We must change our crazy policy on immigration
WHAT kind of a country has an immigration system which turns away qualified doctors while simultaneously putting out the welcome mat to Big Issue-sellers? Sadly, until yesterday, it was Britain.
The Government’s decision to relax visa restrictions on doctors and nurses was muchneeded. It is absurd that in a five-month period the NHS recruited but then had to turn away 2,360 doctors because the Home Office had refused to grant them visas on the grounds that an annual quota of 20,700 non-EU skilled workers had been filled. But we still have a long way to go before we have a sensible migration policy.
Yesterday’s decision will only affect doctors and nurses. Other skilled workers will remain bound to the annual quota. It won’t help, for example, the 1,600 computer specialists and engineers who were turned away between last December and this March in spite of having been offered jobs by firms desperate for their services.
The Government blathers on endlessly about how we need a “digital economy” to boost growth and then steps in to turn away overseas staff needed to help make it a reality. How utterly foolish can you get?
One thing, though, is for sure. We are never going to be able to develop a coherent migration policy until we leave the European Union. We have ended up with such a daft migration policy because of the Government’s impotence in controlling the entry of unskilled workers from Eastern Europe. With net migration running at more than 200,000 a year – as it has done almost continuously for the past 15 years, peaking at 332,000 in 2015 – the Government felt compelled to act.
PUBLIC services could not keep up with the arrivals and nor could our housing stock. The trouble is that under the rules of free movement the Government was powerless to deny entry to large numbers of unskilled workers from Eastern Europe, many of whom have been arriving with no offer of a job and little means of supporting themselves.
Theoretically EU countries are supposed to be able to deport the nationals of other member states if they do not have gainful employment but that is not how it has worked in practice. In 2012 a social security tribunal ruled that a Romanian Big Issue-seller was entitled to stay in Britain – and top up her earnings with benefits – because selling the newspaper counted as self-employment.
Within months it was reported that one in three Big Issue-sellers were Romanian. Moreover there was nothing to stop them and other very lightly employed citizens of EU states claiming welfare benefits paid for by British taxpayers. EU rules demand that all EU citizens are entitled to the same benefits as a country’s own citizens from the moment they arrive.
Unable to control migration from Eastern Europe the Cameron government turned to other desperate measures to try to hit its target of reducing net migration to no more than 100,000 a year. One of the results was the “hostile environment” which the Home Office disgracefully used to try to deport members of the Windrush generation and other non-EU citizens who had been living, working, paying taxes and in many cases raising families in Britain for decades.
Another result was the cap on skilled workers coming here from outside the EU, introduced in 2011 and set at 20,700 a year. For the first couple of years the cap was not reached but from 2015 onwards the Home Office started turning away highly skilled workers.
Yet still net migration remains a long, long way above the Government’s target. Although it has fallen from its peak, in the year to September 2017 it was still 244,000 – a city the size of Southampton every year. The Government has been starving the NHS and technology industries of much-needed staff while failing to bring down net migration to anything like the levels it promised.
Once we leave the EU, however, we will finally be able to devise a fair migration system which does not discriminate against non-EU citizens. We can have an Australian-style points system which favours those with graduate qualifications. We can go back to having special arrangements for lessskilled workers in particular industries, such as the defunct Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme which from 1945 until 2013 helped British farms secure the short-term labour they needed for harvest time.
ABOVE all there will be no reason for maintaining artificial quotas that are keeping skilled people out. For anyone offered a job in the NHS, obtaining a work permit ought to be a formality – subject only to vetting to make sure they are not a political or religious extremist.
It won’t be possible to devise our own migration policy unless we leave the EU single market – something MPs on both sides of the House of Commons have spent this week trying to prevent. Free movement, the EU has made clear, goes hand-inhand with membership of the single market.
In the political drama of Parliament it is easy to forget what is at stake concerning the various options for leaving the EU. The Prime Minister would do herself a favour by reminding MPs exactly why she reached the conclusion – laid out in her Lancaster House speech last year – that we must leave the single market as well as the customs union. The freedom to develop a fair, logical migration system which acts to boost our economy rather than drain our welfare budget should be top of the list.
‘Absurd the NHS had to turn away doctors’