The Government faces choppy waters on immigration but it could be onto something - Ismail Mulla
The issue of immigration is not going away anytime soon and the Government continues to be led by its tail. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has been in Ethiopia promising to help the country create more homegrown jobs in an effort to stop its people from making small boat crossings to the UK.
The Horn of Africa, which also includes Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan, has become a key source of illegal migration towards the UK, says the Foreign Office.
Around 30 per cent of small boat arrivals into the UK have come from the Horn of Africa in the last two years.
It’s a laudable aim but the irony will not be lost on people here, given our own stuttering economy and unemployment problems, especially amongst young people.
The other issue is that this has the whiff of another scheme that promises jam tomorrow to people who want the Government to get immigration under control and for small boat crossings to stop.
First of all, creating jobs in Ethiopia is not necessarily going to mean people are suddenly going to want to stop making the dangerous journey to Britain and Europe. Secondly, even if such an initiative is successful, it won’t happen overnight.
The most vociferous opponents of immigration want to see results now. UK net migration has been falling but the graphs need to chime with emotional minds. That is where Labour is losing the battle to Reform.
It’s not as easy as pulling up the drawbridge though. As the Government’s plan to extend the period needed for people to get settled status after they arrive in the UK shows.
Parts of health and social care have become reliant on migrant workers. The fact that the Government does not know how many NHS staff will be impacted by the changes to immigration rules suggests that it is flying in the dark.
Indefinite leave to remain (ILR) will be granted only after 10 years, and if a specific set of circumstances have been met.
Doctors and nurses working in the NHS have exemptions from the proposed new rules. However, staff working in social care and private healthcare – which has had NHS cases contracted out to it to cut down backlogs – will be affected.
It has led to criticism from some Labour MPs who say that this is just pandering to Nigel Farage’s Reform. While trade body the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said the current plans would be a “grave error”.
You can see what the Government is trying to achieve. Setting down a marker that the country will only welcome the best of the best. But the message this then sends to sectors such as social care is that they’re not as highly valued.
Whichever way you cut it, the need to fill jobs is still there, especially in social care, where despite the demands decades of underfunding has led to a crisis.
The number of people applying to come to the UK on a health and care worker visa fell by nearly half last year. Some 61,000 people applied for the visa, either as a main applicant or a dependent, down from 123,300 in 2024.
That was as a result of changes last summer which ended the overseas recruitment of care workers and raised the minimum salary for skilled workers to £41,700.
The Department for Health and Social Care says it is important the NHS is not “over-reliant on international recruitment”. That is the case but the Government needs to put forward credible plans to fill the gaps within the healthcare sector.
Recruiting British people for some of these roles is one thing, retention is a whole other.
Back to the issue of small boats, one place where the Government may be onto something is the clamp down on social media users touting illegal routes.
The Home Office will activate part of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act, passed last year, as part of its crackdown on adverts telling migrants how they can
So-called “service agents”, middlemen who link migrants up with facilitators for small boats crossings and other routes, could be targeted with the new powers.
Posts on the likes of Facebook and TikTok promise people a safe passage to Britain, when these journeys are anything but.
According to a Government translation, a TikTok post, written in Pashto, offered a one-hour “jet boat” from France to London at a cost of 4,000 dollars.
A total of 933 people have arrived in the UK by crossing the English Channel in small boats this year so far. If the Government can point to a prolonged period where there are no crossings, especially during calm weather conditions, it may just be able to outflank Farage on this issue.