Imagine if, for once, Labour decided to tell the truth about immigration

Our economy needs it. The NHS needs it. And making foreign workers’ lives more miserable – as the home secretary plans to do – will undermine integration

My mum’s carer was uncharacteristically late one morning. She didn’t want to say why at first, but it turned out she’d found her previous client – an elderly lady living all alone, with no family to visit – collapsed on the floor, barely alive. It was a lot to cope with for someone only in their early 20s, a reminder of the heavy responsibility this job carries. Watching the carers who helped both my parents in their respective final weeks taught me that while the work itself might seem mundane, the emotional and social skills needed to do it well – to coax some sense out of the confused, to jolly along the lonely, and to soothe the dying, to walk in and out of unfamiliar houses all day long without quite knowing what you might find – are anything but.

Yet like so many jobs predominantly done by women, care has long been relentlessly undervalued. That means lousy pay, little public recognition, and now – at least for the disproportionately large chunk of this workforce who are migrant workers – the disorientating realisation that the government can snap its fingers and all your life plans are upended overnight.

Under the latest attempt by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to ratchet immigration numbers ever further down, “low-skilled” foreign workers will now have to wait up to 15 years for the right to become permanent residents. The new rules would be backdated to 2021 to catch what the right dubbed the “Boriswave”, that unexpected surge of workers who came to Britain in the Boris Johnson years – many on health and care visas – and would under the old five-year rule have started qualifying for settlement in 2027. What has unsettled some of Mahmood’s own cabinet colleagues is the sense of the state reneging on what was understood to be the deal when those workers came here. Having to be continuously employed for 15 years instead of five without a break means in practice that some will have to leave, while others will live in mortal fear of losing a job. A growing cabinet revolt against Mahmood’s reforms is now becoming the first real challenge to Andy Burnham’s authority as prime minister, but also more broadly a test of where he really stands on immigration.

This month’s budget throws a problem that governments have been trying to ignore for a decade into sharp relief: kneejerk hostility to foreign workers is costing Britain dear, and not just because public services would fall apart without them. Last month, the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that falling immigration would inevitably mean falling tax revenues, shrinking John Healey’s headroom at the budget by about £4bn. So much for the rightwing myth that migrants are a drain on their host country: if anything, they’ve been bailing Britain out.

It’s not just taxes, either. Immigrants pay a surcharge on top for the right to use the NHS if needed while they’re here, which is now raising £2.5bn a year, according to new research from the Nuffield Trust. It seems all those pesky liberals who argued that migrants are generally healthier than the average Briton – and therefore less likely to need a GP – were right after all: the trust estimates that migrants are on average paying in 60% more in surcharge per year than they take out in healthcare services, a handy little revenue stream that for some reason we never talk about. But immigration crackdowns threaten that income too. The trust notes that falling immigration can lead to “a sharp drop in income” for the NHS, much as slashing foreign student visas has hurt universities that were reliant on their fees.

As the Office for Budget Responsibility spelled out in 2024 – when it calculated that the surge of immigration under Johnson that so offended Tory voters at the time would help knock more than £7bn off projected government borrowing by 2028-29 – economically speaking, immigration is basically good news. If the country really wants it to fall, then something else – higher taxes, lower spending or more borrowing – is going to have to plug the resulting hole in the finances. Yet for years now, successive governments, fearful of confronting leave voters, have tried manfully to pretend that that choice does not exist.

Mahmood’s plan is essentially yet another attempt to square the same old circle, gearing the system around letting in as few people as possible – in keeping with what a furious public has for the last decade seemed to want – while trying to cherrypick those most likely to make an outsize economic contribution. Under her reforms, the highest paid workers (who are likely to pay lots of tax over their lifetimes) would be fast-tracked to settlement, while those judged more likely to be an economic burden on the state overall would be pushed away. What she doesn’t seem to have bargained for, aside from the fact that the rest of the world is in hot competition for high-skilled migrants, is the sense of deep disquiet that engenders. As the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, has pointed out, endlessly prolonging settlement risks undermining social cohesion. A country that makes very clear its foreign workers are here at best on sufferance, even if they do hold lives in their hands at work every day, does nothing to encourage them to integrate and put down roots.

The logic of Burnham’s announcement that a future Labour government might consider rejoining the EU, meanwhile, leaves Mahmood’s reforms looking strangely like the relics of a bygone era. If rejoining the single market or customs union would inevitably mean accepting freedom of movement again, what’s the point?

The truth is that grimly ratcheting immigration down to next to nothing has come at extraordinary fiscal and social cost, and if the aim was to destroy Reform’s raison d’etre then it hasn’t worked. The mainstream right has switched seamlessly from the pre-Brexit days of complaining that Polish plumbers were taking Britons’ jobs, to a much darker post-Brexit stage of painting migrants as rapists and criminals. The far right, meanwhile, has simply moved on from cheerleading for deportations to insisting that even people who were born here aren’t English unless they’re white.

Legal migrant numbers are at a historic low and small boat crossings have halved, yet that didn’t stop anger at asylum seekers spilling on to the streets again this summer. There is no level of migration low enough to satisfy some people. There is, however, very much a level of migration low enough to make us all even poorer, and the angry somehow even angrier. And right now, we’re living with it.