Keir Starmer is booting migrants out of his vision for workers’ rights

It is a well-established fact that migrant workers’ rights are already some of the most trampled upon in Britain today. One-in-six foreign-born workers experience precarious work, according to recent research from the Resolution Foundation. At the charity I run, every day we hear from foreign-born workers who were abused by their visa sponsors, but are prevented from changing jobs by strict, poorly designed visa restrictions. But if you thought Keir Starmer would use his party’s flagship immigration policy announcement as an opportunity to tackle the driving factors behind this, you would be wrong. 

The prime minister has made it clear this week that migrants living in the UK on work visas are not included in the ‘working people’ his Labour government claims to represent. 

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While the immigration white paper acknowledges the scale of migrant exploitation, the government’s commitments to address it are soft, at best. They centre on the provision of more information for workers, with only a vague promise to “explore” the reforms that could actually give migrant workers more flexibility and better hold non-compliant employers to account.

Instead, the government relies heavily on the assumption that it will fix things by reducing net migration, notably by closing the health and care worker visa to new overseas applicants and raising the skill level for skilled worker visas. 

It will not. It will just make the thousands of people who answered when Britain called for help feel less welcome. It will also send shockwaves through the business community, particularly in sectors like care, where one in five UK care workers is foreign-born. 

Contrary to what this white paper suggests, exploitation doesn’t happen because there are too many of us, or because migrants on employer-sponsored visas lack the information. It happens because the work migration system we have today ties migrant workers to the employers who sponsor their visas, making it extremely difficult and costly for them to leave bad jobs and speak out against exploitation. 

Hundreds of unscrupulous employers have wielded this power with devastating effects, scamming, overworking, threatening or abandoning the workers who traveled to the UK with the promise of fair pay for hard work. The Big Issue recently reported on one care worker from Cameroon who has been sleeping on the streets since the care agency that scammed him out of £8,000 abandoned him.

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The damage has already been done, and with the numbers of care worker visas being granted already dramatically falling by 94% since the Tories banned applicants bringing family members, it is but a distraction.

There are more than 39,000 migrant care workers already in the UK facing destitution, having had the misfortune of being hired by a rule-breaking employer. What they need is not more hostility and victim-blaming, but reforms that give them the time and means to find a new employer, impose tougher sanctions on rule-breaking businesses, and protect victims reporting exploitation from having their immigration status curtailed.

On top of this, Starmer has unveiled plans to double the time before migrants qualify for settlement from five years to 10 years. This is an arbitrary move that introduces further unfairness into an already hostile system. 

Settled status affords migrants access to benefits and public services like the NHS on a par with British citizens. These are rights that go hand-in-hand with building a stable, self-sufficient life. As they wait longer for these rights, inequality between migrants and UK-citizens will only widen.

While they wait longer to apply for settled status, and the Home Office cashes in on the additional application fees, migrants and their families will remain in a transitory position for even longer. More people will be put at risk of falling into insecure immigration status, putting them at greater risk of exploitation. Surely this makes the Starmer’s end goal of integration much harder, rather than easier, to realise.

This government’s commitment to reduce net migration at any cost is breeding a climate of hostility, and ignoring policies that would in fact be better for migrants, better for business, and better for workers all across the UK. 

The white paper dangerously conflates a reduction in net migration with a solution to the problem of migrant worker exploitation. This isn’t just misunderstanding the root causes of exploitation. It is booting the policies that could really make a difference into the hazy space of exploration.

By the government’s own admission, thousands of migrant workers remain tied to employers who know that it is too costly and too risky for them to leave a sponsored job, however abusive. Alongside more than 130 other migrants’ rights experts, we sent an open letter to the home secretary Yvette Cooper asking her to make it easier for sponsored workers to leave an exploitative employer and start work with a fair one. 

They are the victims of a deeply flawed immigration system. While the prime minister will likely say that it was implemented by his predecessors, he has a duty to help the people whose lives it has ruined. 

We and other migrants’ rights advocates have spent years researching and making proposals for reform to the work sponsorship system that would be beneficial for workers, simpler for business, and entirely realisable by this government. Seeing these proposals acknowledged as something the government will explore is a thin silver lining. But if the government is serious about protecting all working people, concrete action needs to start now.

Dr Dora-Olivia Vicol is CEO of the Work Rights Centre.

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