Betrayed voters deserve action now on the mass migration scandal
When I resigned as immigration minister, I refused to be yet another politician who broke their promises on migration. Having pushed the Government as far as I could within the confines of collective responsibility, I didn’t believe it would go any further. Six months on, with no new policy and our 2019 manifesto commitments looking more distant than ever, my reasoning has been proven right.
Fortunately, leaving government provides new opportunities to effect change. My colleagues and I came agonisingly close to strengthening the Rwanda Bill with amendments that seem more prescient by the week. I am now free to make the case for leaving the ECHR so we can secure our borders in this age of mass migration. And today, I release the report, Taking back Control, with Neil O’Brien MP and Karl Williams of the Centre for Policy Studies, detailing the failures of our legal migration system and setting out more than 30 policies to fix it.
Most could be delivered now. We urgently need to overhaul our bloated university sector, starting by rethinking the International Education Strategy, which sets the enormous and entirely arbitrary target of 600,000 international students a year. This has led to an explosion in low-quality courses at lower-tier universities: the 24 Russell Group institutions combined accounted for just a quarter of the increase in international student numbers between 2017/18 and 2021/22.
We now have a collection of universities more interested in the immigration rather than the education business. To shut this backdoor to the UK, we should scrap the graduate visa route, which enables students to stay on after their studies regardless of the type of job they find. Instead, graduates should have six months to find a job that meets the salary thresholds every other migrant in the labour market is subject to.
The health and social care visa has similarly ballooned beyond imagination. Despite this, the number of vacancies within the health sector remains high. The policy has been a complete failure. We should impose an immediate cap on health and care visas at roughly 30,000 and recruit from the domestic workforce by raising the minimum hourly wage in the care sector by 20-40p and by expanding the NHS workforce plan, training British doctors and nurses. While the Treasury will bear an initial cost, the long-term savings to the taxpayer will be significant as pressure on our capital stock is relieved.
Elsewhere, the Government should automatically index salary thresholds in line with inflation to end the in-built liberal bias. The opaque Immigration Salary List, which allows industries to rely upon a steady stream of cheap labour and avoid investing in technology, should be scrapped. And we desperately need a period of glasnost where the Government is transparent about the immigration data it holds on crime, the benefits bill and tax receipts.
Other proposals, like breaking up the Home Office into two – a Department for Border Security and Immigration Control, and a Department for Policing and National Security – will take longer. But having worked in the department for more than a year, it’s clear that, in its current formation, it isn’t working. We need to start afresh with a totally different culture, structure and far greater ministerial oversight.
Instead of banning smoking or regulating London’s pedicabs, the Government could use the time left in the parliamentary session to deliver the post-Brexit immigration system voters were promised.
We shouldn’t wait to save conservative policies for our manifesto when we are 20 points behind in the polls in an election year – that would be government by posturing and an abdication of duty. The Government has a solid majority and could deliver these today.
The local election results reaffirmed two clear trends, obvious to those of us who spend time on the doorsteps listening to voters. First, Conservative voters feel badly let down and are struggling to find reasons to back us. Second, we are haemorrhaging support to the Reform Party. This is primarily because of mass migration and the allied and growing problem of extremism, although clearly other factors are also at play.
In the precious time we have left before the election, reducing net migration to the 10,000s and delivering the highly-selective immigration system we call for in our report would be the single biggest thing the Government could do to win over these wavering voters. Rational, hard-headed analysis dictates that a vote for Reform at the general election would split the Right-wing vote and usher in a Labour government, with a big majority, who would undo these changes.
For many voters, belated action on immigration will be too little, too late. They are right to be angry – they have been systematically misled by politicians of all stripes. The post-Brexit immigration liberalisations were a particularly egregious betrayal, the consequences of which will be felt long into the future. But the policies I propose are nevertheless the right thing to do for the country, and the Government shouldn’t hesitate to implement them. It would be unforgivable if they did not.