Migration Advisory Committee in 2015 for long-term visas (£41,500, which would be just under £54,800 in today’s money according to the Bank of England calculator).
Raising the cost of staying here would, as Fraser Nelson puts it, crush some “British dreams”. But, and it feels a bit redundant to have to say it, there isn’t any path to reducing immigration that doesn’t involve stopping actual people coming or staying here at some point.
Given that journalism is not a brilliantly-paid profession and only 28 per cent of British journalism graduates end up in the trade, it isn’t obvious why it should be excluded from any push to create a higher-wage economy that does better at recruiting and training British workers, if that’s what the Government is trying to do.
The row over applying that threshold to British citizens trying to bring spouses in is more interesting. Yes, there’s an element of “but I didn’t think cutting immigration would affect people like me” about it. But as Sam Ashworth-Hayes argues, the whole idea is arguably a relic of an earlier attempt to crack down on an apparent problem with sham marriages in a system that doesn’t allow government to target restrictions at specific groups.
Moreover, as critics of the move have pointed out, £38,700 is almost a top-quartile individual income; in fact, the latest data from the Gov.uk website suggests it puts one somewhere between the 77th and 78th percentile. As this level is apparently for the individual’s income rather than the household’s, this potentially stands to bar an awful lot of Brits from marrying a foreigner.
It’s hard to imagine this was ever actually a priority. But it’s the sort of policy you end up with when your starting point is the headline figures, and you’re not prepared to do the hard work of weaning industry or the public services or imported labour.
(For example, health and social care workers are excluded from the new minimum income caps, as are workers on national pay scales such as teachers. As ever, the long-term bit of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan lies somewhere in the future, and likely always will. Meanwhile, every doctor and nurse poached by Australia reduces the headline immigration figures.)
The spousal visa row also highlights the broader problem of dependents. Critics will argue that it is unreasonable to set the threshold at individual rather than household income, because in reality – especially in the economy successive governments have more-or-less explicitly built – it is extremely unusual for a single earner to support a household. The spouse will work. The same is true, at least to some extent, of dependents brought in by immigrant workers and international students, both of which are being cracked down upon.
Yet it also obviously poses a problem from an immigration-control perspective if granting a visa to one person, on the grounds that they are needed for a particular skill or to work in a particular sector, means also granting a visa to one or more other people who don’t qualify on those terms, and thus unless supported will either be a drain on the state or contribute to a broader, untargeted import of labour into a chronic housing crisis and a country which hasn’t seen real GDP-per-capita growth since the financial crash.
(The impact of this doesn’t seem to be factored in when calculating the contribution to the economy of international students or other specific groups of immigrant workers.)
There is no sustainable route to lower immigration through playing whack-a-mole at the margins; this approach consistently seems to maximise the number of perverse outcomes with minimal impact on either the overall numbers or the broader social and economic effects of bringing in hundreds of thousands of people a year.
But a government with only a year to go cannot easily embark on major structural reforms, both for want of time and because the basis for such a radical policy is the inadequacy of the status quo, and that is a tricky case for an incumbent government to make.
Pointing out that mass immigration has not led to per-capita GDP growth (i.e. made us actually richer) means acknowledging that we’re not richer and that any talk of growth is merely about growing the gross size of the economy by adding people to it; pointing out that the shortage occupation list (introduced in 2008) has led to ten per cent of employers reporting skills shortages in 2022, more than triple more than the three per cent in 2011, is awkward when you have presided over almost the entire lifetime of the policy.
As a result, any serious work on building a coherent, comprehensive Conservative policy programme for sustainably reducing the UK’s reliance on immigration is almost certainly going to have to work until the party is out of office. Until then, the home secretary du jour will be left to carry the can.