Thread by @Con_Tomlinson

Keir Starmer announced the government's immigration white paper yesterday.

While it will reduce low-wage worker visas from certain routes, it also contains some less-publicised nasty surprises.

Here's a thread on the contents and consequences of Labour's latest policy changes🧵

For Skilled Worker visas:

Skilled workers must now provide proof of university-degree-level (RQF 6) qualifications.

The salary threshold will be raised to an unspecified amount — with the Immigration Salary List, exempting some from thresholds, to be abolished.

The number of occupations on the Temporary Shortage List will be reduced, and the ability to bring dependents restricted.

However, university degrees issued in the countries of origin are treated as equivalents to their British counterparts, despite being of inferior quality or often fraudulent. It will prove challenging to properly vet the quality of visa applicants and their credentials.

We also don’t know how much the new salary threshold will be raised to.

Fluency in English will be a requirement of all visa holders and dependents.

This follows a long campaign by former-Reform, now independent MP, @RupertLowe10, who discovered the cost of public sector translation services through Parliamentary questions.

In 2023, the NHS spent £100 million on translation services.

Jobcentres spent £3,420,480.

The Department for Work and Pensions spent £7.2 million explaining in 115 languages how Britain’s half-a-million foreign-born social housing and benefits claimants can gain more money from the taxpayer.

Over £7.5 billion a year is spent on benefits paid to those born outside Britain.

When Lowe told “literally a communist” Ash Sarkar, “I don't care, they should speak English”, and that all translation services should be scrapped, he was met with derision.

Now, it’s Labour government policy.

Not bad for the “Very Online Right”, eh?

The Health and Adult Social Care visa route will also be eliminated.

The previous government issued 269,999 visas between 2021 - 2024, but failed to fill thousands of vacancies.

Workers were outnumbered by 377,135 of their dependents, all of whom were net-costs to the taxpayer.

In 2024, Zimbabwean recipients of health and social care visas were outnumbered by their dependents 10-to-1; Nigerians, almost 4-to-1; Ghanaians, 2-to-1.

There were 21,102 Zimbabwean dependants for 5,107 workers, 29,625 Nigerian dependants for 7,926 workers and 11,249 Ghanaian dependants for 4,809 workers.

Sources:
cps.org.uk/research/here-…
telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/2…

The ability for foreign students to remain in Britain after their graduation will be reduced from 2 years to 18 months.

Those who arrived legally on work, study, or visitor visas from countries including Pakistan, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka will no longer be able to apply for asylum while in Britain — as 40,000 did in 2024 alone.

47% of asylum claims from visa holders are from students nearing the end of their expiry date.

White Paper is available here:
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6821aec3…

Ministers will also bring forward legislation to amend the Immigration Acts 2002 and 2014 to redefine the “exceptional circumstances” under which asylum applicants can appeal to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and frustrate their Home Office deportation orders.

BUT it is likely immigration lawyers will still be granted a wide berth in the interpretation of “exceptional circumstances” by activist judges, to keep foreign criminals in the country for reasons as absurd as their son's preference for British chicken nuggets.

After all, Starmer himself wrote the textbook on applying Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which subordinated Parliamentary sovereignty to Article 46 rulings by the European Court of Human Rights.

Leaving the jurisdiction of his treasured “International Law” is never an option, so when reconfiguring guidance doesn’t work, he’ll have nowhere else left to turn.

Also, hidden away in the White Paper is the plan to “explore reforms to allow a limited pool of UNHCR recognised refugees and displaced people living overseas to apply for employment through our existing sponsored worker routes where they have the skills to do so.”

In short, they plan to change the law to allow asylum seekers the legal right to work.

The prospect of employment while awaiting their asylum decision will act as a further draw for illegal immigrants to pay people smugglers to ferry them across the English Channel.

As Robert Jenrick has also pointed out, the UN recognises 123 million refugees worldwide — meaning this could become yet another avenue for untold numbers of migrants to claim a legal right to live in Britain.

Starmer posted on X shortly before his press conference that “The Tories ran an immigration system that relied on cheap foreign labour instead of investing in British workers. That betrayal ends now.”

He refers to the Boriswave: the tripling of net migration after Brexit, mainly from the third-world, because Boris Johnson’s government liberalised immigration laws against the advice of quango the Migration Advisory Council.

After setting the Skilled Worker visa salary threshold to less than the national median wage (£31,461) and lower than the minimum wage (£17,920) for new entrants, allowing primary recipients to bring limitless dependents, removing the requirement for foreign students to return home after completing their degree, and removing the requirement for British businesses to advertise jobs to British worker first, immigration soared to net 906,000 (gross 1.2 million) by 2023.

Most important is that the standard qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) settlement grants has been extended from five to ten years.

This means the Boriswave will no longer qualify for the right to remain in the UK, claim benefits and social housing, use the NHS free at the point of use, claim a state pension after 10 years of National Insurance contributions, and have an expedited path to British citizenship for both them and their descendents, as of next year.

The bill for this was calculated by @MalvernianKarl to be £234 billion, or £8,000 per taxpaying household, starting in 2026.

@sam_bidwell will be delighted.
adamsmith.org/blog/britains-…

The Conservatives, however, will need a new sales pitch.

Kemi Badenoch has committed to passing legislation to disbar the Human Rights Act (1998) and ECHR from all immigration cases — though not to repealing the Act, or leaving the ECHR.

The Tories also pledged to extend the qualifying period for ILR to 10 years, rather than the 15 recommended to them by Bidwell; and refused to restrict eligibility for ILR to persons of countries most likely to be net-tax contributors and culturally proximate to Britain.

They did, however, restrict ILR to those who had been net-contributors during their stay, and who committed no crimes.

Any migrants who arrive illegally, either by small boats across the Channel or overstaying a visa, would be automatically disqualified from claiming ILR even if their asylum claim was granted — leaving them open to the possibility of deportation.

However, now that Labour have promised to do most of this, they have rendered the Tories’ offering obsolete.

Perhaps there's a lesson here, about the risks of playing things too safe...

So, will these measures succeed?

Well, Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick alleges these measures will cut net migration by a meagre 50,000.

Home Office analysis suggests they will reduce the number of foreign workers and students coming to the UK by 98,000 a year.

Professor Brian Bell, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee, said Labour’s white paper could cause net migration to fall “under 300,000 and probably closer to 250,000 in the next few years”.

This is despite Home Office insiders’ estimation that net migration will rise from OBR projections of 315,000 – 400,000 per year to 525,000 every year.

Starmer condemned how “Brexit was used for that purpose… To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders” in a speech last November.

In yesterday’s speech, Starmer told the press:

“Until in 2023, it reached nearly 1 million, which is about the population of Birmingham, our second largest city. That’s not control – it’s chaos.

“And look, they must answer for themselves, but I don’t think you can do something like that by accident. It was a choice. A choice made even as they told you, told the country, they were doing the opposite. A one-nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control. Well, no more. Today, this [political content redacted] Government is shutting down the lab. The experiment is over. We will deliver what you have asked for – time and again – and we will take back control of our borders.”

But with new net migration figures due to release on 22 May, everyone is bracing themselves for news that Starmer has donned his lab-coat to continue that one-nation experiment.

gov.uk/government/spe…

There is a strain of anti-migration protectionism in the socialist left.

But Starmer has never been a part of it.

In “Immigration Law and Practice” in 1988, Starmer wrote that a “racist undercurrent … permeates all immigration law.”

Even in yesterday’s announcement, Starmer couldn’t help but peddle the fiction that mass immigration is an inextricable part of British history:

“Migration is part of Britain’s national story. We talked last week about the great rebuilding of this country after the war; migrants were part of that, and they make a massive contribution today. You will never hear me denigrate that.”

Note the sole example that Keir Starmer can give is the HMT Windrush, which docked unexpectedly at Tilbury on 22 June, 1948.

In the introduction to the white paper, it says:
“Immigration is important for Britain. For centuries people have come to this country to build a better life, contributing economically and culturally to our society and helping to rebuild our country after major shocks such as the Second World War.”

Our post-Macpherson Report antiracist mythology treats Windrush as the British equivalent of Plymouth Rock pilgrims, building settlements on a country reduced to rubble by the Blitz.

But they were economic migrants, enticed to windswept England from the Caribbean by the promise of well-paying jobs as bus conductors; not self-sacrificing benefactors who wanted to rebuild Britain out of the good of their hearts.

This history has since been rewritten to manufacture consent for unprecedented levels of migration, and the accommodation of foreign peoples and cultures as penance for the sins of racism, slavery, and empire.

If Starmer were to argue the anachronism that, before Windrush, Britain’s history was one of unbroken waves of migration, then he would have a hard time explaining how we have received more immigrants since the election of his mentor, Tony Blair, in 1997 than between the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the end of the Second World War.

He would find himself in the absurd position of arguing that invading armies like the Norman conquest and Viking invasions are indistinguishable from the Windrush or Boriswave as “immigrants”.

Those opposed to rapid demographic change, with no democratic mandate, may see it that way, but it isn’t the best sales pitch for its advocates to push.

It’s clear that Starmer is sprinting to keep up with the new immigration centre-ground occupied by insurgent party Reform UK.

Labour are still reeling from losing 187 seats and its sole council in May’s local elections, whereas Reform became the largest party in England at the local level.

Even so, Reform have been dragged rightward not by other parties, but by realising just how ready the voting public are for action on immigration.

Two-thirds of their voters’ chief concern was immigration at the local elections.

Having previously called mass deportations a "political impossibility", Nigel Farage announced a week before the local elections that a Reform government would appoint a Minister for Deportations with a mandate to remove every illegal immigrant in Britain.

Deputy Leader Richard Tice has suggested they might take their lead from governors Greg Abott and Ron DeSantis, and redistribute asylum seekers evicted from hotels and accommodation in Reform’s council districts within a 100 days to Green and Liberal Democrat-controlled areas.

In the midst of vociferous backlash among Reform’s supporters to Farage calling mass deportations "a very grave, dark and dangerous use of language" in March, Adam Wren commissioned polling which found that 99% of Reform voters support the removal of every single illegal immigrant in Britain.

Even 65% of Green voters support the deportation of foreign sex offenders.

Far from being the obsession of a “Very Online Right”, undoing the damage of mass immigration with mass deportations is now THE vote-winning position.

So, will Labour’s new white paper do enough to halt the rise of Reform, and lower immigration to become a non-issue?

Not as much as they hope.

Remember in 2023, after 136,000 student dependent visas were issued in 2022, the Sunak government banned them.

But the 80% fall in student dependent visas was nullified by a 50% rise in skilled worker dependent visas the following year, resulting in a total year-on-year reduction of only 20% (net 906,000 to net 728,000).

Tinkering around the margins will not deter the immigration industrial complex both at home and abroad from playing the system.

Furthermore, none of these measures address the reason why people oppose immigration.

As @epkaufm documented in Whiteshift (2018), economic arguments against immigration are often polite proxies for underlying cultural concerns, that people fear they would be called racist if they raised.

The anxieties animating Brexit, and the subsequent votes for Boris Johnson and Reform UK, were more about rapid demographic and cultural change than they were about economics or the sustainability of public services.

Starmer made the contradictory statement in yesterday’s speech that,

“Nations depend on rules – fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values. They guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to one another. Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.”

But Britons do not want a civil servant from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure the uninvited guests in their home abide by a “Community Cohesion strategy” that puts them on an equal footing to the homeowners.
They want the squatters evicted, and no more guests to be allowed in.

Despite saying he “gets it,” it’s clear that Starmer still sees Britain as an airport or retail park rather than a place belonging to British people.

For more analysis, you can read the following new post, with an audio narration for subscribers.
open.substack.com/pub/connortoml…