The government is in trouble on immigration. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has a fairly hard-line stance towards migrants, but the number of people expressing a lack of confidence in Labour’s ability to handle immigration has risen since last May – particularly among 2024 Labour voters. Tough talk is both failing to win Reform voters and pushing Labour’s voter base away.
Yet the government has excelled in its manifesto promise to reduce net immigration. Drastic reductions in visa applications for skilled jobs, especially in health and social care, are the leading cause of a two-thirds decrease in net arrivals in the year ending June 2025 over the preceding 12-month period. And those numbers are still falling.
Given our ageing population – soon there will be more people dying than being born – plummeting applications for work visas should be no cause for celebration. We will need to attract workers from abroad. But if we don’t treat immigrants equally, we risk creating an underclass workforce that can be easily exploited. Reform politicians have made no secret of their admiration for the Dubai approach, in which migrant workers are generally denied pathways to settled status.
In chasing Reform to make the UK less attractive to immigrants, Labour is entrenching a more unequal system and moving us closer to that Dubai-style model. Creating a poorer, more vulnerable migrant class of workers who have no long-term stake in our society worsens wages and conditions for everyone, and increases resentment towards immigrants. These are the conditions that help the likes of Nigel Farage scapegoat migrants further.
But if Labour wakes up and smells the polling, it can still change direction in time. We do need to overhaul the messy post-Brexit work visa system. Here are the three big changes that would make things fairer and work better.
First, close the loopholes that make migrant workers easier to exploit. We don’t have enough labour inspectors, so standards are not enforced, especially in areas that have disproportionately high migrant workforces, such as construction, farming and care homes. What’s more, if an employer is sanctioned for abusing staff, the workers lose their visa too – making it unlikely that a migrant worker would report abuses, even where there are inspections. With no firewall between labour inspections and immigration enforcement, a migrant speaking up about conditions could bring themselves to the attention of the Home Office and face deportation. The government excluded migrant workers from its Employment Rights Act, so these loopholes persist, undermining Labour’s workers’ rights agenda.
Second, scrap restrictive employer-tied visas. In the Brexit campaign, we were sold the idea of an “Australian-style” points-based system, but we never really got one. It’s near impossible to gain enough points to get a visa without employer sponsorship, so most people’s right to continue to live here depends on their employment. This creates an obvious power imbalance, with bureaucratic hurdles preventing migrants from easily changing job to seek better wages or conditions. When some people have no right to seek better opportunities, employers don’t have to compete to keep their employees happy. Employers take advantage of these restrictions on foreign workers, leading to wage stagnation. A true points-based system, in which anyone accruing sufficient points from things like language proficiency and professional skill can enter the labour market on a level playing field, would drive standards up for all.
Finally, integrate asylum seekers into the points-based visa system. It is absurd that asylum seekers are banned from working. There are many who spend long periods in the asylum backlog, or have difficulty proving their claim to the high legal standard of a refugee; such people should be allowed to enter the labour market. This would mean their skills could be recognised under the points-based system, potentially giving them another route to staying in the UK.
These changes are not about Dubai-style migrant exploitation, but about building a fair, high-wage, high-productivity economy that attracts the workers we need. For the supposed party of Labour, it should be a no-brainer. But as long as Reform is in some way influencing the government’s migration strategy, there is little hope.
[Further reading: Please let me rent your house]
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