Immigration white paper: Who cares?

Another day, another overhaul of the immigration rules (sigh). This time, it's more of the same: illogical, ill-advised restrictions which will harm families and communities and decimate public services and institutions. It defies all logic.

Labour, like the Conservatives before them, think certain visa routes are a tap which can be turned on and off whenever the net migration figure isn’t to their liking. This quarter, it's not even set to be that high - somewhere around the 700,000 mark - and has been falling for over a year. But, as ever, the government is fixated on grabbing headlines in the Daily Mail and parroting Nigel Farage on “taking back control”.

So where do they look first? As with previous governments, both blue and red, Labour has targeted care workers and international students. How very original.

Yesterday the Home Office announced that they would be getting rid of care worker visas altogether, preventing homes from recruiting overseas staff. Makes a nice headline, doesn't it? But with 133,000 vacancies, Britain needs more, not less, care workers to look after our disabled and elderly people. Targeting those who kept our loved ones alive during the pandemic feels grubby and cheap.

The last time the Home Office turned on care workers, I jumped on a train to Scarborough and spent 12 hours shadowing Evans, a registered nurse from Ghana. He had come over a year earlier under the expanded visa route designed to fill labour shortages following the pandemic. Just three days before I met him, the government announced that the spouses and children of care workers would be banned from coming to Britain.

When he and the thirty other overseas staff working at St. Cecilia’s heard the news, they stood in front of the television and wept. A carer from India who had arrived six months earlier on a five-year contract had been waiting for a visa appointment for her two children. ‘I thought that was it, that it started from that moment and I wouldn’t see them for four more years,’ she told me at the nurses’ station. If she had known about the restrictions before she came to the UK, she might have chosen to go elsewhere. Many of Evans’ friends who worked in domiciliary care and residential care had already started to think about a move to the US, Canada or Australia, where they were respected and recompensed for their work.

Downstairs in the kitchen, the care home group director Mike Padgham told me how reliant the sector was on staff from overseas. He had run out of words to describe the state of social care: on a cliff edge, at breaking point, a precipice. Whatever way you wanted to describe it, it surely wasn’t grave enough.

Mike had been a frequent visitor to Westminster to try to explain how bad it was. As a business owner, he was reluctant to say that he would need to close without overseas staff, but that was the reality.

He was often asked by MPs why he didn’t recruit more British workers to fill the vacancies. Like so many others, he wanted to hire locally but the only way of attracting applicants was to put the prices up to pay staff more, which would have a knock-on effect for residents and their loved ones. Even then, it was challenging to recruit locally. Young people wanted to work in A&E and specialist departments, not in homes for the elderly.

The Home Office is now seeking to cut off that avenue entirely in a bid to reduce the net migration figure to below 500,000. Despite repeated claims from Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper that they wouldn't be setting a target, she caved under pressure on live TV just like David Cameron did in 2010.

Cooper says that care homes will now need to recruit from the pool of people who came over to work here in good faith, but who ended up being exploited by unscrupulous providers. It's not that exploitation doesn't happen; it absolutely does. An unknown number of people have paid thousands of pounds to agents for a visa, before arriving in the UK to find themselves locked into debt bondage, without work. Due to the conditions applied to their visa, they are unable to claim asylum, indefinitely stuck in limbo without the papers to secure work. With no other options, they enter the black market economy. Now the Home Office says it's going to identify and employ these people. Wishful thinking is putting it mildly.

This isn't about creating a new pool of staff to fill vacancies, anyway; it's about trying to crack down on abuse. Home Office officials will have looked at the numbers and seen a mess.

When I was researching my book, I, too, was astonished by the state of this part of the system. An individual could simply wake up and decide to set up a care home with two or three members of staff and the Home Office would issue them with hundreds of visas. In an inspection of the social care route, former watchdog David Neal found that the department had issued 275 visas to a home that didn't exist.

This move is unlikely to do anything except add pressure to the NHS, already on its knees - because as care home owner Mike Padgham told me, “if we fail, the NHS fails”. Far from looking tough, it makes the government appear highly reactive and desperate. Some may even say: out of control.

***

Student visas are also under the cosh once again. This also makes little sense. Universities rely on overseas students to subsidise British pupils, who are loss-making and whose fees are capped. Vice-chancellors have consistently warned of a funding crisis, with many saying they would need to close their doors if any further caps on overseas numbers were imposed.

So the changes will not only decimate higher education, they will also damage the economy. International students contributed £42 billion to the UK economy in 2023. What’s more, many leave their courses as highly-skilled, highly-motivated workers with excellent English. They will, in turn, likely raise promising children who contribute significantly to the economy.

But none of that matters when tabloid reporters seize on the net migration figures and write it all up unfavourably.

What can be done?

Government needs to ensure that the calls from the Home Office and No 10 are in check with other policy priorities.

Many groups have long urged the government to adopt an Annual Migration Plan, which would ensure a joined-up, coordinated response across Whitehall.

This, infamously, is not a particular strength. The Home Office is unwieldy and tends to bulldoze through its policies, much to the chagrin of other departments. No 10 would do well to listen to the Treasury, the Department for Health and Social Care, the Department for Education. We’ve seen countless times that a short-termist approach - a knee-jerk reaction whenever the net migration figures come out - never works.