Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham

Last week’s intervention by a leading UK scientist over the prohibitive cost of visas raised an uncomfortable truth: Britain’s migration system is not — or is no longer — designed to attract talent, but to filter it by wealth. Prof Sir Paul Nurse was right to highlight the absurdity of the NHS super-charge, which forces migrant scientists to pay hundreds of pounds a year for a health service they already fund through their taxes. But the problem goes far beyond visa fees. What we are witnessing is the consolidation of a broader logic — one that ranks workers’ worth according to their immigration status and ability to pay.

The debate around migrant scientists is revealing precisely because it exposes the fiction at the heart of government rhetoric. Ministers regularly insist that Britain wants “the brightest and the best,” yet the system they oversee evaluates neither scientific excellence nor social contribution. Instead, it rewards the wealthy. A scientist who cannot afford inflated visa fees, the super-charge, and soaring maintenance requirements may simply never make it to UK laboratories, however exceptional their research. Meanwhile, a wealthy applicant with weaker credentials breezes through. When entry becomes conditional on income rather than merit, the message is clear: Britain values money over knowledge.

This dynamic is even more visible in the patterns of PhD student mobility. Since Brexit, the number of European doctoral students coming to the UK has dropped sharply. These were students who once paid home-level fees, moved freely across borders, and often stayed to build research capacity. Now they face overseas tuition rates, stricter visa rules, limited financial support, and little clarity over long-term prospects. Unsurprisingly, many opt to study elsewhere in Europe, reversing decades of academic exchange. The decline is not marginal — it is structural. At the very moment when global competition for research talent is intensifying, Britain has made itself less accessible, less attractive, and less affordable.

PhD students are the canaries in the coal mine. Their declining presence signals a shift in how the UK understands mobility, aspiration and scientific contribution. If entry into advanced research training becomes reserved for those with personal or institutional wealth, Britain’s research landscape will narrow, becoming less diverse and less capable of responding to global challenges. But it also reveals something deeper: a willingness to accept that foreign-born individuals must continuously prove their value above and beyond British citizens.

This is part of a wider trend. Across Western democracies, the human-rights and anti-discrimination frameworks that once underpinned social and political life — the idea that all people, irrespective of their immigration status, have rights and must not be discriminated against — are fading from political imagination. In their place, a transactional approach is emerging, one that sees mobility as a privilege to be continually earned rather than a condition of human flourishing. This shift accelerates the normalisation of migrants’ inferiorisation — a revival of colonial logics that were never fully dismantled. It creates categories of workers who are structurally exploitable because their rights are provisional and their presence conditional.

Britain’s current political climate reinforces this logic rather than challenging it. Labour, despite claiming a commitment to fairness and equality, has embraced a narrative that assigns value to workers according to the immigration status they hold. British workers are imagined as stable, deserving contributors; non-British workers become inherently less trustworthy, less valuable and less entitled to rights. This hierarchy is not a minor administrative detail. It shapes workplace relations, social attitudes and everyday experiences of belonging. When a government reifies such distinctions, it legitimises inequalities far beyond the migration system itself.

These ideas have long genealogies. The division of labour by legal status and race did not begin with modern visa regimes. Under empire, Britain developed extensive bureaucratic and ideological systems for categorising, ranking and controlling mobile labour. Indentured labour schemes, racialised restrictions and differentiated rights were designed to maintain economic extraction while limiting political inclusion. Today’s migration system does not replicate those structures directly, but the underlying logic persists: migrants are commodified; mobility is permitted when it benefits the state economically, but rights are withheld to preserve control.

This is why the call from scientists to abolish the NHS surcharge is more than a technical policy issue. It challenges the principle that migrants must pay extra to access the same services they already help fund. It rejects the notion that belonging depends on wealth and that contribution is measured in fees rather than knowledge, care or labour.

If Britain genuinely wants to be a global centre for science, education and innovation, it cannot sustain a migration system that devalues the very people it claims to attract. Nor can it ignore the chilling effect current policies have on academic mobility, from PhD applicants to senior researchers. Rebuilding a fair and forward-looking migration system will require more than reducing visa fees. It demands abandoning the hierarchy of human worth embedded in current policy and restoring a rights-based framework that recognises migrants as full participants in society.