By Andy Ford (Warrington South Labour member)
Rishi Sunak was clearly intending to use immigration as a key tactic in the General Election. Now, unfortunately for him, Nigel Farage has entered the fray, also intending to use it as the tactic, or even a whole strategy. According to him, migration is to blame for NHS waiting lists, traffic congestion, sky-high rents, and mortgages…everything in fact.
The whole issue of immigration is intentionally mystified and racialised by right wing politicians and their corrupt media. So, it was refreshing to find the BBC’s Panorama looking at the facts.
The first important fact was that legal net migration, the difference between the people coming and those leaving, as sanctioned by Rishi Sunak’s government, was 672,000 in 2023, the last year for which records are complete. It was just 303,000 in 2015, just before the Brexit vote.
Using the figures produced by the Home Office, and available to any journalist within two or three clicks, the BBC’s Ross Atkins went through the visas granted by the government sector by sector.
Care sector is dependent on overseas staff
Of the 1.44 million visas granted by government in 2023, 146,000 were for overseas workers to come and work in Britain’s dysfunctional adult social care sector. The programme visited a care home which had nearly closed due to a shortage of labour. Unsurprisingly, very few British citizens choose to work in adult care because of the chronic low pay, lack of career opportunities and often appalling treatment meted out to staff by a fragmented and profit-hungry sector. There are currently 150,000 vacant posts.
This care home had tried job centres, agencies, schools, and colleges without success, and so were forced to recruit from India. The Indian care workers were shown doing a great job caring for the elderly residents. It is an important job – all of us will be old one day – and the rates of pay are a disgrace. Even the Chair of the government’s own ‘Independent Migration Committee’, Professor Brian Bell, said that the only way out would be to increase pay and offer a career structure to Britain’s army of care workers.
Nigel Farage is making much of care workers bringing dependents to join them. As well as the 146,000 visas granted to care workers, another 204,000 were indeed for dependents. But who in their right mind would move halfway across the world and leave their families behind, for a minimum wage job in our care sector? Blocking dependents would deter many applicants, and our care system would likely collapse. No dependents, no workers, no care system.
World in crisis
Another 299,000 visas were ‘humanitarian visas’ granted to people from Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan. But they have not really been granted out of compassion or from humanitarian motives. The treatment of refugees from Iraq, Kurdistan and Syria shows that. The visas have mainly been given in the service of British foreign policy. Ukraine is the invaded nation the British elite do care about, in painful contrast to Palestine, and in line with the US State Department. Hong Kong was the end of the end of the empire, and the Afghans were those who co-operated with the British military presence there. To refuse them refuge from the Taliban would ensure that no-one would ever do the same in any future military adventures. So not quite the milk of human kindness.
Migrants subsidise British universities
Panorama visited Coventry University, where 40% of students are from overseas. Because there is no cap on their fees, they are a bit of a cash cow for this university and many others. University funding in England is messed up [https://www.left-horizons.com/2019/04/26/university-funding-the-day-of-reckoning/] and foreign students are a cheap way to fund the gaps. The Conservative government actually set a target of 600,000 foreign students by 2030, a target that was met 9 years early!
Then in 2021, to boost numbers of students and to make their skills available to British firms, the government created ‘graduate work visas’ which permits the students to work for 2 years after graduation. The students can also bring dependents – 458,000 visas were granted to students in 2023, and a further 143,000 to dependents, who may work to support the student. Now the government has U-turned again and has banned dependents. So now applications to universities are falling, and they face a cash shortfall. “Some may go bust”, commented Suella Braverman, “And that might be no bad thing.” But a lot of towns and cities have now built their economies around their universities and the borrowed cash their students bring. Imagine Coventry, Liverpool or Manchester without their universities.
High skill workers – not made in Britain
The crisis of British capitalism is a crisis caused by a lack of investment. That includes not only machinery and infrastructure, but also vocational skills. The UK is notorious for its lack of vocational and craft training, and according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), our record is the worst in the OECD. Panorama visited CCS Technologies, a company specialising in industrial robots for Jaguar and Bosch, just the sort of high-tech company the politicians love to visit in their Hi-Vis vests. Of the eight software engineers employed by the firm, five were from overseas. The Managing Director explained that they looked for, but rarely found, British engineers with the right skills. In fact, he said, “Without immigration the business would not succeed”. High skill workers accounted for 66,000 visas in 2023, and their wives and children another 52,000.
Suella Braverman and the populist pitch
Suella Braverman attacked Rishi Sunak, and her own party, for saying one thing and doing another. In that she was quite right. That is the method of ‘populism’ to whip up a storm of criticism – against your own policies! One wing of the Tory party does what its backers demand and ensures that big business has a pipeline of cheap labour; simultaneously the other wing whips up racism against the immigrants for “taking our jobs”. Johnson was an expert in this tactic.
But Rishi Sunak has not got the common touch, and of course neither has “Cruella”. But you can see the Tories casting around for someone who can front up a populist opposition to migration and immigrants, and use it to win elections. “Cruella” went on to bemoan the state of schools, hospitals, GP services and housing, and to blame not fourteen years of cuts and austerity, but the legal migrants who have come here to staff the care homes, to pay a fortune to study in our universities, or to work on the high-tech sector!
Tory Neil O’Brien, MP for Harborough in rural Leicestershire, tried to say that rising rents and house prices in Leicester were due to migration. The city’s population is up by 40,000, “mainly due to migration”, and rents are up 20%. But a local estate agent explained that the main reason is less houses available for rent – council housing has almost ceased to exist, and landlords are exiting the market due to rising mortgage rates. The IFS have determined that the reason for high rents is “Britain’s broken housing system”.
It was sad to hear ordinary British people repeating the tabloid trope that “Britain is a small island” that is “sinking with all the immigrants”. Rishi Sunak’s way out of the bind he has created for himself by permitting businesses to import labour rather than invest in training, or improve pay rates, has been to home in on small boats and the “threat” they pose. But small boats accounted for 30,000 people in 2023 – when 1.44 million visas were given for legal migration! They account for just 2% of immigration. It is a non-problem; but for Rishi Sunak that is the best sort of problem.
The underlying problems are much more serious and have been studiously ignored by Sunak – Britain’s privatised and underfunded care system, its unstable university sector and the chronic lack of investment in vocational skills for its young people.
