Coming on top of what many saw as the performative cruelty of broadcasting deportation of “illegal” immigrants or putatively undocumented migrant workers which likely include victims of trafficking and the race to the bottom in the language and competitive posturing around the subject so encapsulated by PM Sir Keir Starmer’s taunting of the Conservatives for presiding over “an Open Borders experiment”, Labour Party migration policy in government has alarmed many and not just the usual suspects either. Labour peer David Blunkett, who as Home Secretary introduced citizenship ceremonies as a means of giving more significance to the acquisition of citizenship and strengthening social cohesion, questioned the Home Office guidance that has stated that people who have “made a dangerous journey will normally be refused refugee citizenship”[1]
The Home Office guidance on citizenship is part of the Border, Security, and Immigration Bill which earlier this month passed its Second Reading in the House of Commons. It is the current Labour Government’s alternative to Rishi Sunak’s Tory government widely condemned scheme for the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda which would have put the UK in breach of international treaty obligations and would have further traumatised the refugees subjected to it. It was also an expensive flop, reportedly costing £700m and just delivering four voluntary departures. It was primarily, if not exclusively, on those grounds that Keir Starmer abolished the scheme as one of the first acts of his premiership. Regrettably, bearing in mind Starmer’s background as a human rights lawyer, the PM remained silent on the intrinsically cruel and dehumanising nature of the scheme. More emphasis has been placed on tackling, quite validly, the criminal gangs operating the small boats business model of people smuggling model. But the just and logical twin track to that approach, the creation of safe routes for people wishing to claim asylum in Britain, has not been promised. Instead, there is the refusal of citizenship to people arriving by risky means such as small boats, thereby unlawfully, means disqualification under the Home Office test of whether a claimant is of “good character.” While this is not the same as the Conservative statute that forbade small boat passengers from even making asylum claims in the UK – and therefore violating UN refugee conventions, which emphasise that sanctuary entitlement is not conditional on means of arrival in a safe haven – it’s effect is to lock small boat arrivals into an administrative no-man’s land. It adds up to a narrowing of the differences between the Labour and Tory approaches to migration and asylum and an unspoken imperative to stymie the growth of Reform MP by colonising their discourse.[2] Sadly this has been part of a pattern across Europe with mainstream parties shifting the dial to ward off the far right wolf at the door, not grasping, particularly those of the centre-right that once such concessions are made, the end result is their cannibalisation.
A former senior advisor to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) highlights the perils of summoning opposition to slavery in the cause of immigration control. He argues that Theresa May’s support for the Modern Slavery Act and the 2014 protocol to the ILO’s forced labour convention (no. 29) had been linked to their weaponisation by anti-migration populism. This protocol requires victims of trafficking, even if they have been forced to perform illegal acts in their work, to be protected and compensated, not victimised further. So, the government cannot decry human trafficking by criminal gangs while violating their legal rights and dignity by parading them for gloating television views prior to deportation. He goes to one of the nubs of the migration debate; if governments really believe that trafficking by criminal gangs is the major motor behind the small boats “invasion”, then it can smash their business model by regularising the informal economy that provides their customer base by enforcement against unscrupulous employers who abuse workers, documented or undocumented, and by reopening routes for safe passage with its obligations under the 1951 UN refugee convention.[3]
Migration Myths
To cut through the thicket of myth, misinformation, magical thinking, and hysteria that surrounds, the work of Hein de Haas is an invaluable resource. Distilling three decades of empirical research into global migration patterns into his scholarly yet accessible tome How Migration Really Works[4], he explores and deconstructs twenty-two prevailing myths about migration. While space does not permit a full explanation and analysis of each myth; a few takeaways will suffice.
The first piece of received wisdom that De Haas takes issue with is that Migration is at an all-time high. Using the standard definition of an international migrant as a person who is living in a country other than their country of birth for a period of at least six to twelve months. By this definition and according to data from the United Nations Population Division, in 1960 there were about 93 million international migrants in the world. This number increased to 170 million in 2000 and then to an estimated 247 million in 2017. However, the world’s population has increased at a roughly equal pace, from about 3 billion in 1960 to 6.1 billion in 2000, and 7.6 million in 2017. Therefore, if the number of international migrants is expressed as a share of the world population, relative levels of migration have remained stable at around 3 per cent. Refugees represent between 7 and 12 per cent of all migrants in the world, which is equivalent to about 0.3 per cent of the world population. To turn that figure around about 97 per cent of the world population live in their native country despite the existence of huge global inequalities.[5]
Furthermore, and really importantly there has been a global migration reversal since the Second World War; namely the transformation of western Europe from the world’s main source of colonists and immigrants to a major destination of migrants. It is thus the nature of migration traffic rather than the numbers which explain the perception from a North American and Western European that immigration may appear to be at all-time high. Decolonisation in the two decades after the end of the Second World War, fast economic growth, and the establishment of welfare states during the Long Boom meant that Europeans lost interest in emigrating to America, Australia, and New Zealand. Full employment and fast-declining birth rates also meant labour shortages in various industries, and mining in Europe and so people from the rest of the world increasingly headed towards Western Europe. This often started with post-colonial migration from former colonies: from the Caribbean, South Asia and ethnic Indian populations living in East Africa to Britain; from the Maghreb and West Africa and from Indonesia and Suriname to the Netherlands. Consequently, there was a growing settlement of non-European origin demographics in Europe and North America leading to the perception that immigration is at an all-time high; particularly when viewed from the cities, neighbourhoods, and towns where immigrant communities are concentrated. But this idea, in De Hass’ view, reflects a Eurocentric perspective which views non-Western and people of colour immigration as problematic, but which does not factor in past European migration to Africa, Asia and elsewhere.[6]
But it is this perception that immigration levels are becoming uncontrollable and that the peace and harmony of host societies are being disturbed by the arrival of new and visibly and culturally different arrivals that are the animating constituents of the anxieties felt by many in the host populations. And to help us to understand these fears and why immigration pushes so many buttons in contemporary societies, it is necessary to go beyond purely statistical descriptions and legalistic definitions of migration to more personally resonant descriptions. There is no contradiction in refuting the myth that migration levels are at an all-time high while acknowledging the shock of the short to medium impact of, for example, the decision by the UK (and Ireland) in 2004 to allow, at one fell swoop, freedom of movement to all residents of EU accession counties from the Eastern European Visegrad region and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2016 to admit a million Syrian refugees. Both decisions were worthy exercises in their own right but their suddenness and mode of implementation did generate opposition from many, rightly or wrongly, concerned about the effects on jobs and community cohesion. The nativist elements of that backlash were arguably the major driver in Leave’s victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK and in the electoral performances of the far right AfD party in German who are expected to poll well in today’s Bundestag elections. It is often asked by opponents of mass migration “Who voted for it?” Leaving aside the constitutional issues as to whether the issue should by deliberated on by parliament or plebiscite; electoral contests in the West have increasingly become de facto referenda on migration.
In another magisterial study of the migrant experience, Sam Miller[7] borrows this broad definition of migration from the work of the psychologist Greg Madison, according to whom:
Complementary to that definition, is Miller’s contention that migration is now a signifier for a host of other contemporary issues affecting our lives and outlooks: identity, ethnicity, religion, ideas of home, patriotism, nostalgia, integration, multiculturalism, safety, terrorism, racism. It is so because migration is so fundamental to the human story; after all we are all the descendants of migrants.[9] Migration has always been a major developmental dynamic in the evolution of humanity; for peoples fleeing persecution, poverty and famine migration is often a story of painful loss but eventual emancipatory redemption; but at other times it has been a metaphor for massacre and despoilation – for example the expansion of western colonial empires.
Framing migration and the passions it arouses in such a philosophical framework thus helps is to understand the current nativist hostility to migration in Europe and the United States. To reframe the debate away from the perceived wisdoms and common sense that is dominating everyday conversation, I wish to look at one (of many) prevailing myths about migration – immigrants steal jobs and drive down wages.
They are Taking Our Jobs
The contention that immigrants take the jobs of natives and drive down wages’ rests on a causal relationship that politicians of all stripes make between the rise of immigration over the past half century and the decline in job security and real wages. The oft told tale is that because migrants are willing to work hard for lower pay and longer hours, immigration puts downward pressure on wages and increases job insecurity. This creates unfair competition for local workers, who are excluded from stable, well-paid jobs, forcing them to accept below par labour conditions.[10]
However, while it is true that lower-income earners have experienced erosion of job security and labour standards over the last four decades or so of globalisation and widening income and wealth inequalities; immigration plays a very negligible role in this. For the correlation between levels of immigration and levels of unemployment is negative, meaning that immigration rises during times of high growth and low unemployment and falls when unemployment goes up. Furthermore, immigration is a reaction to labour shortages rather than the cause of unemployment and wage stagnation. Immigration trails economic growth and unemployment, usually by six to twelve months due to the time lag between the emergence of labour shortages and the news about jobs to travel and the recruitment and registration of migrant workers. Thus, immigrants don’t steal jobs, they fill vacancies. Immigration is primarily a response to labour shortages caused by a dwindling supply of local workers able and willing to do manual jobs in agriculture, construction, cleaning, domestic care, and other services. Labour shortages are because there are simply not enough local workers who wish to do such jobs as picking fruit and vegetables in the field. Attempts to persuade local workers to do them whether by the resurrection in 2019 of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) abolished in 2013 or the ‘Pick for Britain’ launched in May 2020 during lockdown failed.[11]
They failed because in the words of one agricultural employer the low supply of local workers was ‘the effect of a gradual transition to a service-based economy in the UK’ and that ‘due to lifestyle changes … many Britons are not cut out for the hard graft of farm work.’ Such statements are backed up by the fact that nine in ten seasonal agricultural workers in Britain are EU immigrants.[12]
At the end of the day, the real causes of job insecurity and precarious employment are policy decisions taken by governments following neo-liberal economic orthodoxies that deregulated labour markets; eroded trade union rights and power; reduced rights at work; depressed wages and widened inequality, not immigration..[13] Surely this should be the departure point for a progressive narrative on migration encompassing rights and justice for workers no matter their ethnicity. It should feature the case of ‘Ben,’ a 26-year-old Uzbek, one of dozens of migrant workers who claim not have been paid after their employer linked their wages to the amount of crops picked. They were just some of the 45,000 workers who came to Britain last years from overseas to work temporarily in UK agriculture on the seasonal worker visa introduced in 2019 to address Brexit-related labour shortages. The Worker Support Network (WSC), a Scotland-based NGO which supports seasonal workers across the UK, said that of the 99 workers who contacted them last year, more than half of then reported non-payment due to the measurement of product picked resulting in large chunks of time – such as that spent moving between workstations or in team meetings – being unaccounted for and unpaid.[14]
While all seasonal workers must be paid at least the national living wage in England, or the agricultural minimum wage in Scotland, the WSC reports that the use of targets and the dense payslips made it difficult for workers to decipher hourly pay. The scale of the issue may likely be far greater as seasonal workers are often afraid to raise concerns due to their insecure status. The WSC, along with the TUC, Anti-Slavery International have now written to the Low Pay Commission to request that they call for an HMRC investigation into the issue.[15]
Another injustice concerns the March 2024 rules banning new migrant care workers from bringing dependants[16]. It is fair to say that without generations of immigrant labour from the Windrush Generations from the Caribbean onwards, the NHS could barely function from consultants at the apex of the service through nurses on the wards right down to domiciliary staff. Any such restrictions are bound to have detrimental effects on the NHS. But what is less well-known thousands of health and care workers who arrived before this date have also been prevented from bringing their children – most of them single mothers. For a report published on 22 January by Action for Southern Africa and Women of Zimbabwe has revealed that thousands of single mothers, from Zimbabwe and elsewhere, settled into their jobs, only to be denied visas for their children waiting back home to join them. These Home Office refusals are based on the concept of “sole responsibility” which is a creation of the UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), and which is very difficult for single mothers to prove, as it extends further than the internationally recognised notion of “sole custody.” Consequently, these mothers, separated from their children for years, have to make multiple costly visa applications and in the process have to deal with lack of clarity about which documents the UKVI will accept as proof, inconsistent application of its own guidelines, and evidence of ‘hostile environment’ tactics to cause in decision-making. These agencies document the case of a mother from Zimbabwe separated from her two daughters for almost two years who had to make six applications before being granted the visas (three for each child). They document eight similar cases in their report, but thousands of children remain in limbo.[17] Such are the anecdotes of the institutional racism that lie at the heart of many Home Office migration decisions.
Another starting point for a progressive narrative on migration and labour is the warning by experts that the native populations of the continent of Europe is expected to fall sharply over the next century in an era of low births. Ageing societies deprived of the benefits of immigrant labour will thus face a plethora of economic challenges as workforces’ contract and care burdens increase.[18]
The latest projections by Eurostat, the EU’s official statistics agency, suggests that the bloc’s population will be 6% smaller by 2100 based on current trends - falling to 419 million from 447 million but without immigration it projects a population fall of more a third, to 295 million by 2100. The agency’s baseline projections assume countries will maintain their average net migration levels of the past 20 years. However, when this assumption is left out, Italy, France, and Germany, which has experienced electoral surges for far-right, anti-immigration parties would face big population dips in zero-immigration scenario. Italy, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe would see its population more than halve by the end of the century without immigration. Zero immigration scenarios would see Germany’s population shrinking from 83 to 53 million and in France from 68 to 59 million. Not only would populations plummet in zero immigration scenarios but would become older as the number of working-age people fell relative to the working age population. Today, 21% of the EU population is 65 or other. In Eurostat’s baseline scenario, this proportion rises to 32% by 2100, but in the agency’s zero-immigration scenario, it increases to 36%.[19] In a zero-immigration scenario, tax burdens, already high in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, will rise in inverse proportion to sluggish rates of growth and the health and social care industries will become increasingly important – sectors which are of course currently highly dependent on immigrant doctors or nurses.
While immigration may not be the silver bullet or Europe’s demographic challenges, John Springford, an associate felloe at the Centre for European Reform thinktank, does opine that “those countries that manage to hold the line against demands to cut working-age immigration will be in a stronger position economically in the long run.”[20] What most definitely should not be on any progressive agenda, are the clarion calls being expressed by right-wing culture warriors such as Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, and the former Tory MP, Miriam Cates for women to have more children and to be incentivised accordingly through financial payments as in Victor Orban’s illiberal democracy in Hungary. Such calls were never an explicit part of the agenda of the pro-life/anti-abortion movements certainly in the British Isles and resonate horribly with the pronatalist social policies of totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and Ceausescu’s Romania.
An alternative to the grandstanding Smash the Gangs rhetoric, the performative cruelty of televising deportation of irregular migrants and the sneaky introduction of deprivations of citizenships for irregular arrivals by the Home Office, is for progressives to site immigration policy within a wider. critique of contemporary capitalism that speaks to those “left behind” by globalisation. Writing about the communitarian, “left-conservative” Blue Labour movement, Juliam Coman writes about how it can speak to the blue-collar leave vote in the EU referendum that was such an expression of the desire for rupture with a globalised capitalism that had undermined the power and agency of the western working class. Uncomfortably for those of left-liberal, Remain persuasions, it also reflected a latent perception that compassionate “one world” social liberalism coexisted happily with a callous economic version; one that had stripped people and places of dignity, status, and self-esteem.[21]
As Keir Starmer seeks to detach blue-collar voters from the Get Brexit Done coalition of 2019 in order to recover its lost working class audience in abandoned towns nostalgic for a vanjshed sense of community, how to address their concerns about immigration without appearing Farage-lite, an example from a major recent victory against nascent fascism provides a possible model - the defeat and vanquishing of the British National Party (BNP) and its leader Nick Griffin in the constituency of Barking and Dagenham in the General Election of 2010 and the simultaneous Borough Council elections. There was a real fear that Griffin, who in the previous year had won a seat in elections to the European Parliament, would win and that the BNP would take control of the Council. In the end, he was convincingly beaten by Labour grandee Margaret Hodge and the BNP lost all their council seats.
The Home Office guidance on citizenship is part of the Border, Security, and Immigration Bill which earlier this month passed its Second Reading in the House of Commons. It is the current Labour Government’s alternative to Rishi Sunak’s Tory government widely condemned scheme for the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda which would have put the UK in breach of international treaty obligations and would have further traumatised the refugees subjected to it. It was also an expensive flop, reportedly costing £700m and just delivering four voluntary departures. It was primarily, if not exclusively, on those grounds that Keir Starmer abolished the scheme as one of the first acts of his premiership. Regrettably, bearing in mind Starmer’s background as a human rights lawyer, the PM remained silent on the intrinsically cruel and dehumanising nature of the scheme. More emphasis has been placed on tackling, quite validly, the criminal gangs operating the small boats business model of people smuggling model. But the just and logical twin track to that approach, the creation of safe routes for people wishing to claim asylum in Britain, has not been promised. Instead, there is the refusal of citizenship to people arriving by risky means such as small boats, thereby unlawfully, means disqualification under the Home Office test of whether a claimant is of “good character.” While this is not the same as the Conservative statute that forbade small boat passengers from even making asylum claims in the UK – and therefore violating UN refugee conventions, which emphasise that sanctuary entitlement is not conditional on means of arrival in a safe haven – it’s effect is to lock small boat arrivals into an administrative no-man’s land. It adds up to a narrowing of the differences between the Labour and Tory approaches to migration and asylum and an unspoken imperative to stymie the growth of Reform MP by colonising their discourse.[2] Sadly this has been part of a pattern across Europe with mainstream parties shifting the dial to ward off the far right wolf at the door, not grasping, particularly those of the centre-right that once such concessions are made, the end result is their cannibalisation.
A former senior advisor to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) highlights the perils of summoning opposition to slavery in the cause of immigration control. He argues that Theresa May’s support for the Modern Slavery Act and the 2014 protocol to the ILO’s forced labour convention (no. 29) had been linked to their weaponisation by anti-migration populism. This protocol requires victims of trafficking, even if they have been forced to perform illegal acts in their work, to be protected and compensated, not victimised further. So, the government cannot decry human trafficking by criminal gangs while violating their legal rights and dignity by parading them for gloating television views prior to deportation. He goes to one of the nubs of the migration debate; if governments really believe that trafficking by criminal gangs is the major motor behind the small boats “invasion”, then it can smash their business model by regularising the informal economy that provides their customer base by enforcement against unscrupulous employers who abuse workers, documented or undocumented, and by reopening routes for safe passage with its obligations under the 1951 UN refugee convention.[3]
Migration Myths
To cut through the thicket of myth, misinformation, magical thinking, and hysteria that surrounds, the work of Hein de Haas is an invaluable resource. Distilling three decades of empirical research into global migration patterns into his scholarly yet accessible tome How Migration Really Works[4], he explores and deconstructs twenty-two prevailing myths about migration. While space does not permit a full explanation and analysis of each myth; a few takeaways will suffice.
The first piece of received wisdom that De Haas takes issue with is that Migration is at an all-time high. Using the standard definition of an international migrant as a person who is living in a country other than their country of birth for a period of at least six to twelve months. By this definition and according to data from the United Nations Population Division, in 1960 there were about 93 million international migrants in the world. This number increased to 170 million in 2000 and then to an estimated 247 million in 2017. However, the world’s population has increased at a roughly equal pace, from about 3 billion in 1960 to 6.1 billion in 2000, and 7.6 million in 2017. Therefore, if the number of international migrants is expressed as a share of the world population, relative levels of migration have remained stable at around 3 per cent. Refugees represent between 7 and 12 per cent of all migrants in the world, which is equivalent to about 0.3 per cent of the world population. To turn that figure around about 97 per cent of the world population live in their native country despite the existence of huge global inequalities.[5]
Furthermore, and really importantly there has been a global migration reversal since the Second World War; namely the transformation of western Europe from the world’s main source of colonists and immigrants to a major destination of migrants. It is thus the nature of migration traffic rather than the numbers which explain the perception from a North American and Western European that immigration may appear to be at all-time high. Decolonisation in the two decades after the end of the Second World War, fast economic growth, and the establishment of welfare states during the Long Boom meant that Europeans lost interest in emigrating to America, Australia, and New Zealand. Full employment and fast-declining birth rates also meant labour shortages in various industries, and mining in Europe and so people from the rest of the world increasingly headed towards Western Europe. This often started with post-colonial migration from former colonies: from the Caribbean, South Asia and ethnic Indian populations living in East Africa to Britain; from the Maghreb and West Africa and from Indonesia and Suriname to the Netherlands. Consequently, there was a growing settlement of non-European origin demographics in Europe and North America leading to the perception that immigration is at an all-time high; particularly when viewed from the cities, neighbourhoods, and towns where immigrant communities are concentrated. But this idea, in De Hass’ view, reflects a Eurocentric perspective which views non-Western and people of colour immigration as problematic, but which does not factor in past European migration to Africa, Asia and elsewhere.[6]
But it is this perception that immigration levels are becoming uncontrollable and that the peace and harmony of host societies are being disturbed by the arrival of new and visibly and culturally different arrivals that are the animating constituents of the anxieties felt by many in the host populations. And to help us to understand these fears and why immigration pushes so many buttons in contemporary societies, it is necessary to go beyond purely statistical descriptions and legalistic definitions of migration to more personally resonant descriptions. There is no contradiction in refuting the myth that migration levels are at an all-time high while acknowledging the shock of the short to medium impact of, for example, the decision by the UK (and Ireland) in 2004 to allow, at one fell swoop, freedom of movement to all residents of EU accession counties from the Eastern European Visegrad region and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2016 to admit a million Syrian refugees. Both decisions were worthy exercises in their own right but their suddenness and mode of implementation did generate opposition from many, rightly or wrongly, concerned about the effects on jobs and community cohesion. The nativist elements of that backlash were arguably the major driver in Leave’s victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK and in the electoral performances of the far right AfD party in German who are expected to poll well in today’s Bundestag elections. It is often asked by opponents of mass migration “Who voted for it?” Leaving aside the constitutional issues as to whether the issue should by deliberated on by parliament or plebiscite; electoral contests in the West have increasingly become de facto referenda on migration.
In another magisterial study of the migrant experience, Sam Miller[7] borrows this broad definition of migration from the work of the psychologist Greg Madison, according to whom:
a migrant is someone who has moved from one culture to another, where the second [culture] is experienced as significantly different from the fist, and for a significant duration that the person engages in daily activities and is challenged to undergo some adjustment to the new place.[8]
Complementary to that definition, is Miller’s contention that migration is now a signifier for a host of other contemporary issues affecting our lives and outlooks: identity, ethnicity, religion, ideas of home, patriotism, nostalgia, integration, multiculturalism, safety, terrorism, racism. It is so because migration is so fundamental to the human story; after all we are all the descendants of migrants.[9] Migration has always been a major developmental dynamic in the evolution of humanity; for peoples fleeing persecution, poverty and famine migration is often a story of painful loss but eventual emancipatory redemption; but at other times it has been a metaphor for massacre and despoilation – for example the expansion of western colonial empires.
Framing migration and the passions it arouses in such a philosophical framework thus helps is to understand the current nativist hostility to migration in Europe and the United States. To reframe the debate away from the perceived wisdoms and common sense that is dominating everyday conversation, I wish to look at one (of many) prevailing myths about migration – immigrants steal jobs and drive down wages.
They are Taking Our Jobs
The contention that immigrants take the jobs of natives and drive down wages’ rests on a causal relationship that politicians of all stripes make between the rise of immigration over the past half century and the decline in job security and real wages. The oft told tale is that because migrants are willing to work hard for lower pay and longer hours, immigration puts downward pressure on wages and increases job insecurity. This creates unfair competition for local workers, who are excluded from stable, well-paid jobs, forcing them to accept below par labour conditions.[10]
However, while it is true that lower-income earners have experienced erosion of job security and labour standards over the last four decades or so of globalisation and widening income and wealth inequalities; immigration plays a very negligible role in this. For the correlation between levels of immigration and levels of unemployment is negative, meaning that immigration rises during times of high growth and low unemployment and falls when unemployment goes up. Furthermore, immigration is a reaction to labour shortages rather than the cause of unemployment and wage stagnation. Immigration trails economic growth and unemployment, usually by six to twelve months due to the time lag between the emergence of labour shortages and the news about jobs to travel and the recruitment and registration of migrant workers. Thus, immigrants don’t steal jobs, they fill vacancies. Immigration is primarily a response to labour shortages caused by a dwindling supply of local workers able and willing to do manual jobs in agriculture, construction, cleaning, domestic care, and other services. Labour shortages are because there are simply not enough local workers who wish to do such jobs as picking fruit and vegetables in the field. Attempts to persuade local workers to do them whether by the resurrection in 2019 of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) abolished in 2013 or the ‘Pick for Britain’ launched in May 2020 during lockdown failed.[11]
They failed because in the words of one agricultural employer the low supply of local workers was ‘the effect of a gradual transition to a service-based economy in the UK’ and that ‘due to lifestyle changes … many Britons are not cut out for the hard graft of farm work.’ Such statements are backed up by the fact that nine in ten seasonal agricultural workers in Britain are EU immigrants.[12]
At the end of the day, the real causes of job insecurity and precarious employment are policy decisions taken by governments following neo-liberal economic orthodoxies that deregulated labour markets; eroded trade union rights and power; reduced rights at work; depressed wages and widened inequality, not immigration..[13] Surely this should be the departure point for a progressive narrative on migration encompassing rights and justice for workers no matter their ethnicity. It should feature the case of ‘Ben,’ a 26-year-old Uzbek, one of dozens of migrant workers who claim not have been paid after their employer linked their wages to the amount of crops picked. They were just some of the 45,000 workers who came to Britain last years from overseas to work temporarily in UK agriculture on the seasonal worker visa introduced in 2019 to address Brexit-related labour shortages. The Worker Support Network (WSC), a Scotland-based NGO which supports seasonal workers across the UK, said that of the 99 workers who contacted them last year, more than half of then reported non-payment due to the measurement of product picked resulting in large chunks of time – such as that spent moving between workstations or in team meetings – being unaccounted for and unpaid.[14]
While all seasonal workers must be paid at least the national living wage in England, or the agricultural minimum wage in Scotland, the WSC reports that the use of targets and the dense payslips made it difficult for workers to decipher hourly pay. The scale of the issue may likely be far greater as seasonal workers are often afraid to raise concerns due to their insecure status. The WSC, along with the TUC, Anti-Slavery International have now written to the Low Pay Commission to request that they call for an HMRC investigation into the issue.[15]
Another injustice concerns the March 2024 rules banning new migrant care workers from bringing dependants[16]. It is fair to say that without generations of immigrant labour from the Windrush Generations from the Caribbean onwards, the NHS could barely function from consultants at the apex of the service through nurses on the wards right down to domiciliary staff. Any such restrictions are bound to have detrimental effects on the NHS. But what is less well-known thousands of health and care workers who arrived before this date have also been prevented from bringing their children – most of them single mothers. For a report published on 22 January by Action for Southern Africa and Women of Zimbabwe has revealed that thousands of single mothers, from Zimbabwe and elsewhere, settled into their jobs, only to be denied visas for their children waiting back home to join them. These Home Office refusals are based on the concept of “sole responsibility” which is a creation of the UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), and which is very difficult for single mothers to prove, as it extends further than the internationally recognised notion of “sole custody.” Consequently, these mothers, separated from their children for years, have to make multiple costly visa applications and in the process have to deal with lack of clarity about which documents the UKVI will accept as proof, inconsistent application of its own guidelines, and evidence of ‘hostile environment’ tactics to cause in decision-making. These agencies document the case of a mother from Zimbabwe separated from her two daughters for almost two years who had to make six applications before being granted the visas (three for each child). They document eight similar cases in their report, but thousands of children remain in limbo.[17] Such are the anecdotes of the institutional racism that lie at the heart of many Home Office migration decisions.
Another starting point for a progressive narrative on migration and labour is the warning by experts that the native populations of the continent of Europe is expected to fall sharply over the next century in an era of low births. Ageing societies deprived of the benefits of immigrant labour will thus face a plethora of economic challenges as workforces’ contract and care burdens increase.[18]
The latest projections by Eurostat, the EU’s official statistics agency, suggests that the bloc’s population will be 6% smaller by 2100 based on current trends - falling to 419 million from 447 million but without immigration it projects a population fall of more a third, to 295 million by 2100. The agency’s baseline projections assume countries will maintain their average net migration levels of the past 20 years. However, when this assumption is left out, Italy, France, and Germany, which has experienced electoral surges for far-right, anti-immigration parties would face big population dips in zero-immigration scenario. Italy, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe would see its population more than halve by the end of the century without immigration. Zero immigration scenarios would see Germany’s population shrinking from 83 to 53 million and in France from 68 to 59 million. Not only would populations plummet in zero immigration scenarios but would become older as the number of working-age people fell relative to the working age population. Today, 21% of the EU population is 65 or other. In Eurostat’s baseline scenario, this proportion rises to 32% by 2100, but in the agency’s zero-immigration scenario, it increases to 36%.[19] In a zero-immigration scenario, tax burdens, already high in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, will rise in inverse proportion to sluggish rates of growth and the health and social care industries will become increasingly important – sectors which are of course currently highly dependent on immigrant doctors or nurses.
While immigration may not be the silver bullet or Europe’s demographic challenges, John Springford, an associate felloe at the Centre for European Reform thinktank, does opine that “those countries that manage to hold the line against demands to cut working-age immigration will be in a stronger position economically in the long run.”[20] What most definitely should not be on any progressive agenda, are the clarion calls being expressed by right-wing culture warriors such as Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, and the former Tory MP, Miriam Cates for women to have more children and to be incentivised accordingly through financial payments as in Victor Orban’s illiberal democracy in Hungary. Such calls were never an explicit part of the agenda of the pro-life/anti-abortion movements certainly in the British Isles and resonate horribly with the pronatalist social policies of totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, and Ceausescu’s Romania.
An alternative to the grandstanding Smash the Gangs rhetoric, the performative cruelty of televising deportation of irregular migrants and the sneaky introduction of deprivations of citizenships for irregular arrivals by the Home Office, is for progressives to site immigration policy within a wider. critique of contemporary capitalism that speaks to those “left behind” by globalisation. Writing about the communitarian, “left-conservative” Blue Labour movement, Juliam Coman writes about how it can speak to the blue-collar leave vote in the EU referendum that was such an expression of the desire for rupture with a globalised capitalism that had undermined the power and agency of the western working class. Uncomfortably for those of left-liberal, Remain persuasions, it also reflected a latent perception that compassionate “one world” social liberalism coexisted happily with a callous economic version; one that had stripped people and places of dignity, status, and self-esteem.[21]
As Keir Starmer seeks to detach blue-collar voters from the Get Brexit Done coalition of 2019 in order to recover its lost working class audience in abandoned towns nostalgic for a vanjshed sense of community, how to address their concerns about immigration without appearing Farage-lite, an example from a major recent victory against nascent fascism provides a possible model - the defeat and vanquishing of the British National Party (BNP) and its leader Nick Griffin in the constituency of Barking and Dagenham in the General Election of 2010 and the simultaneous Borough Council elections. There was a real fear that Griffin, who in the previous year had won a seat in elections to the European Parliament, would win and that the BNP would take control of the Council. In the end, he was convincingly beaten by Labour grandee Margaret Hodge and the BNP lost all their council seats.
One of the lies that the BNP spread was that the Council was prioritising social housing for African refugees over local people. Eschewing both the earnest “No Pasaran” sloganizing of young anti-fascist Labour activists which ran the risk of alienating local electors and of seeming to give racism respectability as Hodge has appeared to do previously when she defended ‘the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family' grassroots Labour attacked the exploitative landlords not the migrants and pursued them to clean up their houses of multiple occupation and their gardens. They orientated the council towards delivery and meeting people’s needs and values.[22] But this should also be accompanied by rebuttal of the gratuitous lies spread by the far right about migrants coming for ‘cheap money’ and to claim full board at hotels at taxpayer’s expense.
References
[1] Union ally of PM opposes refugee citizenship bar. Guardian, 17 February 2025.
[2] Asylum Having repudiated Tory policy, Labour is walking into the same political trap. The Guardian 13 February 2025.
[3] Simon Steyne Former senior adviser on fundamental rights at work, International Labour Organisation “Why Labour’s stance on migrants will backfire. Guardian Letters, 13 February 2025.
[4] Hein de Hass (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Viking Penguin.
[5] Ibid pp.17-19
[6] Ibid, pp.19-23
[7] Sam Miller (2023) Migration. The Story of Us All. London : Abacus
[8] Miller, p.5
[9] Ibid, p.3
[10] Ibid, p.129
[11] Ibid, pp. 131-41.
[12] Ibid, p.142
[13] Ibid, p.144
[14] Eve Livingston ‘Exploitation’ of migrant farm workers paid for picks. The Observer. 23 February 2025 p.18
[15] Ibid.
[16] John Harris Immigrants are the backbone of the NHS. I’ve seen it up close. The Guardian, 17th February 2025.
[17] Tricia Sibbons, Director, Action for Southern Africa and Patricia Chinyoka, Founder, Women of Zimbabwe Migrant health and care workers deserve better. Guardian Letters 24 February 2025.
[18] Alex Clark EU faces economic shocks as rise of far right threatens to drive population decline Guardian 19 February 2025 p.24.
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid
[21] Julian Conan Back from exile – and ready to help Labour repel Faragism, Guardian. Opinion 21st February 2025 p.3.
[22] Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund (2025) GET IN. The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer. Lindon: The Bodley Head.
[1] Union ally of PM opposes refugee citizenship bar. Guardian, 17 February 2025.
[2] Asylum Having repudiated Tory policy, Labour is walking into the same political trap. The Guardian 13 February 2025.
[3] Simon Steyne Former senior adviser on fundamental rights at work, International Labour Organisation “Why Labour’s stance on migrants will backfire. Guardian Letters, 13 February 2025.
[4] Hein de Hass (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Viking Penguin.
[5] Ibid pp.17-19
[6] Ibid, pp.19-23
[7] Sam Miller (2023) Migration. The Story of Us All. London : Abacus
[8] Miller, p.5
[9] Ibid, p.3
[10] Ibid, p.129
[11] Ibid, pp. 131-41.
[12] Ibid, p.142
[13] Ibid, p.144
[14] Eve Livingston ‘Exploitation’ of migrant farm workers paid for picks. The Observer. 23 February 2025 p.18
[15] Ibid.
[16] John Harris Immigrants are the backbone of the NHS. I’ve seen it up close. The Guardian, 17th February 2025.
[17] Tricia Sibbons, Director, Action for Southern Africa and Patricia Chinyoka, Founder, Women of Zimbabwe Migrant health and care workers deserve better. Guardian Letters 24 February 2025.
[18] Alex Clark EU faces economic shocks as rise of far right threatens to drive population decline Guardian 19 February 2025 p.24.
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid
[21] Julian Conan Back from exile – and ready to help Labour repel Faragism, Guardian. Opinion 21st February 2025 p.3.
[22] Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund (2025) GET IN. The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer. Lindon: The Bodley Head.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
1950 - 1997 , UK net migration was zero . Since , it has averaged 400 K p a & a record amount is paid annually in welfare benefits to people of working age . During the same time , the cost of housing has quintupled & 70 % of residents in London prisons are foreign nationals . Gullible Ireland has followed the same path , with 40 % of murder convictions since 2022 accruing to foreigners . A 72 yr old Nigerian woman living in Cork ( for 15 yrs ) was found murdered yesterday , the person to be charged is believed to be a close relative . Rinse & repeat . Matt Goodwin provides the clearest analysis of the negatives that limitless immigration ( often from those who conveniently arrive with zero I D ) gift to a society .
ReplyDeleteRed Ron, as I will explain in a future article migrants are net contributors to host economies. Housing shortages are due to the incentivising of home ownership and the refusal of the state to provide social housing.
ReplyDeleteI will also show that migration is not responsible for increased crime in host societies as first generation migrants at any rate do try and keep their heads down.
ReplyDeleteDon't bother . I have an M SC degree in Economics & am capable of analysing & parsing the facts . Milton Friedman summed it up best - You can have limitless immigration or a welfare state , impossible to have both .
ReplyDeletebut we don't seem to have limitless immigration. Societies governed on a nation state basis would not survive if they had limitless immigration.
DeleteMilton Friedman had an ideological preference not for people but for entrepreneurs. What he called the Miracle Of Chile was rooted in massive repression and extra judicial executions.
I guess it takes some commitment to attain Masters level in economics. I found it very dry - always reminded me of law. Never any good at maths, economics was a subject I only ever flirted with.
# 160 k p a ( & rising ) immigrants in a country of just 5 million is the highest per capita of any country in the western world . The loony left ( S D , S F , Lab etc want to dismantle our few remaining border controls ; Ireland is @ a tipping point thanks to people traversing the globe & passing through numerous countries before claiming asylum here . We are increasingly the dumping ground for the rest of Europe . As for economics , I did it on my own @ leaving cert level , it was the only subject from 7 that I got an A in & I was the only one in the school ( despite their being 50 pupils doing it ) to hit the top grade . Did it's first cousin ( Biz org ) for two yrs with a crap teacher & only got a C . Met a few people over the yrs who also did subjects ( history , applied maths , accounting ) by themselves & also obtained A grades . The priests who ran my school were so embarrassed by the crap leaving cert results , they got the housekeeper to give out the envelopes while they went into hiding ! The full time careers officer was a priest who never came near us during my five yrs there . His only unction was to pick up a fat cheque . L F C for the Prem ! # 13 POINTS CLEAR
ReplyDeleteThat is still a long way off unlimited immigration. SF might be looney but they are hardly left.
DeleteI don't see any party wanting open borders other than perhaps PBP.
How can any society sustain open borders and remain a coherent entity. There would be no point in holding a census every ten years because the information obtained would be redundant within a month.
I'm something of a globalist, feeling people should be able to live where they want but in the real world it simply does not work like that. National governments organise on a national basis.
That was no mean achievement to get the results you did. You obviously had an aptitude for economics, something I never had.
I enjoyed studying alone. In the areas I studied there wasn't much opportunity to work collectively.