Migration debate is now back to front
Many people who supported Brexit did so because they thought it would reduce immigration. Yet the most recent figures show the numbers arriving in the country to be higher than ever – higher, indeed, than at any time in our history.
Over the past 12 months, work visas are up 25 per cent to 239,987, family visas are up 49 per cent to 280,776 and student visas are up 52 per cent to 432,729. That is nearly one million visas granted. Some of this increase has been caused by arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong, but they represent only a small proportion. A few years ago such a large rise in immigration would have triggered a ferocious political argument, yet it has hardly featured as a subject among the recent succession of crises to embroil Boris Johnson.
Mr Johnson has always been more relaxed about immigration than many of his colleagues. He maintains that his support for Brexit was not motivated by a desire to reduce overall numbers – an ambition of his two immediate predecessors, though one not realised by either – but to reassert control over who could and could not come to the UK.
This is underpinned by a points-based system which will try to attract graduates from the world’s top universities by way of a new visa scheme, which Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, said would “put ability and talent first, not where someone comes from”.
However, many of the manpower problems facing the economy at the moment are not linked to high achievers but to the dearth of people in lower skilled jobs. This should be addressed from within the settled population where there has been a fall in the number of people working compared with before the pandemic. People have dropped out of the workforce not because of a want of jobs: vacancies exceed the number of those looking for work and the unemployment rate is the lowest since the 1970s. There has been an exodus of older workers and a sharp rise in people reporting long-term illnesses, trends that are worse in the UK than in other comparable countries.
Attracting high-value graduates is one thing, but the Government needs to give far more thought to what to do about the pressures facing sectors like retail, hospitality and construction as well as the NHS and social care. These labour shortages risk exacerbating the stagflationary tendencies already in evidence.