Voters going to the polls in July will be thinking about immigration.
Some, poll finds YouGov, 40% of those surveyed now believe it is one of the biggest issues facing the country, just behind the economy (44%) and health (49%).
This marks a dramatic change from with the last election when only one in five said it was a major issue.
It is therefore not surprising that both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer have spoken out strongly on the issue.
“Immigration is finally falling and we are stopping the boats through our partnership with Rwanda,” the Prime Minister said last week.
Meanwhile, the Labor leader has made securing Britain's borders one of his key promises. promising to create a new border command that will combat illegal migration.
The backdrop to this claim is the latest stunning set of net migration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The figures showed a record 764,000 net arrivals in 2022 – an upward revision of 18,000.
The figures fell only marginally in 2023 to 685,000, more than three times the pre-Covid average .
< p>That means migration has added two million people to the population over the course of Parliament, the Center for Policy Research think tank quickly noted, equivalent to a rise of 3%.
Sunak is far from the first politician to preside over a surge in numbers migrants, while promising a significant reduction. Lord Cameron promised to “control and reduce immigration” as Prime Minister, but within a year the figure had risen from 82,000 to 336,000.
Net migration also rose sharply under Labor governments in the late 1990s and early 2000s. .
Successive governments have failed to bring the situation under control, and in the process the British economy has become dependent on migrant workers.
“Having foreign workers come to us was a real godsend,” says Paul De Savary , managing director of Home From Home Care, which runs 11 specialist care homes in Lincolnshire for adults with very complex needs.
< p>Asked if he could run his business without immigrants, De Savary says: “No, we can’t right now. [Immigration] has become an important part of the sector.”
Earlier this week, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride promised “a new economic model based on British talent.”
He might as well promise to use “every talent to create British jobs for British workers” or to give “British people the skills to do the jobs Britain needs.”
Gordon promised the first. Brown in 2007, most recently by Lord Cameron in May 2015.
Despite repeated promises, the share of foreign-born workers in the UK workforce has tripled from 7% in 1997 to 21% in the first three months. year.
The immigration figure has become a politically toxic number, but as Ashley Webb of Capital Economics says, increasing the number of foreign nationals coming to the UK often benefits the current government.
Without an influx of labor from countries like Nigeria, India and Zimbabwe, companies would find it difficult to fill jobs. This, in turn, will limit economic growth.
“Migration has played a very important role in maintaining labor supply,” Webb says.
Increased immigration “behind the scenes” helped return the economy to strong growth in the first three months of the year, Webb said. Rishi Sunak celebrated the expansion and made it the centerpiece of his election campaign.
The problem is that per capita growth was still 0.7% lower than a year earlier.
Although immigration may bring some economic benefits, it is no longer enough.
Labor wants to reduce net migration to a “normal” level of “a couple of hundred thousand a year”. Meanwhile, the government is taking steps to curb arrivals, such as tightening student and spouse visas and raising the minimum wage threshold.
The impact is already being felt in sectors such as the care industry.
About 315,000 work visas were issued for health and care workers in March, up 5% from a year earlier and more than double the pre-pandemic figure in 2019.
>According to the Ministry of the Interior, this increase was mainly due to care workers.
The situation is changing, however: tightening rules led to a 76% decline in the first four months of the year compared with the same period in 2023.
De Savary says stricter rules and immigration policies around the election make him fearful.
“We have elections coming up. As a result, they will end up recruiting more staff for the NHS. These will probably be care assistants and the like. All that will happen is that they will rob the welfare [staff] sector again.”
Hiring foreigners is neither cheap nor hassle-free, says De Savary. Fees are high and some cultural mediation is required to ensure that employees from different backgrounds get along with each other.
But they are resilient, he says. Many of his young British staff are constantly ill and complain of anxiety and depression, he says wearily.
“There is much less resilience. Young people come… there is an expectation that they will help you with everything. They will hand it all to you on a plate,” he says.
“We have employees who go to the doctor, and the doctor willy-nilly just signs them off. This is a huge problem. This is getting pretty funny. Three, four or five years ago this would not have been the case.
“It has become incredibly easy to get your doctor to do what you want them to do, which then has a huge impact on our ability to staff. comprehensive services.”
Stride believes people like De Savary should hire British workers on preferential terms rather than foreigners.
De Savary believes Stride is “almost naive “, believing that this could completely solve his personnel problems.
p>“It almost means that anyone can do the job, but that’s not true. There is a general lack of understanding of what it actually takes to work in this sector.”
Mel Stride has been called “almost naive ” think that Britain can exchange foreign workers for British workers on benefits. Photo: Christopher Pledger for The Telegraph
Weaning Britain off its immigrant workers will cost dearly, bosses warn.
Rose Carey, partner at high-profile law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, says changes to the top-skilled salary threshold, which rose from around £26,000 to £38,700 in April, may have forced some companies she works with to move your activities to Poland.
<р>One of its clients is an international manufacturing company with factories in the north of England, the USA and Poland. They pay £14 an hour. Staff need to be trained, on full pay, for a year before being left alone with the equipment.
“They're really struggling to recruit [to work in the UK],” says Carey. “They don't get many applications from local workers, and those who apply don't stay.
“They're wondering if they should start making more things in the Polish factory instead.”
Many of the current employees are Poles and Romanians with engineering backgrounds, but their numbers are dwindling after Brexit.
Current wages are £2 an hour below the new work visa wage threshold. However, bringing wages into line with the new threshold will require significant costs, as the company will also have to increase the salaries of UK employees to avoid problems with labor laws.
Another client, a smoke shop with several branches in the UK, risks moving production to Poland if the wage threshold is not reduced. If both of these clients moved, around 1,000 jobs, many of them held by British workers, would be lost.
Work visas are often the subject of controversy around immigration due to the perception that foreign workers are taking jobs that are Otherwise, they will be available to Britons. But Madeleine Sumption, from the Migration Observatory in Oxford, says: “We know from the research that the most likely outcome is that there will be fewer such jobs.” < /p>< Sumption adds: “Although some of the biggest policy issues on migration relate to visa policy, legal migration of students and workers and so on, we don't see huge differences between Labor and the Conservatives on these issues.
Both sides want to end the era of seemingly unlimited immigration.
But after decades of large numbers of new arrivals and an economy reliant on immigration, combating the economic fallout of such a crackdown may prove difficult a pill for both Starmer and Sunak.
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