Sheona York gives her expert comment on the government’s announcement of new salary and income requirements for migrants.
‘On 4 December the new Home Secretary, James Cleverley, announced his plan to ‘slash [legal] migration by 300,000’. The plan is simple, and, unlike the Rwanda fiasco, legally open to the government. The minimum salary for a work visa is to be raised from £26,200 to £38,700. The shortage occupation list, allowing employers to offer visas at wages 20% lower than to UK residents, is to be reduced to a smaller list still containing health and social care workers. Those workers will not be permitted to bring any dependants to the UK. Family migrants are also to be hit with a new Minimum Income Requirement at the same level, 38,700, more than double the current level of £18,600.
These three measures may ‘work’ – the number of new work and family migrants arriving in the UK may well be significantly reduced.
But these measures will lead to a swathe of destruction cutting through the UK economy and public services, and through the lives of migrant families already present in the UK.
First, the economic and public sector implications. The whole political spectrum tacitly agrees that both the private and public sectors seek migrant workers because UK resident workers ‘won’t take’ certain jobs. Not because British people are too lazy, or benefits are too high, but because rents and travel to work cost too much for many people to take minimum wage and multi-shift jobs. Migrant care workers are needed because the government’s funding of local authorities is too low to enable councils to pay care workers properly for the skills and training they need. Only today a coroner found that an elderly woman had died because two separate overseas care workers could not speak English sufficiently to describe her medical condition to an NHS call centre.[1] But the technicalities clearly required training to recognise the symptoms, not just describe them.
But the impact on family migrants has barely been discussed. The new Minimum Income Requirement is to be £38,700. It is not yet known whether the extra requirements for every foreign child is also to be increased. Even if it is not, it would mean that to bring in a partner and one child would require a salary of over £40,000. The national average wage is around £35,000. This will hit anyone seeking to bring in their partner and children – including refugees who have married after leaving their country, and even British people seeking to return home with their family after working abroad.
Worse will be the impact on migrant families already in the UK, struggling to regularise and survive through the ‘5- and 10-year routes to settlement’, requiring repeat applications every 2 ½ years, costing nearly £3000 per applicant. The Clinic has clients, largely working in the NHS and social care, barely able to meet the £18,600 requirement, who will now find themselves ‘relegated’ to the ’10-year route’. This involves meeting specific ‘human rights’ requirements. Having a British child would probably secure them from a refusal, but having a non-British child here fewer than 7 years would lead to refusal and appeal – a process currently taking up to 2 years. A couple with no children face a test of whether there are ‘insurmountable obstacles’ to their going and living in the applicant’s home country. This would probably lead to refusal for any couples where the applicant is from a European country, Australia, or the USA. (And we do not yet know if the government’s cack-handed attacks on ‘human rights’ might accidently abolish even these provisions.)
These decisions will affect thousands of families who have lived and worked in the UK for years, falling in and out of the ‘hostile environment’ through falling out of work, or completing the wrong Home Office form. The Home Secretary should be told: these families do not ‘go home’, but merely survive in the margins of British life, supported by friends, their church, or by hard- pressed local authorities acting in the ‘best interests’ of the children.
Once again the government is indifferent to creating and perpetuating illegality.’
Sheona York, Kent Law Clinic