Immigration white paper part 2: unsettled status

It has been an odd week - depressing at times - watching the Prime Minister lurch ever further to the right. Despite saying that he didn’t want to make his latest changes about politics - that he was reforming the immigration system because it was “the right thing to do” - the entire week has been dominated by nothing but that.

Between the “island of strangers” speech and his “embarrassing” trip to Albania, few media outlets and commentators are focusing on the substance of the white paper and what it will mean for hundreds of thousands of people - and for British families and communities, too. Maybe that was No 10’s game plan: blindside people with some poorly-chosen language, dog whistle as loudly as you possibly can, and maybe nobody will hear what it is they're actually proposing.

Alongside care workers and international students (which I've written about here), the other group at the sharp end of all this is those already in Britain who are on a route to settlement. They will now have to wait double the amount of time to become a British citizen, putting us out of step with almost every other high-income country in the world.

Starmer says he wants people who are “committed to integration”, yet an estimated 1.5 million of them will now need to wait a decade before they can secure indefinite leave to remain and move forward with their lives. Most will have to find £20,000 or more to cover visa costs, healthcare surcharges, English language tests, Life in the UK tests, naturalisation itself and the other paperwork they'll need - all going into the Home Office coffers.

Many people will be pushed into a more precarious financial position as a result of this change. Some may even be driven into poverty and destitution, made more vulnerable to exploitation. For five more years at least, they won't have support from the state or access to benefits and it may take its toll on their mental health, putting greater strain on public services. They could have chosen to go elsewhere if they had known that the government would move the goalposts - but now it is too late. In other words, the changes will mean those on the route to settlement are less likely to integrate; the opposite to what the government claims it wants. It is fundamentally unjust.

The higher bar for English language skills is not, in theory, a bad idea. Adult dependents of workers and students will be able to come here and find work more easily if they can speak some basic English, and it makes sense to encourage people to progress those skills. But it may also divide families, forcing spouses, children and parents to live apart for longer until they can attain the correct level. According to the Oxford Migration Observatory, nine out of ten migrants speak good English, anyway. And the tests are not exactly foolproof: as I wrote in my book, a South African man was denied a visa to reunite with his wife - an NHS consultant anaesthetist who has cared for critically-ill children for over twenty years - because the Home Office said he couldn't prove an adequate level of English. He is an English university lecturer with a degree in English literature.

Meanwhile, Labour have said they will axe the overseas care worker route, even though the number of visas issued is already down by 80%. Care workers will now need to be hired from a pool of people already in the country without work, or from within the local community. That's despite providers repeatedly trying and failing to attract British recruits. Clearly their back-breaking work is not high-skilled enough to be included on the list of professionals who will be “fast-tracked” to citizenship.

One question that keeps coming up is why we can't do more to mobilise the 9 million inactive individuals of working age across Britain. Stephen Bush wrote a brilliant piece about this. Essentially, it's because a third of midlife people are out of work caring for their children or elderly parents or sick or disabled loved ones. To solve that, you need to invest in social care and childcare. The younger age group of 18-24 year olds fall into this category because of cuts to higher education. Again, there is a cost involved to get them into work.

So what's the solution? To fix the systems - and, particularly in the case of the NHS and social care - it needs investment, but it also requires people willing to do the jobs. That manpower can be found languishing in the asylum system, where tens of thousands of people are currently banned from working, or among refugees who are battling for a roof over their heads, or international students who have completed their studies and now find their graduate visas cut short. There is a pool of qualified, motivated individuals desperate to make money, to give back and to integrate into our communities, if only the government would let them.

If you want to support my reporting, the best way is to pick up a copy of my book, ‘Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All’, published last month. Buy the book here.