S3 E11 Labour’s new immigration plan is anything but Brexit

Michaela Benson [MB] Welcome to season three of Who do we think we are? The podcast debunking taken for granted understandings of migration and citizenship in Britain today. In this season, we'll be considering the role of migration in the making of Global Britain, as the UK redefines its borders and seeks to reposition itself on the world stage following Brexit. I'm Michaela Benson, a sociologist specialising in citizenship and migration, and your host. For this season, I'll also be joined by co-host Nando Sigona, whose research expertise includes international migration and forced displacement. Join us as we challenge public and political narratives of migration to and from Britain today, and encourage you to think differently about some of the most pressing issues of our times, charting a new understanding of Britain's migration story after Brexit. Welcome back to Who do we think we are? We thought we'd come to you with a bonus episode focused on the white paper just released by the UK's Labour government. The white paper is entitled, Restoring Control over the Immigration System, and we're recording this in the week that it came out. It is fair to say that it's generated quite a lot of noise from colleagues working on migration, but also from migrant rights organisations and civil society organisations. So Nando and I are just going to have an informal conversation about what this tells us about the Labour administration and the role of migration in its political and geopolitical projects. So in some ways, what we're trying to do is draw out the connections between this white paper and where we left off with our account and analysis of the Conservatives' Global Britain project. So Nando, I'm going to come over to you first to say, What's in this white paper? What's the kind of headline thing that the government wanted us to take away with this?

Nando Sigona [NS] The key thing is, clearly, they want to reduce net migration. And they don't tell us exactly why, it's not ever fully explicit, but the reduction of net migration, in a way, is what justifies a series of measures that puts it in place. That goes from what they call cutting loopholes in the system, for example, avoiding people from moving from one visa to another one, shifting from one pathway to the others. They are lifting the level of qualifications required for accessing skilled visas. For example, they are trying to reduce the time that international students are given to stay in the country to find a job, contributing to the economy with the skills they have acquired in Britain. And in particular, they decided to attack, and close, the social care visa route, which is immediately creating huge resistance, even from the Royal College of Nursing and from other organisations working in the sector. So it's really interesting, but perhaps we need to distinguish one thing. There has been an initial response to the narrative that has been used to launch and present this white paper. I think a lot of the articles written on the white paper have been written by people before reading it, you know, responding to the press release, let's say, by Keir Starmer. There have been a few catchphrases that really caught the imagination of different audiences, isn't it? 

MB  Yeah, I think so. I mean, obviously you and I have talked about the problems with net migration figures before, and our kind of curiosity about why net migration figures need to come down. This is an approach that started with David Cameron right at the beginning of the 2010s when he was when he was in office as prime minister. And this paper is kind of interesting from the point of view of arguing that we need a sustainable level of net migration, but never once does it really tell us what sustainable means. My suspicion is it's kind of an - well, I was going to say it's an economically-driven assessment of sustainability, but given that we're never really presented with any figures around what the impact is of these people who apparently come to the UK and use our public services and everything else - I think it's the implication is that it would be an economic evaluation, isn't it? 

NS Yeah, it's just this idea of sustainability, it feels like the sustainability according to what Farage and the right-wing media says, you know. It feels like Labour is chasing someone else's agenda. They're using the same vocabularies, the same slogans. And what was really interesting to me to observe was that even at the point in which, in a sense, they were promising to embrace many of the pledges that Farage and the Right does continuously, the title on the on the Daily Mail was, But still they haven't put a cap on the number of people. They still haven't done this. So they will never be able to - they are feeding a kind of, the idea of a sort of electorate, but the same time, they will never manage to to capture it. And the problem is, what are the consequences of really basing your immigration policy on this idea of sustainability? I think.

MB Yeah, I think so. And I also think, to go back to the point about language, the big phrase that lots of people have picked up is this idea that we're becoming an "island of strangers," which was how Keir Starmer announced this. And many people have already drawn out the kind of parallels between that and Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech. And I suppose if we're thinking about this sociologically, it does kind of point to those arguments that we're seeing from our colleagues who work in Far Right studies about the mainstreaming of far right narratives into, well, into the center of the political discourse from that point of view. But I think that's only one of those key phrases that's been used. For me, the one that really stood out was in Yvette Cooper's introduction to the white paper, where she talks about taking back control over who comes and stays in the UK. Now, of course, you and I have been working on Brexit since 2017 - probably since the referendum, really, in 2016 - so this is a phrase that I think has escaped a little bit of attention from some of the commentators, but is so resonant with the language of Brexit, isn't it?

NS Yeah, I mean, the issue of the language is interesting, because you're right. But I want to say two things. One is about the island of strangers. First of all, we are all strangers to each other, isn't it? I mean, what's the problem? The problem is actually creating an ethics for strangers to live together. Because the reality is, in a sense, the narrative around the island of stranger has very much an implicit narrative, as you point out, around this idea of of nation and nationalism, of who is in and who is out of this imagined community. We talked a lot about the imagined community and the ideological project that is always behind sankatau, the idea of re-bordering society, that Brexit has really initiated. So there is continuity with some of the work we have discussed a lot in our series on this. And there is very important work being done, for example, around the idea of superdiversity, London, commonplace diversity, how diverse cities may become more welcoming, more inclusive, than places where actually there isn't that diversity. Where, basically, the stranger is imagined as the enemy, and there is not really contact. And there is a lot of literature on that. Which has got limitations, but it's interesting literature. The point about taking back control? I mean, it makes me laugh. In a sense, it reminds me when, when people are so obsessed with something that they forget that people, other people, have moved on. I mean, obviously take back control, immediately returns to this idea of our sovereignty and the message of Brexit. But paradoxically, in this white paper, even in the way that Starmer has been presenting it, Brexit is not there. Brexit is not present. COVID pandemic is not there. So it's really interesting how he hooks the message to to a slogan, but he doesn't want to make that connection. What do you think, why is this the case?

MB Yea, it's really interesting. You're absolutely right. I mean, the connection is linguistic, isn't it? It's rhetorical. So they're thinking to themselves, Oh, well, this took hold of the popular imagination when they used it for Brexit. So we'll carry on using that. But then they never talk about how Brexit, and by that, we're talking about the actual withdrawal of the UK from the European Union, how that created a set of conditions which in turn shaped the migration regime and shaped the Conservative administration's approach to what they did after Brexit in respect to migration. So it's really, really noticeable that that's not there. I feel like what they want to do is they want to blame the Conservative government, so that they can demonstrate that they are making a change, without saying, Well, actually, do you know what? Brexit was pretty fundamental to some of the things we're seeing. And really, I mean, you can't rejoin the European Union just like that, can you? And they've been distancing themselves so much from Brexit. Of course, Starmer himself was not pro-Brexit. He very much wanted to stay in the European Union, and was part of that campaign. So I think that there's some kind of interesting. political positioning going on there, where they cannot be associated with a pro-EU position. Even drawing attention to some of the negative outcomes of Brexit and how that had led to the production of the migration regime as we know it, the migration flows as we know them - kind of the shape and contours around that - I think is really significant. But I think the other thing that you highlighted when we were talking before was the relative absence of the pandemic as well, from this account.

NS The reality is one of the reasons why we have had the booming in the social care visas - people forget that after Brexit and then with the pandemic, some of the NHS and the social care sectors really experienced a huge loss of workforce. Because of Brexit in the early 2020s, basically the Spaniards that were among the biggest groups, among the other EU citizens working in the NHS, disappeared from the system because the work in Britain was no longer, for some, recognised as part of their accreditation for their degrees. And what happened was that the waiting list in hospitals increased significantly. Then we have the pandemic that, again, created another shock to the system in terms not just with people not coming to Britain, but also a lot of people leaving and staying, going back to their country of origin, etc. So while, you know, every time you can blame the Conservative government - it's fine, that is fine with me - however, I think that part of the reason of this huge liberalisation of the skilled visa system that has brought the number to go up very quickly, with the net migration number going up very quickly, is the response to the fact that net migration went really, really, really record-level low with the pandemic. And so there was a huge need to fill quickly the places, which enabled the Labour Party, as well, now to be able to show off the fact that they are reducing the waiting list in the NHS and the hospitals. You see, my problem here is that, then, as usual, while they are claiming that they are connecting better the immigration system to the needs of the labour market, I think that some of the measures that we see in the white paper are going to damage, again, some of our public services, because they're going to struggle to recruit.

MB Yeah, I think so. They'll bring in those kind of policies before the things are in place even to replace the workers that they won't be recruiting. And I think that that's often the case, isn't it, in the way that things are happening. I mean, I was looking closely at the white paper around the kind of issues around the care sector. Now, you've said it quite lightly there, but the care sector in the UK is in crisis. It's been in crisis since before the pandemic, and the pandemic made it much, much worse. People who have family members who are in care are struggling with the costs of that care. And of course, one of the things that has been happening there is that the payment to the people who work in that sector has also been low. So I wonder whether there's a different solution to that particular problem that doesn't involve restricting the number of people who come, but paying them properly, which is one of the things that, to be fair, this white paper is trying to do. But also talking to employers and the companies behind these care organisations about how they could reduce their profits. This is a mechanism that the government also has at its disposal, but of course, it doesn't feature in this white paper at all. 

NS The other day, I was talking with the chief executive of one of the organisations that works for the rights of migrant workers in the domestic sector, as part of my research for the I-CLAIM project, a project on improving the working and living conditions of irregular migrants in Europe. And she was telling me that basically, even among the workers that work in domestic work sectors, they basically say, I could move to a different visa, for example, working in social care, but I will never do it. Because the salary is so low that even for migrant workers with precarious legal status, they decide that actually, for those who are already in the country, working in social care is not really a sector where, because of the working conditions, because of the salary, they feel attracted to. They prefer to try their best to stay in domestic work. And she was telling me that what you can negotiate in terms of salary in a city like London as domestic worker, it can be even two or three times higher than what you will get paid to work in a social care home, or even privately. And on top of that, especially if you're working in the domestic space you may be living in, there are all the issues of exploitation, the loss of personal spaces, the impossibility of building a family, etc. So it was really interesting for me. It was quite enlightening to hear from someone who actually, while being an activist, she also worked in the sector herself for decades. The other point, linked to what you were saying before about this idea of why Brexit is not discussed. That's one issue. But on the other hand, the other issue is about, can we go back in the European Union? No, but yes, in a sense of what's going on at the moment, in terms of what we're seeing, as in the past, rather than this so-called realignment of Britain with Europe is happening on a different level, on a level of practice. In the sense of, you know, a few months ago, we saw Keir Starmer visiting the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and talking about how successful was the Albania plan of Italy, of building these return hubs in Albania, learning from the Italians. And now we see thiese conversations that happened months ago,  that somehow they are coming to fruition, because we are seeing the European Union moving very much towards the harmonisation of return policy and instrument. And we are seeing how Britain is really keen to get involved, even if they are outside the European Union. Because obviously, somehow, it gives Britain a kind of a legal cover, in a sense, you know, against all the attacks that they have had for the Rwanda plan. So there is something there that I think we should pay attention to also in the coming months.

MB Yeah, definitely. I mean, the white paper doesn't cover asylum. It just promises that they will be announcing a whole load of things later in the year as they extend or model counter terror-style powers into the border. I can't remember what that bill is called. 

NS Yeah, the return hubs, in a sense, what is happening with those is where the big shift is happening. We mentioned in the previous episode when we discussed the Rwanda plan. And in an article that we can put in the notes that I wrote for The Conversation, I think a few months ago, it was about how the Rwanda plan, while it was clear that they're using it to manage the asylum claims, and this idea of transferring the responsibility to Rwanda faced huge resistance, there have been other models of cooperation with third countries that have been already proved "successful," in inverted commas. I'm talking through the logic of this kind. So the idea, for example, of renting, hiring places in detention centres for migrants who had committed crimes, or migrants waiting for removal, and then basically just transferring them to other countries. So what we are seeing now, and Starmer has been mentioning this, is this idea is quite interesting to what the European Union is doing with the creation of these return hubs, where some cases, they speak about the processing of the asylum, but in most cases, they're talking about sending asylum seekers who have had their cases refused, awaiting return. So in a sense the function is changing in the conversation gradually. And this has happened actually also with the Albania plan of Italy, which started as a place where Italy would manage asylum applications for people that were arriving by boat. But the idea was they were managing these applications with the Italian civil servants, an officer. So it was actually very expensive and still is, as a plan. And now instead, they are talking about sending people who have refusals on their application and using it a bit like the Rwanda plan, as a deterrent for people to come. So we are seeing the conversation is moving gradually, and we are seeing an important, interesting thing that the European Union is moving from a multilateral approach to return to a much more harmonised, Commission-led approach. And all the instruments that they've launched just a few weeks ago in that direction, you know, basically creating a common return order for migrants who have been rejected or been refused their applications, and basically harmonising the procedures. So you can see how Britain is paying attention to this transformation, because, as we know, one of the biggest challenges in terms of implementing removals is, basically, actually to remove people and getting someone else to accept them.

MB It's an important reminder, isn't it, that that discourse around securitisation and migration is so center stage and mainstream in terms of how governments think about their migration regimes. And if you go back to some of the earlier episodes, both in this series and in previous series, that wasn't always the case. So that connection between security and migration is one that starts to come in around 2002, really, not just in the wake of 9/11 but exacerbated by 9/11, for example. So I think that we've now come to the stage where most governments think that securitisation of migration is business as usual. Which takes me on to another thing that stood out to me in this white paper, which is to do with the rollout of eVisas and kind of match data, and the way this is discussed in the paper. So these eVisas are a kind of a digital-only status again, as we've seen in the case of EU citizens and the EUSS, and in the case of the Hong Kongers and the BN(O) visa. And I was reading the paper this morning, and it's very, very clear how, again, that is linked to considering migrants as potential abusers of the UK's immigration system. So what gets highlighted is how this technology can be used to almost instantaneously identify people who are not meeting the terms of their visas, in terms of if they're staying too long outside of the country, or anything else. And this is highlighted in the paper as something really, really good, an ability to kind of match up data very, very quickly. And I assume when we see more detail about this, this will also be kind of AI-controlled, I suspect. I mean, it doesn't say that. I should say that's my own speculation. But what we see through this is that shift, that long-term shift, from a situation where people have paper documents, they became biometric, which gave the government even more control over them, and now getting to a stage where the surveillance is literally minute-by-minute, second-by-second. It's really insidious. 

NS There are a couple of points about this eVisa. I was in Italy recently, and I had to help my elderly parents to basically do the ETA, the new digital visa required for European nationals to come to visit. And and it was fascinating, because one thing was that immediately, you can see how there is a market of apps and service providers who are speculating.

MB Intermediaries. 

NS Intermediaries who are actually speculating on the system. I mean, you can end up being asked to pay 250 Euros to have your decision within 24 hours for your ETA. 

MB Doesn't it cost like seven pounds or something?

NS It costs 16. I did it for my father, and we received the answer within like one minute. But the problem was that I could see all these people coming from outside Britain, from Europe, and trying to access the system, how easily they can then sort of get exploited. But also the other part of it, which was more interesting, was that, again, while you can argue that people that are permanently living in UK, or they plan to settle for long terms, they may get familiarised, or they may get socialised within a system that increasingly is only based on no-paper, legal sort of visas. For people that come on visits, they were really sort of mesmerised and surprised that there was nothing to show for this visa. So actually, we were left with this idea that they didn't know what's going to happen when they get to the border. So already I could see the level of anxiety growing. I had to tell them, please just print out to the email, you're going to receive a confirmation, just in case. But in reality, I know that they're not going to be asked because probably they're going to go from the eGates, and automatically they will be recognised. But the problem is that we cannot expect the rest of the world coming on a visit for a week to see Buckingham Palace, to necessarily understand how this thing works. It has got clearly differential impacts. If you are an educated person, if you are elderly person, etc, etc. We are going to have a problem on that side, which I think are going to emerge in the in the coming months as well. But there are two more areas that are covered by the white paper that maybe you can tell us a bit more about. One is this level of qualification that has been increased and also language-wise, not just in the sense of qualifications, but also what's happening to students, international students.

MB Yeah. So I think that the first one of these is that in the skilled worker visa category, there was a reduction from recognised qualification level six, which is degree-level qualification, to recognised qualification level three, which is equivalent to A-level, for people coming to the UK. And of course, this is the area that includes people who are working in the care sector, all of these kinds of things. So that was a reduction that was introduced by the Conservative government, I assume, in consequence of the pandemic and the needs within those kind of relatively low-skilled sectors. And the Labour government are now saying they're going to return it to recognised qualification level six. Now, part of me thinks that that might have been the lowest level of qualification, but what we don't hear from the white paper at all is how many people actually only had that level? Because, as we know, when it comes to people who come to the UK, and actually to most countries. If people are migrating, what we see is quite significant social demobility, so people basically working in jobs that are not equivalent to their skill level. And I suppose one of the things that I've been thinking about, too, while I was reading this white paper, is that the ambitions for kind of economic recovery and growth in the UK are really front and center within this. But what it also fails to account for is the fact that actually, to keep the country going on a day-to-day basis, you need people performing roles at all levels of skill within the economy. And we also know, for example, and this takes me on to the second point about the students, that lots of our graduates, whether they are people who've come from overseas, or they are British citizens, go into employment that is far below their skill level because of the shape of the economy at this point in time. So that seems to me not to really be acknowledged at all in this immigration white paper. When I say that, what I mean is that it's not acknowledged that many people who come to the UK will be working far below their qualification level anyway. 

NS It's well known. De-skilling is well known.I mean, I met people that, they're an engineer, they work as a taxi driver. 

MB Exactly, and we saw this with the Ukrainians in the Hong Kongers as well. People who'd worked in universities, who'd worked in managerial professions, finding that there were no jobs for them, and so having to work at a much lower skill level. And this being a real cause for concern for them, and something that they felt really acutely. And I think this takes me on to the other point about the students. So there are two headlines here around international students in the UK. The first is shortening the length of time that they're allowed to stay after their degree, to 18 months. And also tying this to what kinds of professions they are working in, or what kind of jobs they're able to get, so what sectors of the labour market. Because at the moment, they're saying that only 30% of international students who stay on are working at that level, the level that they would expect. Again, as I just said, we know if we were to compare that more generally with graduate outcomes, probably we would find that the citizen population, the home students, are probably employed at a slightly higher percentage, but all the same, we do also know that there's been a bit of a crisis in terms of the kind of jobs that are available to young people today. But the second point about students - and this is one that I really was curious about when it was first stated in the paper but became clear what they were talking about later - they were talking about the numbers of students who switch from student visas to claiming asylum at the end of their studies. And as the paper went on, it became clear that they were talking very specifically about those who were in the UK for the purposes of temporary study, so short periods of time. Now I just wondered what you think about that.

NS We always complain about the lack of safe routes to asylum. And it's interesting how they are basically criminalising people because they choose not to cross on the boats and pay a huge amount of money to smugglers. And actually, the government always say they want to save people from smugglers, but people still may need, you know, many cases, these are genuine cases of seeking international protection. And there is an opportunity to travel safely and actually cheaply in many cases, and do it. So the problem with this white paper is, again, this framework, how it's framed in terms of criminalising the mobility as a starting point and implicitly reading a lot of what people do to secure or find protection as necessarily criminal, or as a threat. And this is where a lot of people are emphasising how important it is to imagine a different narrative, how to shift the narrative. What we're seeing with this white paper, we are not shifting the narrative. We are basically just regurgitating, poorly, in some cases, old slogans, old messages, and we have not moved at all from kind of a right-wing narrative that is now on a daily basis, pushed by people like Trump and his administration. For example, all the discussion around closing the border. Yes, while there is an echo of Brexit, but there is clearly also an echo of what's going on in Trump's America with this mass deportation. Actually, it's quite interesting that Trump is thinking of using the British facilities in Rwanda for sending people deported from America at the moment. Again, there is this Rwanda that returns from a different route. But one thing I think I want to stress here - I'm thinking about two things in the way that this white paper has been launched that really touched a lot of people and looking also at reactions online. One is this idea of talking about the "squalideers" that brought a lot of people to come, which really offended a lot of fellow migrants like myself, and feelling, Oh, what is squalid about myself, about people like me that come here to work? This is actually what is shocking here, is that people were just arriving in Britain using legal routes that were built by the government, and they were doing the job which they actually had come to do. So they were not talking about people that crossing irregularly, you can say that they are terrible and a threat, they break the rules. These are people actually, they came through the legal route that they were available. And you say, Oh, that's squalid. How do you dare? The other point isn't one that is completely out of this, but we have discussed in our series. If you build a migration system that dehumanises people - the people come here to work just as a migrant workforce, as bodies doing a function, but not as citizens, not as political subjects - and then you complain that we are an island of strangers. Because these people come here with very short-term contracts, exploitative conditions, they have no time, in many cases, to do anything outside of work because if they are outside work, they may lose their visa. Then don't complain if you have a very disenfranchised population in the country that feel excluded. Don't complain if your citizens then say, Oh, these people never interact with us. They have no chance, because you constructed the model of migrants. What should we do? Again, and this is something that the pre-Brexit reality was, if you have a model of migration that also allows or facilitates the production of new citizenship, new citizens - and this is not only about the new citizen of the pre-Brexit era, I'm also thinking of the Commonwealth citizen subjects that were in the country, but they had the right to vote. And because they had the right to vote, the Labour Party was paying attention to them. They were treating them as humans. Nowadays, we are not. Because they don't vote, they have no chance to vote. Actually, we are increasing the time it takes to become a citizen to 10 years.

MB Yeah, I know. I was thinking about that earlier in preparing for this, but I don't think we've got too much time to get into it today. But that focus also on shifting the terms for settlement, which is what they're going to do, which I assume will be about changing the time length for claiming Indefinite Leave to Remain, and changing the time length for citizenship acquisition. Which, of course, has already sent ripples through the communities that we were working with for MIGZEN, particularly the Hong Kongers, who'd been promised citizenship acquisition after gaining ILR. But I don't think we have time to talk about that today. There's so much more in that white paper that we haven't been able to discuss, but I hope that gives you a little bit of a sense of some of the things that are there, how it connects to some of the things that we've talked about before. We will be keeping a close eye on it. Obviously, that was our very first go at talking about this, but we'll put some links into the show notes. And you'll be excited to know that we will be coming back to you soon with a new mini series that will be all about MAGA - that's Make America Great Again - and migration. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. 

NS Thank you. Bye bye for now. 

MB You're listening to Who do we think we are? Presents Global Britain, a podcast all about migration and citizenship in the UK after Brexit, hosted by me, Michaela Benson and my co host, Nando Signoa. If you like what you've heard, follow and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. This means that you'll be the first to hear when our episodes drop, and it also helps more people to discover the podcast.