This morning, the Home Office is publishing its long-awaited white paper on legal migration. The Home Secretary has already been out on the airwaves, billing it as a ‘crackdown’ on low-skilled visas. This morning it was the turn of the Prime Minister. Keir Starmer deployed the Downing Street bully pulpit to hail the package as a ‘clean break’ from the ‘broken measures’ of the past.
Proposed changes include tightening English tests and pausing the recruitment of additional overseas care workers. The route to settlement for migrants will be extended from five to 10 years – with reductions for those who contribute to economy. A clampdown on graduate visas is expected too, with overseas graduates forced to leave the UK unless they get a graduate-level job.
Inevitably, these changes are being read as a reaction to Reform’s success in the local elections. But Starmer claimed that ‘I’m doing this because it is right, because it is fair and because it is what I believe in.’ He pointed to the speeches he gave at the CBI and his annual party conference in 2022, in which he argued that ‘taking back control’ was a Labour value.
Both Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer are determined not to put a number on legal net migration over the course of this parliament. But the ONS estimates legal net arrivals will be 340,000 in 2028 – less than 40 per cent of the 906,000 who arrived here in 2023. Asked for his message to MPs ‘squeamish’ about a crackdown, the Prime Minister replied:
The Labour party has as core values, the idea that immigration should be controlled, that it should be selective, we should be choosing who we want, with higher skills, the high talent routes into our country and it must be fair. They’re basic Labour arguments and concepts for many, many years.
When challenged by the Daily Mail about his 2020 letter objecting to the deportation of foreign criminals, Starmer refused to address the point. But the reason why the Prime Minister is now able to pose as a champion of controls is the Conservatives’ own record, which saw net migration reached nearly one million in the year ending June 2023 – four times the levels seen in 2019.
The Sunak government tried to belatedly turn this around, with James Cleverly unveiling a package of measures in December 2023 which aimed to cut legal numbers by 300,000. Cooper’s changes look set to carry on in that same spirit, but the spike under Boris Johnson enables her and other Labour colleagues to make political hay out of the so-called ‘Boriswave.’ As Starmer said:
I don’t think that you can do something like that by accident. It was a choice, a choice made even as they told you, told the country, they were doing the opposite – a one-nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control. Well, no more. Today, this Labour government is shutting down the lab. The experiment is over. We will deliver what you’ve asked for time and again, and we will take back control of our borders.
Of course, cracking down on visas is just one part of ‘control of our borders’. Even before Starmer spoke, scores of illegal migrants had started the journey across the Channel, in a bid to make it to England. If the Prime Minister wants to demonstrate that migration controls are really a ‘core Labour value’, then incremental visa tweaks will likely prove to be insufficient.
