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.
