Following leaks from Suella Braverman, the Conservative immigration plan has been opened to scrutiny.
The plan is simple, create a Growth Visa for targetted sectors that will allow skilled workers to enter the UK with business sponsorship. This visa will be easier and cheaper to acquire than the usual work visa, provided the worker has the required skills. The aim is to move £14bn back into the UK economy.
This sounds like a sensible approach to plugging gaps in the UK's workforce, but as this is a Conservative plan, it falls apart the moment a more-than-cursory glance is passed over the detail.
The target industry is IT, an industry that is booming in the UK. It is the one sector where pay has kept up with inflation and skills have value, despite previous attempts to sabotage it (see IR35).
The growth visa undermines this entirely.
The main target of this visa is consultancies like Infosys, a significant shareholder of which is the PM's wife. Under the new visa, these companies can bring their offshore staff (mainly from India) to the UK to work on projects, thus appeasing the desire for talent onshore and in the office.
This puts UK-based IT professionals at a disadvantage, now competing with workers on offshore rates without the offshore trade-offs. This will either see a race to the bottom, or a complete devaluation of skills and a total brain drain as the more capable workers head to more lucrative markets in Europe, Australia, or the USA.
Those coming in via visa also find themselves in limbo between worker protections and slavery, with the threat of being deported held over their heads to ensure compliance with unreasonable work demands. Even under the current scheme, it is not unheard of to see workers deported for failing to adhere to their offshore bosses' demands for unlimited overtime commitments, despite the cost incurred by their employer. With a cheaper, faster visa, this process becomes even more palateable for abusive employers.
Finally, there comes a question that impacts everyone in the UK. Where are these people going to live? The UK has experienced decades of underinvestment in housing, the total selloff of its social housing stock, and a government determined to keep house prices aloft at the expense of all else. With anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise, how can the Conservatives square the circle of increasing immigration while simultaneously flogging the dead horse of nationalism?
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