We’re stuck in a debate with no purchase in reality. Since the latest immigration figures came out last week, the Conservative Party has been embroiled in a fractious internal battle about the subject. How will numbers be reduced? Who has the best plan? Did Rishi Sunak ignore Suella Braverman’s proposals to limit them? Is Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick about to break from the Prime Minister?
It’s a debate without meaning, about plans we haven’t seen, for a goal which does not satisfy the conditions which gave rise to it. It’s a dreamworld conversation, completely unmoored from the social and economic reality it claims to address. And at its heart there is a single truth, which no politician dares to speak out loud.
The truth is that we need immigrants. And part of the reason we need immigrants is because of the Government’s failure to fix the British economy.
Clear away all the noise and you’re left with a parable about how Britain functions – a horror story with a clear moral lesson. It works like this. First, there is government negligence. Then there is an ensuing breakdown in basic services. After that there is the behind-closed-doors use of immigration as a way of patching over the Government’s ineptitude. And finally, there is the grotesque spectacle of the Government attacking those who arrived to fix the problems it itself created.
The best example of this is in social care. The sector is a human disaster zone. As repeated Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) reports have shown, there is a soaring demand for care, high vacancy and turnover rates, low pay with little pay progression, and poor terms and conditions.
The situation was bad before the pandemic. Then it got worse. And it will continue to get worse, because of the demographic bulge in the system provided by the baby boomer generation.
As they continue to slide into old age without as many working taxpayers in the generations after them, the system is going to groan and strain under the pressure. Social care already employs around 2 per cent of the working-age population. By 2033, it is expected to employ up to 4 per cent.
This problem is not just about those working in care and those receiving it. It impacts the whole of the health service. Why are A&E waiting times so bad? Part of the reason lies with the failure of social care. We struggle to get people from A&E onto the wards. And we struggle to do that because we can’t get them off the wards and into social care. The failure of social care creates a blockage which impacts all the way down the system.
There are plenty of ways to approach this problem, but better pay is at the heart of all of them. The MAC recommended a fully government-funded minimum pay rate for care workers above the National Living Wage. Labour wants to introduce sectoral bargaining to drive up pay and conditions. The Government has done none of these things. Instead, it has used immigration as a patch-up job. On 15 February, 2022, the Home Office made care workers eligible for a Health and Care visa and placed them on the shortage occupation list. This meant there was a low qualifying salary of just £20,960.
Between June 2022 and 2023, 60,000 foreign care workers arrived, together with 18,000 senior care workers. On average, they brought one immediate family member with them.
There are good reasons to be worried about this sudden rise in care visas. Workers are tied to their employer. If they leave the company, they lose the visa. That hands the firm a massive power advantage, allowing it to claw back the sponsorship money they paid to hire them and thereby reduce pay even further for those who are anyway on pitifully low salaries. The Unison trade union has recorded “shocking abuse” of workers. Professor Brian Bell of the MAC says there are “really bad employers doing quite dreadful things“.
But instead of doing anything about that, the Government is panicking about the numbers. Jenrick apparently wants to limit care workers to one dependent, or perhaps ban them from bringing any family members with them at all.
Notice the implicit disrespect of this proposal. Immigrants are not treated like real flesh-and-blood people, who have meaningful lives and relationships. They are just numbers, a problem to be solved, an egregious figure in an accounting sheet which is no longer convenient and must be manipulated into something more suitable.
Even if they don’t care about immigrants, they might at least bring themselves to care about the lives of Brits. What happens if Jenrick, Sunak and Braverman get their way and reduce numbers? The original problems with social care remain, because they have done nothing to solve them. So we will see even more people go without care, even worse care for those who do receive it and a continuation of the pass-through blockage which undermines the NHS.
Whether we’re an immigrant or a care user, we’re all just victims of a government which shows no interest in tackling the root causes of our problems. They use immigrants to patch up the consequences of their own labour market failure and then berate and dehumanise them for cleaning up their mess.
We need politicians who are ready to have an honest conversation about the British economy, the labour market and immigration. But there are precious few with the bravery to do that. Until there are, we will be stuck in this grim political dreamland, with policies designed to alleviate the Tory psychodrama rather than improve people’s lives.