“Britain is open for business,” Alok Sharma, the new business secretary, declared in an article last week extolling the virtues of the government’s new immigration proposals. Yet just the previous week the government had tried to press ahead with deporting 50 men it described as guilty of “very serious offences” to Jamaica, despite the fact that many had grown up in Britain, had been convicted of drugs-related offences for which they had already served a prison sentence and have families in the UK.
These are the Janus faces of the government’s immigration policy. Even as it continues to make Britain an inhumane place to live for low-skill immigrants, to demonstrate its tough credentials to voters at home, it talks up how liberal its immigration policy is to the international business community. Judged by the low bar of Theresa May’s immigration proposals, which proposed a minimum £30,000 salary threshold for longer-term visas in a post-Brexit immigration system, Johnson’s proposed system is marginally more open. Like May, he plans a system that scraps free movement and treats EU and non-EU immigrants alike. But the salary threshold will be dropped to £26,500 and for designated shortage occupations, it will be lower at £20,480.
But there are major problems with the proposed system. One is purely administrative: the lack of capacity in the Home Office, a notoriously chaotic department, to introduce such a big change. The last such change took four years to implement. The government is planning for this new system to be operational in just seven months’ time.
That is just the start. Many critical sectors of the economy, such as social care, have become reliant on low-paid workers from the EU. There is huge uncertainty about how this system will work for them; most care workers, for example, do not come close to the minimum salary threshold. The government’s argument is that making it harder for low-paid sectors to rely on immigration will force up wages. This is crank economics. Social care is highly skilled work, and of course should be better paid. But it is underpaid not because of immigration, but because it relies on skills that are fundamentally undervalued by society. The government is indirectly the biggest employer of care workers and it is its lack of funding for social care that holds down wages.
In making the case for overall levels of immigration to come down, Priti Patel, the home secretary, has argued that the 8.5 million “economically inactive” people aged 16-64 could do the jobs currently undertaken by immigrants. But the vast majority of these are retired, studying, full-time carers or sick. To take social care as an example again. Our ageing population means we will probably need an additional 800,000 more care workers in just 15 years. As the ratio of working-age adults to older people continues to decline, it would be very challenging to fill those vacancies without to some extent relying on immigrants. Those who argue that immigration acts to depress wages right across the economy buy into the fallacy that there are a fixed number of jobs. In fact, through spending their earnings, immigrants also create jobs. And working-age immigrants are net contributors to the exchequer: without immigration, taxes would have to go up to maintain current levels of healthcare and pension provision in an ageing society.
The economics are indisputable, but there is a real danger in making the case for immigration solely in these terms. It risks real people being cast as commodities; as assets to move here, contribute and leave. That belies the reality of how human lives play out. People who come to Britain to earn a livelihood contribute far more than pounds and pence: they enrich our collective cultural life. They put down roots: they make friends, fall in love, have children. None of that fits neatly into the 2.5-year segment of a working visa.
Yet this government treats immigrants less and less like human beings. Its hostile environment policy has resulted in the wrongful deportation of members of the Windrush generation who have lived and paid taxes here for decades. Men who came to this country as young children, some of whom became ensnared by county lines gangs, have been deported to countries they do not know, where their lives are at risk from gangs, despite having British children and to all intents and purposes being British. The extortionate visa, citizenship and health charges levied by a profiteering Home Office mean young people who have grown up in Britain face thousands of pounds in fees and several years of navigating Kafkaesque bureaucracy in order to secure their status. The government’s right to rent policy – whereby landlords are forced to run checks on tenants’ immigration status if they suspect they do not have the right to be in the UK – has been ruled racially discriminatory by the high court.
The irony is that the British public appears far more pragmatic about immigration than the government: attitudes towards immigration have become noticeably warmer, with 90% of voters believing immigration is essential so long as its levels are determined by economic need. There are far fewer people now whose hostility to immigration is driven by prejudice than a decade ago. But there is a strong public preference for immigrants to “put down roots and integrate”, something the hostile environment makes immeasurably harder.
For all the government’s sales pitch about its liberal and open approach to immigration, the message once immigrants actually get here is clear. If you live and work in Britain, but are not British, do not try to become so. Do not put down roots, settle down, or integrate. You are not welcome here. Britain is not open, not while we have a government that fails to treat those immigrants who live among us and enrich us with the dignity and humanity that they deserve.