On Monday, the British government has promised to strengthen the rules of migration and make more difficult for new arrivals to remain permanently in the country, as a sign of the growing political pressure on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to cut the number of immigration.
According to the plans, the visas for some lower skilled workers would be reduced, the linguistic requirements for immigrants have grown and the period of time necessary for most of the new arrivals to qualify for citizenship or the right to remain permanently doubled, from five years to 10.
In a Downing Street speech, Mr. Starmer, who guides the government laburist party, accused his predecessors of allowing immigration of exhausting control and effectively creating an experiment with open borders.
“Today this Labor government is closing the laboratory. The experiment is over. We are resuming control of our borders,” he said, adopting the slogan used by Pro-Brexit activists before the British referendum to leave the European Union in 2016.
Without his new measures, Starmer added: “We risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation walking together”.
The measures announced on Monday refer only to legal immigration. Previous conservative leaders have promised to cut immigration to specific objectives, starting with Prime Minister David Cameron, who has notifiedly committed to reduce net migration from hundreds of thousands a year to the “tens of thousands”, a policy that has never delivered and that has become a political responsibility for his party.
In part, following this, Mr. Starmer's plan does not include concrete objectives for the number of legal immigrants who will be admitted every year, opting instead for a large commitment.
“Don't make mistakes, this plan means that migration will fall, this is a promise,” said Starmer from Downing Street, adding that if the ministers need to take further measures to release pressure on public accommodation and services, then “mark my words, we will do it”.
Repression contains some risks for the government at a time when the economy is flat, cracks are visible in the assistance system for the elderly and some employers complain about the lack of labor. But Starmer rejected the topic that large -scale immigration by definition promoted economic growth.
His hardened position reflects how migration is once again a matter of Hot-Batton in Great Britain. At the beginning of this month, Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-emigration reform reform party, won a significant victory in the regional and mayor elections, marking a large setback for the Starmer Labor Party and opposition conservatives.
The senior government ministers hypothesized that the reform could emerge as the main rival of Labor with the next general elections, which could explain a new frank tone of Mr. Starmer who wrote on social media: “If you want to live in the United Kingdom, you should speak English. It's common sense.”
But some critics argue that the approach could validate the right populist agenda of Mr. Farage and the prejudice of the fuel. “The step forward in the government's anti-migrant rhetoric is shameful and dangerous,” wrote Nadia Whittome, a Labor legislator, on social media.
Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a research institute specialized in migration and integration, said that the government had to demonstrate that it was able to manage immigration, but questioned the Stager language. “I think they should do it, with a lot of this type of content,” he said, “but with a more balanced tone”.
Responding to the announcement that the work visas for healthcare professionals would have finished, Martin Green, CEO of Care England, who represents the suppliers, said it was “an overwhelming blow for an already fragile sector” and that the government was “calculating while we are already down”.
UK University, which represents higher education colleges, invited ministers to “carefully think” about the impact of a new withdrawal planned on the international students' taxes.
Immigration was a great theme in view of the 2016 referendum, in which 52 % of the British voted for Brexit. Some of the major supporters of Brexit, including Boris Johnson and Mr. Farage, promised to “resume control” of migratory policy if Great Britain has left the European Union.
But after Brexit, under the guidance of Mr. Johnson as prime minister, annual net migration has tripled, reaching a peak of over 900,000 in the year ended in June 2023.
At the same time, the arrivals of asylum seekers from France on small often disturbing boats have increased and Mr. Farage has capitalized on both issues.
Mr. Starmer's critics on the right claim that he is not going far enough and notice that, due to the restrictions outlined by the last government towards the end of his time in power, the numbers will be expected anyway. Reform UK wants to freeze what he calls “non -essential immigration”, although he has not explained what he would mean in practice. Conservatives ask for a binding annual ceiling.
But the conservatives, who were expelled from power last year after 14 years, have a difficult record to defend. Subsequent conservative governments promised to cut net immigration to less than 100,000 per year, but they ended up prejudicing the net migration number nine times at the level.