Keir Starmer admitted immigration doesn’t benefit Britain’s economy - what now?
Where do we go from here?
There has been quite a commotion in Britain this month. The government’s new immigration White Paper, entitled “Restoring control over the immigration system”, has startled the commentariat by making the admission that mass immigration has not benefited Britain’s economy.
The details of the White Paper - a form of report presented to Parliament summarising research into a key political issue alongside proposals to resolve any problems - have, unfortunately, been largely obscured by the briefing speech Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave to announce its release.
This speech has been dubbed the “Island of Strangers Speech”, after Sir Keir made the incredibly uncontroversial observation that a nation depends on shared rules that must apply to all residents, regardless of citizenship status.
In the flutter that has become far too common amongst the British press, Sir Keir’s statement was compared to Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he feared the dangers of mass immigration on social cohesion and public peace (it’s worth noting that Powell feared 50,000 arrivals per year; in 2024, it was nearly one million).
But a more cynical eye must regard this flutter as intentionally obscuring the key admission in the paper; that mass immigration has been an economic failure.
Beginning at point ten, after charting the unsustainable rise in mass immigration that saw Britain’s net figures reach over 900,000 in 2022, the paper details the ways in which the state has fallen asleep at the wheel over the management of migration.
The focus of work visas has shifted towards the prioritisation of temporary, short-stay workers (for whom there is no language requirement); our study visas, which made up the majority of longterm visas in 2024, have been for students primarily at “lower-ranked education institutions”; and we have allowed the number of dependants arriving with main-route visa holders to explode. So much so, that 55% (315,000) of visas issued to Health and Care workers between 2021 and 2023 were to dependants. Those are the legal routes: meanwhile, an additional 160,000 illegal migrants have crossed the English Channel since 2018.
All of this means, as the paper continues, the narrative that supported and facilitated the public acquiescence to large-scale immigration - that it will improve our economy - has turned out to be false.
All of this means our economy has been struggling under the weight of numbers that cannot be accommodated while our infrastructure is neglected and an additional £3bn per annum is spent merely on illegal channel crossers.
All of this means, as the paper continues, the narrative that supported and facilitated the public acquiescence to large-scale immigration - that it will improve our economy - has turned out to be false. Points 13 to 19 detail the ways in which this has become obvious: stagnating GDP growth (just 3.4% since 2019, compared to the US’ 12% in the same period); low-skilled workers “distort the labour market”, and in fact have actually displaced workers in six out of 10 key industries; and, most damning, GDP per capita has fallen, meaning the average Brit is worse off, continually since 2022. So much so that our GDP per capita is now lower than before the Covid pandemic.
Yet if that cynical eye turns to the paper itself, the details as ever hide the devil. On page eight, paragraph nine, the paper frames the problem as a recent one, blaming the rules introduced after Britain left the European Union formally in 2020, which was a points-based system that set the threshold unacceptably low, reducing the education level needed for a visa as well as the minimum income.
Doing so is a not-so-careful attempt to position the Labour government as being pro-immigration, but anti-mass immigration. Of course, “mass” is a matter of perspective; in framing the problem as a post-Brexit one, when our net migration averaged over 700,000 per annum over three years, the government clearly wants to present our 2010s average of circa 250,000 a year as normal, when our pre-1998 levels of immigration was basically net zero; until 1994, we experienced negative net migration.
This puts the government on a very different page to the electorate, who wildly underestimate the number of immigration (typically thinking it’s net 70,000 per annum), yet still want immigration drastically cut, with nearly 50% saying it should be below 10,000.
It also puts the government on the wrong side of the evidence when it comes to the impact of immigration on the economy; the International Monetary Fund, for example, released a report stating that surges in low-skilled immigration has a depressing impact on workers’ wages. It does, apparently, benefit middle-income wages, though that is in the short term. The report found that this was just as true in the United States.
Even with all of this, there is a dearth of detail over the future of Britain’s immigration policies, and resolutions on how to address the negative economic impacts of mass migration. Where there are details, they tend to be over how unelected bodies will play a role in shaping the future immigration policies of the country.
The only place a discernible reform is recommended is over the language requirements of visa applicants, which will generally rise from high school diploma level of proficiency to college degree level. But this only applies where there is a pre-existing requirement, meaning that low-skilled migrants (which the paper admits has become the focus), who do not have to prove any skill level, will continue to be admitted with no requirements. Nor will it audit the poor level of English amongst our student population, which is fast becoming a source of scandal. It will do practically nothing to alter the overall language proficiency of our migrants.
Our public philosophy has slipped too far into the attitude of non-intervention.
So, we find ourselves in a mean situation: the government has willingly admitted that our experiment in mass migration has been an economic failure, yet offers no concrete plans to address this, and will rely on unelected technocrats to provide them.
Where do we go from here?
The ever-excellent Guy Dampier has suggest that:
The government should begin to discuss the demographic makeup of the country and set a target for what the foreign-born population of the country should be. Considering that people think immigration on average was around 70,000 a year, far lower than reality, this would be a more meaningful benchmark for the level of immigration there is democratic consent for.
I agree with Guy’s recommendation in terms of setting a goal, though no doubt he will invite criticisms of population-control in the style of totalitarian regimes. In actual fact, our public philosophy has slipped too far into the attitude of non-intervention, predicated on the presumption that government should not involve itself in the lives of the people it governs over. Well, if a state exists because of its people, I think it’s reasonable to say a state ought to be concerned with the existence of its people: it’s the same reason we have a national health service, national education, and other “cultural infrastructural” institutions.
Neil O’Brien MP pointed out (today, no less) that “what we really badly need in the face of such unprecedented changes is a really strong, confident, unifying national culture that people can assimilate into as much as possible.”
But all of these points are missing one key ingredient: an immigration strategy. Guy’s goal of a target is aiming in the right direction, and Neil is right that we need a unifying culture, but without a strategy of how to manage either the communities that are here and actively refuse to assimilate, as well as a strategy of what to do when too many arrive in the first instance, we have no earthly idea of how to get there.
Remigration, the phrase that is gaining currency rapidly, is a term that conjures up images of men being led onto planes in chains, thanks to the discussion around President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. In actual fact, these are gang members who are being sent to El Salvador, in part because of an agreement between the United States and El Salvador, for the latter to house them in prisons.
That, in my view, is where we need to go; identifying how the British state needs to be restored to working order, and explaining to people why certain decisions must be taken to achieve it.
In fact, Britain seems to want to pursue softer policies. As the Gov.uk website states:
The voluntary returns service can provide up to £3,000 in financial support to help you after you leave the UK. If you are eligible, you will get a single payment on a card before you leave the UK. You can only use the card in your home country.
But this service is voluntary. Much has been made about the ECHR preventing us from deporting criminals - and indeed, it does, as does the presence of activists judges in our legal system and the gummed-up appeal network that prevents decisions being made and actually facilitates them being overturned - but it seems that there is no real desire to enforce deportation decisions.
Nevertheless, the conversation is moving in that direction: Kemi Badenoch MP called for deportations (though the cynical view is that she did so to try and mitigate the drubbing her party got at the local elections) and Nigel Farage MP has promised a “Minister for Deportations” in the Home Office, if a Reform government forms. Constitutional reform will be needed in order for the ECHR to be rooted out of the legal framework that prevents the sovereign decision of the British people, but that requires a more holistic approach to the British state that goes beyond the migration debate. That, in my view, is where we need to go; identifying how the British state needs to be restored to working order, and explaining to people why certain decisions must be taken to achieve it.