Britain has many levers for controlling migration. Which ones should it pull?

Labour won power on July 4th after declaring that Britain had too much immigration, and pledging to cut it. The new government promptly ran into the problem that has floored its predecessors. Whatever they may say, ministers have little control over the number of asylum-seekers reaching the country. Those migrants, who are often resented—witness the attacks on hotels used to house them during a wave of racist riots in early August—are driven mostly by wars and geopolitical forces. Nor does the government have much say over the number of arriving Hong Kongers and Ukrainians, to whom it gives special visas.

But it does wield great power over the workers, students and dependants who make up the bulk of immigrants. Indeed, it has more power over them than it used to. When the previous Labour government left office, in 2010, almost one in three long-term immigrants arrived under eu freedom-of-movement rules. Nothing could be done to prevent Bulgarians and Romanians from gaining full access to the labour market four years later, which pushed the numbers even higher.

Now that Britain has left the eu, freedom of movement is no more. And the new government has inherited other controls over immigration that it lacked in 2010. Family migration is now subject to a salary threshold, which Labour seems minded to keep. The outgoing Conservative government tried banning some immigrant workers from bringing dependants. It tightened, then liberalised policies towards graduates. Labour has many levers to pull, and some idea of what the effect will be.

Given all this power, what should the government do? Immigration is a boon, at least at first: the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, estimated in March that higher-than-expected net migration would cut net borrowing by £7.4bn ($9.5bn, or 0.3% of GDP) in four years’ time, thanks to the migrants’ taxes. But Britons are growing more concerned, perhaps because net migration reached a near-record 685,000 last year (see chart 1). With the Conservative and Reform uk parties likely to bang on about immigration, Labour will probably want to demonstrate control, even stinginess.

Britain has largely avoided two policies that other rich countries have tried: guest-worker programmes and points-based immigration systems, which let people in if they are young and highly qualified, even if they do not have a job. It would be wise to stay clear of both. Guest workers have a distressing tendency to become permanent, and do not integrate well; that kind of migration is better suited to insular autocracies like Saudi Arabia. Madeleine Sumption of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University says that points-based systems in countries like Australia leave many immigrants unemployed to begin with. They catch up later.

Although British ministers have often claimed to be enacting an Australian-style points system, the government actually relies on companies and universities to screen immigrants. It sets minimum salary thresholds for workers. If you can find a firm that will pay you £38,700 ($49,300) a year, or the going rate for a job if it is higher, then you are in, together with your dependants. The threshold is lower for young people and workers in some occupations.

In theory, a salary threshold is a powerful tool for controlling immigration, although Britain’s experience has been mixed. In April the threshold was raised from £26,200. That has not obviously affected the number of visa applications, which stood at 11,800 in July, slightly higher than a year earlier. Jonathan Portes, an economist at King’s College London, suggests that many firms were already paying more than the minimum, and that the increase is less steep than it seems because the fixed costs of hiring a foreigner (in the form of fees and bureaucracy) are so high. To cut the numbers, the government could push the threshold up again.

A simpler, better option would be to apply the salary threshold to more jobs. The British government has carved out many exceptions, especially for immigrants who are ultimately paid by the government itself. Last year almost 350,000 work visas, three-quarters of the total, went to health and care workers. They can be paid as little as £23,200 a year, or £11.90 an hour. The industry loves them. Geoff Butcher of Blackadder Corporation, which runs care homes, says that foreign recruits work hard and are less likely to quit than natives, although some struggle with abba and Rolling Stones singalongs.

Polls for British Future, a think-tank, show that immigrant care workers and nurses are popular—far more so than immigrant bankers, probably because care workers and nurses are more popular than bankers. But exempting them from the salary threshold seems dubious. A lax visa regime may be propping up an industry with appalling pay. According to Skills for Care, which oversees the care workforce, an employee with five years’ experience is paid just six pence more per hour than an employee with less than one year’s experience. And immigrant care workers can move on to other jobs in time. Some might—horrors!—go into finance.

Alarmed by the number of low-paid workers who were taking advantage of the loophole that it had created, in March the Tory government barred immigrant care workers (although not nhs workers) from bringing their dependants. That may have helped cut the numbers: in July just 2,900 people applied for health and care visas for themselves, down from more than 16,000 a year earlier (see chart 2). Bans on dependants are a bad idea all the same, if they break up families rather than selecting for single people.

Studies of immigrants and military families have repeatedly proved what should probably not need proving: that children suffer when separated from their parents. One study of migrants in Spain found an effect on their mental well-being that is similar to the effect of divorce among natives. The fact that some of the harm is invisible at first, because immigrants’ children are not in Britain, does not mean it can be ignored. Besides, after five years a care worker acquires more rights. She could switch professions and apply to bring her family over.

The Conservative-led governments that ran Britain between 2010 and 2024 tried more drastic experiments on foreign students. At first they clamped down, removing people’s right to work after graduating, as part of a doomed attempt to reduce annual net migration to the tens of thousands. Then they relaxed the rules. The number of enrolled international students jumped from 496,000 in the 2018-19 academic year (just before the more liberal policy was announced) to 759,000 in 2022-23. China, India and Nigeria sent the most.

The graduate visa scheme may be controversial, but it works effectively. Foreign students provide a valuable export and prop up the higher-education system: British universities ranked in the top 100 globally get 69% of their fees from them. And foreign graduates who choose to stay and work in Britain tend to take professional jobs. An evaluation by the Migration Advisory Committee, which counsels the government, finds that by the end of the first year of employment they earn almost as much as British graduates.

Graduate visas do, however, lay bare some of the problems that exist elsewhere in the immigration system. A foreign graduate who wants to stay in Britain has only two or three years in which to find a job that pays more than the salary threshold. The higher the threshold rises, the harder that becomes. About one-fifth solve the problem by going to work in the care system. If architects and engineers are doing that, it seems like a poor outcome. Hence the argument for a lower threshold with fewer exceptions.

It is worth remembering, though, that immigrants as a whole fare pretty well. A forthcoming research paper for the Migration Observatory finds that migrants from outside Europe who started working in 2021 earned 97% of the median British wage in the second year and 104% in the third year. Changes to the immigration rules could improve the system. It already works well. ■

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.