The famous quote from Swiss novelist Max Frisch goes, “We wanted workers, but we got people instead.” At the time, Frisch was talking about the short-term migrant worker visas that were introduced across Europe to plug labour shortages in the 50s and 60s. Today, the Conservatives have built a post-Brexit visa regime that strips humanity from migrant workers much further.
Most temporary migrant workers to the UK today are allowed to come for only limited periods, and they are tied to working in a single industry until they are churned back out. They of course pay high fees for the privilege. This approach has fuelled deteriorating conditions, labour shortages, and severe exploitation.
We urgently need a migration system that provides us with the workers we need without making them vulnerable to abuse in the process. To do that, we must first tackle the lie about ‘economic migrants’.
A demonised workforce
The term economic migrant has long been used as a smear for people seeking to build new lives in the UK. Politicians talk about personal aspiration and the importance of growing the national economy, yet they still characterise migration for economic opportunity as illegitimate. That’s a farce.
As British citizens and residents, we participate in this charade when we accept that refugees legitimately need protection from bombs or political persecution, yet view their need to rent a home, eat food, pay bills or support a family as discretionary. Something for the state to decide, regulate, and turn off and on at will.
The reality of our world, of course, is that we all need to earn money to survive, and political instability very often goes hand-in-hand with harsh economic conditions.
There has never been a neat distinction between a person who has fled war, and one who needs to find work. Just like there has never been a neat distinction between the needs of the individual and the needs of the family. Families often cannot afford to flee as a unit, so they commonly send their best workers ahead in the hopes that they will eventually buy passage for the rest. It’s staged flight, but flight nonetheless, and it’s a sign of limited options – not of the situation being ‘not that bad’.
There is no viable legal pathway into the UK for the majority of the global workforce
However, being unable to feed a family or afford a home isn’t enough to get you refugee status in the UK. Only escaping political repression or war will do that (at least until the Tories find a way to send those people to Rwanda as well). At the same time, for most people from most countries – whether they are fleeing poverty or war – there is no viable legal pathway into the UK.
Work and study visas are the only options, and those visas are expensive and tightly regulated. Application fees can be prohibitively expensive – visa costs have spiralled over the past decade, easily reaching £1,000 per year – and applicants must usually show a sealed offer of study or well-paid employment in the UK prior to arrival to get one. These are completely out of reach for many people escaping extreme poverty, climate destruction, and a lack of education and opportunity in their home countries.
As a result, such people are caught between two pathways to legitimacy. They are not persecuted in the right way to access refugee protection, and they are not wealthy, educated, or networked enough to qualify for a skilled worker or student visa. This category of migrant surely makes up the majority of the global workforce, yet there are vanishingly few opportunities for them to participate in ours.
If we are to address the challenges of the next decades, people seeking work globally will need to be considered a serious asset rather than dismissed as economic migrants without sufficient economic means. If the Labour Party comes into power in 2025, it could have a chance to right these wrongs. But it needs to start now.
The UK is desperate for workers
We don’t have an immigration system that reflects the needs of our economy. The lack of pathways we have to fill the shortfall of labour in essential industries is a big part of the problem. While the pre-Brexit system was far from perfect, freedom of movement for EU citizens allowed people to come and go from jobs as opportunities arose, and to live in the UK with equal rights to their British peers.
Now, we have a government that insists we must clamp down on all routes into the UK that lead to lower-paid, yet essential sectors like farming and care work. The goal, they say, is to create a “high-wage high-skill economy”. But this meaningless talking point only serves to hide the fact that the Tories’ post-Brexit migration policy has forced them to create one ad-hoc visa scheme after another to plug the gaps.
While parroting the “high-wage high-skill” line, the government has done less than nothing to improve pay and conditions in these sectors, despite the current cost-of-living crisis. They have forced multiple sectors, from the railways to the schools to the NHS, to strike for liveable wages. They have maintained long-term cuts to social support, and deprioritised enforcement of minimum working conditions. Beyond these obvious failings, the government left the post of director of labour market enforcement vacant for nearly a year in 2021, and the post of independent anti-slavery commissioner vacant to this day, 17 months after the previous commissioner resigned.
People are fulfilling essential roles in our economy, but they are doing so without the protections of the state
Meanwhile, the number of “temporary work” visas for low paid workers has grown. In the last 12 months it has quite neatly matched the number of people seeking asylum. These visas have repeatedly been demonstrated to produce a high risk of labour exploitation and abuses. They are limited to six-months in duration, which leaves far too little time for workers to obtain redress for exploitation or seek out better conditions. It also makes it impossible for workers to benefit from switching to another visa pathway if they find employment in a different field, and therefore impossible to extend their visa and put down roots, regardless of their situation.
Visa terms are restrictive, minimum conditions are poorly monitored and enforced, and evidence of widescale abuse goes ignored. The government’s own review of its seasonal agricultural worker visa found that more than one in five workers alleged unfair treatment, including racism & discrimination, and just under one in six said their accommodation was unsafe, unhygienic and cold. Other investigations into UK agriculture have uncovered the widespread existence of substandard accommodation, wage theft, and other difficulties stemming from the fact that many temporary work visas prohibit holders from freely changing employers.
People are fulfilling essential roles in our economy, but they are doing so without the protections of the state. They are here because they need safety and money and because we need their labour, yet they are reviled as the least deserving of an immigration status and the dignity of decent working conditions.
Many industries are still crying out for workers. The National Farmers Union recently issued a report urging the government to uncap the number of visas for agricultural work and extend the duration of visas. Care workers, meanwhile, have been moved to the shortage occupations list – a list of jobs for which demand so outstrips supply that the government relaxes minimum salary requirements for migrant workers in order to allow bosses to fill vacancies at lower cost. These are not sustainable models for our workforce in such crucial areas.
Labour needs to step up
The Conservative government has backed itself into a corner on migration by demonising anyone crossing borders, especially those doing so for economic purposes. It would be politically impossible for them to now take the steps needed to regulate the irregular migration flows that they cannot make disappear.
A new Labour government, if we get one, must not make the same mistake. It must never denigrate people who are moving to access safety and opportunity. It must reform immigration policies, and end the Catch-22 that leaves most people unable to be either needy enough or wealthy enough to fit into the Tories’ pre-approved boxes.
We must introduce flexible pathways for migrant labourers to come and do the jobs that provide for our needs, in dignified conditions.
Some first steps to achieving this include:
- Reducing visa fees and scrapping the unjust “health surcharge” – in particular, stop requiring migrant workers to renew their visas and pay these costs repeatedly every couple of years.
- Untying low-paid migrant workers from exploitative employers by ensuring no visa traps someone in a particular workplace or industry.
- Introducing more genuinely flexible pathways to enter and remain in the country for people seeking work in our essential industries, without requiring a highly paid contract in advance of arrival. These should allow people to switch onto alternative visa pathways if they wish to pursue new employment, training or study opportunities once they are in the UK.
- Refocusing attention on measures to enforce minimum pay and conditions for all workers, including those in harder-to-reach industries such as farming and domestic work.
We must dismantle the twin lies that migrants are not needed in the UK, and that their reasons to come are invalid. They both push the creation of a subclass of workers on precarious visas to plug the gaps.
A successful migration system can also be a humane and respectful one – offering a fair package of rights and opportunities to all the people who come to find work in vital industries that are supported and planned for our future needs. Labour has an opportunity to overhaul how we treat migrant workers by recognising their humanity, as Max Frisch warned we’d have to all those decades ago. It should take it.
