Nando Sigona [originally published in OpenDemocracy]

The UK government announced its new plan to comprehensively tighten immigration rules last week. Among other measures, it seeks to: strengthen the requirements that all sponsoring institutions must meet to recruit international students; increase visa charges; close social care visas to new applicants from abroad; and expand the qualifying period for permanent settlement.

These changes are motivated more by panic over the growing support for Reform UK and pressure from right-wing media than by economic evidence.

Heading forward into the past

The white paper detailing the government’s plans, titled ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System’, frames them as a response to the failed “one-nation experiment in open borders” under previous Tory governments. This claim may seem counterintuitive for many readers. But policy-wise, it does indeed represent a marked shift from the past several years.

Immigration policy under the Conservatives in many ways liberalised following Brexit. Yes, there was plenty of performative cruelty directed at refugees and migrants, particularly those travelling irregularly across the Channel. But hiding behind that, the reforms instigated by Boris Johnson’s administration in 2020 actually liberalised migration channels to non-EU workers and international students. This led to unprecedented levels of net migration.

The new strategy attempts to reverse course. Its provisions close off lower-skilled routes, including the health and social care visa route that has been essential for filling the post-Brexit and Covid job vacancies in the NHS. They also raise salary, language and qualification thresholds for other routes. Specifically, the minimum skill level for work visas is being raised from A-level to degree-equivalent.

The Shortage Occupation List, designed to help employers fill vacancies in areas where they were struggling to find skilled workers, is replaced by a Temporary Shortage List. This will be accessible only under strict, time-limited conditions and eligible only for sectors deemed essential to the UK’s industrial strategy or infrastructure.

In an effort to avoid relitigating the Brexit referendum, Starmer shifts the blame for the failure of migration governance onto migrants themselves

International student recruitment, and their rights to stay after graduation and be joined by family members, are also targeted. The new plans impose tougher requirements on sponsoring institutions, international brokers and the students.

The many elephants in the room

The prime minister vocally condemned his predecessors for losing control of immigration while introducing these new plans to the press. His language mimicked the notorious “take back control” slogan used by pro-Brexit campaigners, controversially saying that the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” if it stayed on the present course.

Given his clear interest in making the Tories to blame for migration, it’s striking that the white paper makes no mention of Brexit or its profound impact on migration to and from the UK. Brexit, lest we forget, was not only a Tory policy project but also the long-standing obsession of Nigel Farage in his various political incarnations (UKIP, Leave.EU, Brexit Party, and now Reform). But in an effort to avoid relitigating the Brexit referendum, Starmer omits the single most important cause of the “squalid years” he claims to be moving beyond. Instead, he shifts the blame for the Brexit-induced failure of migration governance onto migrants themselves.

At the same time, the emphasis on “net migration must come down” and “restoring control” echoes long-standing Conservative narratives dating back to Theresa May’s tenure as prime minister. The rhetoric of a “fair but firm” system, rooted in economic utility, remains central. In such a system, migrants are welcome only if they are “highly skilled,” “speak English,” and “contribute” economically – a framing that flattens migration into a purely transactional exchange.

The language and structure of the white paper furthermore echoes larger, right-wing populist narratives in Europe and the United States. In a turnaround from some of his earlier statements celebrating the positive contributions of migrants to the UK, Starmer’s foreword frames high migration levels as an existential threat: “Britain became a one-nation experiment in open borders. The damage this has done to our country is incalculable.”

Phrases like “restoring order,” “crackdown on illegal working,” and “deportation of foreign criminals” appear throughout the text. Though framed as neutral governance tools, these terms tap into deeper symbolic associations between migration, chaos, criminality, and loss of sovereignty – tropes widely used by parties such as France’s Rassemblement National or Donald Trump’s Republican platform.

Perhaps more insidious is the use of dogwhistle racism – coded language that signals racialised meanings without explicitly referencing race. For example, the white paper notes that: “Most remaining eligible study visa dependants are still able to come without a requirement to speak English, limiting their ability to integrate.”

White, English-speaking professionals are “global talent”, while racialised workers from the Global South are seen as “cheap labour” or “abuse risks”

Here, assumptions about “integration” become a reason for pre-emptive exclusion – a cultural and linguistic gatekeeping mechanism. It implicitly targets migrants from racialised, non-English-speaking backgrounds and casts them as socially problematic. Similarly, the paper criticises the rise in family visas and dependants, linking them to pressures on public services and declining “community cohesion”.

Although race is never overtly mentioned, the cumulative effect of such language – combined with the focus on “low-skilled” sectors like care, hospitality, and food service – constructs a racialised hierarchy of migrants: white, English-speaking professionals are “global talent”, while racialised workers from the Global South are seen as “cheap labour” or “abuse risks”.

Once again, migrants will pay the price

The consequences of this new policy for migrant workers are likely to be severe. The closure of the health and social care visa route removes a major legal pathway used by thousands – particularly women from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

For many migrants already in the UK, the ability to renew visas or switch status will remain, but new arrivals will face sharply reduced options. As research my colleagues and I recently conducted on the living and working conditions of irregularised migrants in the UK shows, these changes risk funnelling workers into informal or exploitative arrangements – particularly in sectors like domestic work and care, where demand remains high even as legal channels disappear.

Family life is also made more precarious. The white paper raises income thresholds for bringing dependants and restricts family reunification for workers in “lower-skilled” roles. This further stratifies rights along classed – and implicitly racialised – lines, creating a system in which only the well-paid are permitted to live with their families.

Even for those deemed “desirable”, the path to permanence is about to become more conditional. A new “earned settlement and citizenship” model requires migrants to prove their economic contribution and language ability over a ten-year period, rather than the five-year period usually required up until this point. It also formalises a fast-track pathway based on a yet not clearly defined “contributions to the UK economy and society”.

Beneath its administrative and technocratic surface, the 2025 white paper reflects a genuine hardening of the UK’s immigration regime – one that draws heavily on right-wing populist tropes while maintaining a veneer of policy neutrality. It enshrines a vision of migration as temporary, conditional, and dependent on narrowly defined economic value.

The cost of this approach will fall disproportionately on racialised migrants, low-income workers, and families forced to live apart. In the name of restoring control, the UK risks deepening inequality and entrenching a two-tier system of rights and belonging – one in which access to citizenship is ever more restricted, and where migrants are constructed primarily as economic instruments, bodies to do work, rather than full members of society.