Cameron’s ‘tens of thousands’ pledge is achievable, but not with Deliveroo visas

Imagine if there were no such thing as the budget. Instead, every department just spent what it thought it needed and then handed the bill to the Treasury. Of course, you’d never run the public finances like that. It would be a recipe for chaos — not to mention vastly higher taxes. So why do we let it happen when it comes to immigration?

Last week Rishi Sunak finally managed to get the Rwanda plan for asylum processing off the ground. Lawyers permitting, the planes will follow. But, as I’ve pointed out before, the rise in illegal migrants is dwarfed by the number arriving perfectly legally.

In the 2000s, commentators worried about our capacity to absorb net migration of 150,000 a year. Over the past two years it’s been running at more than four times that rate. Overall, migration has added almost 100 times more people to our population during the quarter-century since Tony Blair came to power than it did in the previous 25 years.

But it’s not just the raw numbers. My colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank have been working with Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien, two former Tory ministers, on a comprehensive survey of our immigration system. What is striking is the extent to which, under the rules introduced after Brexit, every main migration route has grown enormously — because no limits were put on the numbers.

To give the most dramatic example, when the new health and care visa route was introduced, the government’s public estimate was that 6,000 people a year would make use of it. In the latest year on record, the number was more than 145,000, plus a further 203,000 dependants.

Then there’s the student route. This was billed as a way for Britain to attract the best and brightest. But it became a back door to the employment market. Students could apply for a one-year master’s course, during which they could work for 20 hours a week (or more, in practice). Once their course was finished, they could work in the UK for two more years without needing to meet the salary threshold required for the skilled worker visa. Oh, and they could bring their other half, too. As O’Brien has said, these weren’t research visas but “Deliveroo visas” — because people on them often ended up driving round on motorbikes instead of peering through microscopes.

Jenrick and O’Brien’s final report won’t be out for a few more weeks. But their core recommendation is that the government take back control of the system (sound familiar?). That means that, on top of its existing efforts to curtail the explosive increase in net migration, it should set an overall cap on the number of people who can come into the country, and individual caps on each of the main visa routes, decided democratically by parliament.

Where it gets a bit more contentious is at what level the cap should be set. The two MPs believe that we can, and should, return to the tens of thousands figure promised by David Cameron. That Britain should aspire to be the grammar school of the western world — attracting highly skilled, high-earning migrants who will be net contributors to the public purse and/or public services. This wouldn’t just fulfil the repeated promises made to cut the numbers. It would, they believe, ensure that we focused on the kinds of immigration that undeniably benefit Britain.

You can already imagine the howls of outrage. The pro-migration lobby will insist that this is economic vandalism. That migration is falling anyway. That you couldn’t cut migration so sharply without destroying the NHS, or the universities sector.

Well, very high levels of migration make individual migrants richer, and swell overall GDP, but they don’t seem to do that much for the living standards of those already here — or rather there are plenty of cons to set alongside the pros. And yes, net migration may now be falling. But it will stay extremely high by past standards — the equivalent of a new Birmingham every four years. Also, it’s hard to trust the official projections given that they’ve underestimated the numbers again and again, often by huge margins.

But it’s the impact on public services that is the most interesting. It’s true that there would be a cost to universities, many of which have built their financial models (and their new London campuses) on harvesting tuition fees from low-skilled students on low-quality courses. You would almost certainly have to increase wages in the social care sector — although the scandalous level of fraud on that visa route means we could tighten requirements substantially without hurting care homes. And you would definitely have to train more doctors and nurses domestically, as proposed under the NHS long-term workforce plan.

But that in turn reflects the strange institutional passivity in our country. The surge in net migration is startlingly new, yet we already act as if it is just a fact of life, something about which nothing can or should be done. It’s the mentality that made us just sort of shrug as the number of overseas doctors and nurses went up and up, to far higher levels than in other G7 countries, because training more staff domestically meant tackling penny-pinching in the Treasury and protectionism in the medical unions.
In fact, you could apply the same criticism more widely. We failed to invest in energy generation. In building homes — not least to house all of those immigrants. In transport infrastructure. We’ve essentially wished away the rising challenge of China — the threat it poses to international stability, its industrial-scale spying operations, the catastrophic consequences for our manufacturing sector as it dumps its industrial surplus onto global markets.

And even when we do get serious, we don’t actually do it seriously. For example, while it’s welcome news that both main parties are committed to increasing defence spending, they’re still not admitting that they may not be able to spend as much on other things as a result.

I’m no fan of the big state. But whatever its size, we need the state to be smart — and strategic. One of the most striking aspects of our immigration work, for example, has been the number of times we have asked for very basic figures on how many people are in the country, where they came from and what they are earning, only to be told the data isn’t being collected, or can’t be made public without too much effort.

If we want grown-up politics, then there are all kinds of improvements we need to make. But having a proper discussion about the merits, needs, capacity and drawbacks of the various migration routes we have created would be a pretty good place to start.