The publication of the British government’s white paper for a post-Brexit immigration system is long overdue. But coming so late in the day, with such uncertainty continuing about what Brexit will look like, much of what’s being proposed feels quite surreal, writes Emma Carmel (University of Bath).
The UK’s immigration system is currently a malfunctioning mess. It’s overly complicated, opaque and weighed down with political and social expectations that cannot be met. It’s been consistently castigated by senior legal figures for being so labyrinthine that even immigration lawyers have difficulty navigating it. It’s expensive, intrusive, and places unreasonable burdens on citizens, including landlords, health service workers and lecturers, to act as if they were employed as border guards. The current system can also end up unfairly discriminating by ethnicity.
Many of these shortcomings are acknowledged in the Home Office’s white paper, and the potential clarity the eventual publication of this document brings to the debate on the UK’s future immigration policy is welcome.
In the immediate aftermath of the white paper’s publication, much was made of the absence of a numerical target for net migration. But this is a red herring. The target has been politically dead in the water since before the 2016 referendum.
Devil in the detail
There are other, rather more fundamental changes in the government’s new plans for both migrants and employers. The resident labour market test will be scrapped, meaning employers can recruit directly from outside the UK without having to advertise in the UK first. Migrants on “skilled-employment” visas will also be able to stay for five years, and bring dependants with them. A system of new temporary visas will be created that are not tied to a single employer, enabling migrants to move between employers in precarious and flexible sectors of the labour market. At the same time, these temporary migrants will be prevented from renewing their status or continuing their employment even if they and their employers would prefer it.
What happens to these proposals as they are consulted on, translated into legislation, and then into guidance and Home Office practices will be key.
In UK immigration policy, the devil is always in the detail. Restrictions often become clear in the non-legislative detail of immigration paperwork and key questions must await those technical documents. How high will the health service fee be for migrants on temporary visas? What will the level of the “skills charge” be to employers? What checks on prospective qualifications of employees will employers have to make in order to employ someone on a skilled visa?
Nonetheless, the policy outlined in the new white paper has three striking characteristics that shed light on its overall weaknesses. It is in turns, rather surreal, cynical and in places, potentially quite sinister.
Problems with an earnings threshold
There is much weight given within the white paper to the settlement scheme for EU citizens currently living in the UK that will be in place until the end of the Brexit “implementation period” in December 2020. Yet without parliament’s approval of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, which includes a reciprocal arrangement with the EU on the rights of citizens, the political basis for that scheme is void. That means the proposals in the white paper might be dead by March if there is a no-deal Brexit – at least as far as EU citizens are concerned.
Much is made in the white paper of the “skills” basis for the new immigration system. Yet the skilled employment route has two problems. First, it’s likely such a route will be tied to an earnings threshold. The government will consult on a proposal, made by the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in September, to set that threshold at £30,000 a year, just above median earnings. This is politically contentious as there are many skilled workers who earn well below this. Second, it treats “skilled employment” as if this is an objectively measurable attribute – it isn’t.
The policy proposals are also pretty cynical. The MAC report found little evidence of large effects of migration on employment and wages. Yet it explicitly made reference to such pressures when it proposed keeping the £30,000 per year earnings threshold for skilled employment, arguing that such a high level might encourage employers to pay their skilled workers – librarians, care workers, physiotherapists, teachers – more. For the same reason, it opposed lowering the income threshold for public sector workers, on the grounds that upward pressure on their wages would be a good thing.
Yet, under current public expenditure levels, skilled public sector workers will not have wage increases to match these requirements. In the face of employer complaints, the government has explicitly invited employers to discuss the rate at which the threshold will be set in a year-long consultation. It’s likely the threshold will go down, directly undermining the MAC’s rationale for having it at all, and continuing to endorse the UK’s low-wage economy. Meanwhile, the gender pay gap, and the differential treatment of skills in typically male and female employment, means that women migrants are less likely to meet whichever threshold is set.
Selecting ‘immigrants’
One of the rather understated, but politically telling, elements of the Home Office’s plans is that they permit two possible divergences from the new employment visa regimes they are proposing. First, new trade agreements after Brexit may open new routes for migrants from preferred countries and the UK will trade access to its labour market for those willing to do a deal. Yet it’s unclear how this constitutes “taking back control”, being open, or having a skills-led immigration policy.
The second, is that immigration policy may diverge in future if more immigration routes are closed on the basis of “risk”. “Low-risk nationalities” and “low-risk countries” will have access to the UK. Migrants – however skilled – that do not conform to this “risk” assessment are always vulnerable to exclusion. “Risks” can be defined in many ways and give governments wide powers to select which countries the skilled migrants may come from. And the government is specifically proposing to automate such assessments. This opens the possibility for a return to the outright discriminatory and racist immigration policy of the past.
Overall, the timing of the white paper’s publication is surreal, it presents proposals that rather cynically reproduce existing inequalities in the UK’s precarious labour market and its casts a rather sinister light on how the government thinks about selecting “immigrants” after Brexit.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Brexit blog, nor the LSE. It first appeared at The Conversation.
Emma Carmel is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath.
There is nothing “cynical” about it. If people from outside the UK have skills this country needs, or are entirely self sufficient, then they are welcome here, if they are unskilled and will require some form(s) of benefit and are not fully self sufficient, then they should not be allowed to come here.
Sinister is perhaps not quite the right word. Maybe Byzantine and Machiavelliantinely convoluted will do the trick. However, in the real world there are things at play which are downplayed or else taboo subjects altogether in the mainstream media. By now, it has become patently obvious to even the most casual political observer that governments in western democracies do not always do what the majority wants and leave undone what the majority wishes to be left undone. Moreover, the people within the governing apparatus, say, the PM and Cabinet, with perhaps some important civil servants thrown in, have a strong opinion of their own. This need not necessarily be sinister-It might be that these key influential people have the country’s best interests at heart- but the government, or whoever are really in control, will have an agenda of their own, the which they will not divulge to the public as that would make it clear that the government in question would rule autocratically rather than democratically.
Since immigration policy nominally issues from the Home Office and Mrs May the PM has form and history in that department, certain continuities may be expected as far as the politics and policy of immigration are concerned. The first is stated intent and public policy versus actual practice and real time policy. It has been standard practice for these two to be diametrically opposed one to the other. The country’s (UK) electorate has indicated it wishes by majority for fewer migrants and/or drastically less net migration. If one includes the fact that successive governments in the UK have been very tolerant of illegal immigration, even to the extent of somehow allowing these illegal migrants to become established by means of them, somehow or other, acquiring national insurance numbers, it may be noted that assurances by these successive UK governments to reduce net migration into the UK have been quite deliberately misleading. Seeing that May as PM has, in the matter of Brexit, also form and history misleading the electorate as to her true intentions, one may safely assume, unless evidence to the contrary becomes available, that the paper on future post-Brexit immigration policy is, if not a fudge, not meant to fully clarify this government’s real intent. Several possible reasons may be advanced for this, let’s say, obfuscatory exercise.
For one, the UK government, in keeping with practically all governments in the democratic West, lends its ear most prominently to big business and certain, here unspecified, partisan interests. Naturally, it, the May government, wishes to keep the most flexibility in immigration matters as it can reasonably, or unreasonably, get away with vis-a-vis the general public so as to be able to deliver to big business and aforementioned unspecified partisan interests as much as possible of the extras which, at some future date, can be traded for favours in case the government had need to call on big business and partisan interests for leniency or assistance in some important matter or other.
Then, one could point to strategic issues not available in the public domain which are of considerable import to governing elites in the western world generally. Globalisation is perhaps the main contender here. Politically, these elites, assuming they are several rather than one entire cabal lording it over the western democracies, have interests which in many ways are not contiguous with the wishes of the majorities in the diverse electorates in the West. Likely, immigration is one of these means by which western elites hope to further their, perceived, future interests. The alternative media is full of speculation on that score.
Lastly, for the moment, from a strictly legal perspective, a UK policy enunciated at the moment, especially one on immigration, cannot but give very vague outlines of post-Brexit practical measures, because the UK cannot rely on any withdrawal agreement with the EU or make any legally binding agreements with other countries until the UK is able to act as an independent sovereign entity. The WA negotiated sofar, and still slated to be pushed through somehow, is patently not a withdrawal agreement, but, elementary, quite the opposite. May’s WA is EU membership reductio. Not even second rate, but third rate. Vassalage is indeed the right word.
The entire Brexit exercise sofar has been an eminently Machiavellian performance. After the fact of a true separation, a real Brexit, even the mainstream media will acknowledge as much. The mainstream media operators will want to survive, even if their major mastheads may not. Hence, their fudging of this issue will stop some time. Generally, the fudging of issues will continue, of course. That’s politics.