The British Labour government is in the process of fine-tuning a class-based immigration policy to suit the needs of the market. Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s announcement in February of a four-tier work permit scheme was just the latest refinement in this plan. This ‘modern’, capitalist-friendly immigration system underpins all today’s spin about keeping out ‘unfounded’ asylum seekers but letting in skilled economic migrants and is no less racist than the policies that preceded it. FRFI opposes all immigration controls. NICKI JAMESON reports.
In September 2000, then Immigration Minister Barbara Roche announced a fundamental change to Labour’s immigration policy. Roche gave a speech entitled ‘UK migration in a global economy’ to a conference organised by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) and sponsored by the British Bankers Association. She opened by congratulating the City of London on having the ‘most diverse and international workforce in London’.
Prior to then Labour’s sole policy on immigration had been based, like that of the previous Tory government, on restricting and reducing it, and in particular on attacking ‘economic migrants’, accusing those making asylum claims of secretly coming here to find work and improve their living standards.
However, the shortsightedness of this approach had begun to be pointed out to the government by its own supporters, and pro-Labour journalists had been preparing the ground for Roche’s speech for several months. On 19 June 2000, the day after 58 Chinese people died a horrific death whilst being smuggled into Britain in a tomato lorry, The Guardian’s Alan Travis used the focus on the dangers faced by would-be economic migrants to call for an ‘immigration policy based on…economic needs rather than foreign policy objectives or asylum sympathies’. He dismissed as of ‘marginal importance’ the argument against depriving poor countries of skilled workers so they can service the rich nations, citing the global value of remittances sent to poor nations by workers in rich ones as $65 billion a year.
As we reported in FRFI at the time, the government now changed its stance in order to encourage the openly ‘economic’ migration of a cheap, skilled, middle class workforce. ‘Workers who will earn enough to pay taxes and buy houses, who will not require council accommodation or state benefits; who can be paid relatively high wages but are cheap nonetheless, because this country has not had to invest in their education or training.’ (Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 157 October/November 2000)
Highly skilled…
The Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (HSMP) came into operation in January 2002. Men and women with the requisite level of qualification and existing salary are recruited abroad to seek work in Britain. They are given visas for one year initially, which they can renew if they find jobs. The programme has spawned an entire industry of recruitment consultants and lawyers, who promise to smooth out the bureaucracy for applicants. However there is no actual guarantee of finding work, and even at the ‘highly skilled’ level, black and Asian migrants face racism. FRFI spoke to two men from India who came here on the HSMP and remain unemployed (see box).
The IPPR, which hosted the conference at which Barbara Roche spoke, bills itself as ‘Britain’s leading progressive think tank’. Its direction is, however, firmly in tune with the drive of ‘New Labourism’. Current director Nick Peace was formerly a Special Adviser to David Blunkett on migration, asylum and citizenship. It is therefore not surprising that the IPPR should now produce research that vindicates this aspect of current government policy by demonstrating that the widely held notion that immigrants are a drain on the public purse is untrue. The study Paying their way: The fiscal contribution of immigrants in the UK, published by the IPPR in April 2005, concludes that in fact the reverse is the case, and immigrants contribute more to the state per person than people born in this country.
The study is based on data from the Labour Force Survey and the Office of National Statistics and shows that total revenue from immigrants grew 22 % in real terms from £33.8 billion in 1999-00 to £41.2 billion in 2003-04.This compares to a 6% increase for people born in the UK.
Skilled…
Of the almost 20,000 nurses who joined the medical register in 2003-04, more than 15,000 were from overseas. One third of the 212,000 doctors on the register qualified abroad. Home Office figures show the annual number of work permits issued to healthcare staff from outside the European Union has risen 27-fold since 1993, to more than 40,000. The highest number of these workers come from the Philippines, followed by India and South Africa.
A campaign against this draining of skilled staff from oppressed nations to service rich ones forced the government in 2001 to impose a ban on recruitment from the hardest-hit countries. However, deals have since been struck with the Philippines, India and some other countries which claim to have a surfeit of trained staff and are anxious to secure the remittances which such workers can send home from Britain and other wealthy nations.
In 2003, 5,560 work permits were issued to teachers from Commonwealth countries to work in the UK. Young teachers from Australia and New Zealand in particular teach in Britain to fund their travels in Europe. The largest single source of overseas teachers is South Africa, while Africa lacks five million teachers if universal primary education is to be achieved by 2015. Again there have been complaints and in autumn 2004 the British government was forced to agree to clamp down on the poaching of overseas teachers.
Ironically, while the government twists and turns to allow in the skilled workers it requires, and at the same time introduces yet more new measures to make it difficult to claim asylum in Britain, it is compelled to ignore the skills and qualifications of those ‘highly skilled migrants’ who have entered the country as asylum seekers. According to the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA), there are at least 1,000 asylum seeker doctors in Britain who are not allowed to work as their claims are still being processed. CARA estimates that ‘the skills and experience of up to 5,000 foreign academics seeking refuge in this country could be worth more than £100m to the economy.’ Britain is short of 3,000 dentists, while an estimated 700 asylum seekers have qualifications in dentistry.
Less skilled…
Clarke’s aim was to gather ‘all our current schemes for work and student migrants into one simple points-based system’ (Hansard 7 February 2005). As with the ‘highly skilled migrants’, the ‘tourists, students and migrant workers’ remain subject to endless controls, policing and changes in policy. The new system is designed so that permission to enter the country seeking work can be granted or withdrawn from whole sections of people with no warning or reason given. Just two months after the current version of the ‘working holidaymaker visa scheme’ was introduced, the Home Office began to restrict it. Of course, no Australian, New Zealander or white South African has been affected, but there was a sudden and total block put on any further applications, from Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Namibia and Botswana. This followed the announcement of a similarly sudden block on the issuing of visas to visitors aged 18 to 30 from Nigeria.
Unskilled…
Meanwhile the lowest paid workers from overseas continue to exist in the worst conditions, entering the country legally if they are from the ‘newly incorporated’ EU nations of eastern Europe, or illegally if they are from China or other poor nations, and doing the worst jobs for the lowest pay.
There is nothing progressive about the current policy simply because it involves the encouraging of some immigration, while the one it replaced openly discouraged all forms. This is not an offer of betterment to the workers of other nations, but the ‘flexible market economy’ drawing on the reserve army of labour of poorer countries to service the rich ones. In the 1950s the British economy needed an influx of low-paid workers and found them in its former colonies in the Caribbean and south Asia. As soon as enough were here, Enoch Powell shouted about ‘rivers of blood’ that would flow from a race war if immigration was not halted and all political parties unquestioningly united to ensure the door would begin to be closed. Today Britain needs certain types of skilled workers and is ensuring it obtains them at the lowest cost. If these gaps are filled, the policy will change again to fit the latest dictates of the market and Labour will dance to the tune of the City of London once again.
Highly Skilled Migrants seek work
‘The elation, the promise and the expectations last only until we arrive at Heathrow. The Home Office provides absolutely no support, understanding or help – no telephone calls are answered; e-mails and letters are not replied to, and visits in person are not entertained.
We are told repeatedly before coming here that the UK of today is an equal opportunities country; they are ‘investors in people’, in fact we are even handed out an equal opportunities monitoring form, where we tick our origin. But its all a trick – it’s pseudo-racism, isn’t it? Everyone is sickeningly polite, but the jobs never come our way. This is usually put down to ‘lack of UK experience’. Yet I have met so many New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans, people of white origin, who don’t have a shred of UK or London experience, are a lot less qualified, armed with CVs which have far weaker experience, not even relevant experience for the jobs that they are doing here, but they are the ones who have got the jobs. There is always some hurdle – if it’s not ‘London experience’, or ‘lack of UK network’, it’s that the job is in Wimbledon and you stay in Wood Green, or you are overqualified and ‘too senior’ for the role.
Half the recruiters do not know about this programme. So they do not recognise it. They ask us who has sponsored your visa? They do not realise that no one needs to sponsor an HSMP visa. The staff in the REED office at Wood Green told me that they have never seen a HSMP visa; even though REED is currently in partnership with the government to increase employment for migrants. Even the government’s own Job Centre initially refused to let me register because they did not know about HSMP.
So, how are we living here without jobs? We have brought our savings here and are spending them in this country. We cannot find any jobs – forget managerial ones, not even basic ones. And when the money finishes, we have to go back with shattered dreams and empty pockets. Maybe that is how we are making a difference – by spending our money here, so it adds to the net GDP of the UK. Could it be that it is the real reason why only senior managers and people with funds are targeted for this programme?’
FRFI 185 June / July 2005
