The Great Britain government promised on Monday to adjust the migration rules and make it difficult for newcomers to remain permanently in the country, in a sign of the growing political pressure on the main slope to reduce the immigration number.
According to the plans, visas would be reduced for some low -qualification workers, the language requirements for the immigrants collected and the time needed so that the majority of newcomers qualify for citizenship or the right to remain permanently would double, from five years.
In a Downing Street speech, Starmer, which leads the Government Labor Party, accused its predecessors of allowing immigration to run out of control and effective creating an experiment with open borders.
“Today, this Labor Government is closing the laboratory. The experiment is over. We are recovering control of our borders,” he said, adopting the slogan used by Pro-Brexit activists before the Britain referendum to leave the European Union in 2016.
Without its new measures, Mr. Starmer added: “We risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks together.”
The measures announced on Monday are only related to legal immigration. The previous conservative leaders promised to reduce immigration to specific objectives, starting with Prime Minister David Cameron, who significantly pledged to obtain migration from hundreds of thousands a year to the “tens of thousands, whoabe Whoame Lacame Levamaal his party.
In part as a result, Mr. Starmer’s plan does not include concrete objectives for the legal number or immigrants to which they will be allowed every year, instead of opting for a wide plica.
“They do not make mistakes, this plan means that migration will fall, that is a promise,” Starmer said from Downing Street, adding that if the ministers need to take more measures to free the pressure on housing and public services, then “mark my words, we will do it.”
Repression contains some risks to the government at a time when the economy is flat, cracks are visible in the care system for older people and some employers are compared to labor shortages. But Mr. Starmer rejected the argument that large -scale immigration, by definition, promised economic growth.
Its hardening position reflects how migration is once again a Hotonton problem in Britain. Earlier this month, Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Anti-Inmigration Party, won a significant victory in the regional and mayor’s elections marking a great setback for the Labor Party of Mr. Starmer and the conservatives of the opposition.
The upper government ministers have speculated that the reform can arise as the main rival of work in the next general elections, which could explain a new forceful tone of Mr. Starmer who wrote on social networks: “If you want to live in the United Kingdom, you must speak English. That is common sense.”
But some critics argue that the approach could validate the right -wing populist agenda of Mr. Farage and fuel prejudice. “The increase in government antimigrant rhetoric is shameful and dangerous,” Write Nadia Whittome, a Labor Legislator, on social networks.
Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a research institute that specializes in migration and integration, said the government needed to demonstrate that it could manage immigration, but questioned the language of Mr. Starmer. “I think they should go to do this, with much of this son of content,” he said, “but with a more balanced tone.”
Responding to the announcement that the work visas for the care workers would end, Martin Green, executive director of Care England, who represents the suppliers, said it was “a crushing blow for an already fragile sector” and that the newspaper.
UK universities, representing higher education schools, asked ministers to “carefully think” about the impact of a new planned tax on students’ international rates.
Immigration was a great issue in the period prior to the 2016 referendum, in which Briton voted for Brexit. Some of Brexit’s greatest defenders, including Boris Johnson and Mr. Farage, promised to “recover control” or migration policy if Britain renounces the European Union.
But after Brexit, under the leadership of Mr. Johnson as prime minister, the annual net migration tripled, reaching its maximum point in more than 900000 in the year that ends in June 2023.
At the same time, the arrivals of asylum applicants in France in small or non -digital ships increased and Mr. Farage has capitalized both issues.
Mr. Starmer’s critics on the right argue that it is not going far enough and observes that, due to the restrictions described by the last government towards the end of their time in power, the numbers are expected to fall anyway. Reform UK wants to freeze what it calls “not essestial immigration”, although it has not explained what this would mean in practice. The conservatives are asking for a binding annual roof.
But the conservatives, who were expelled from power last year after 14 years, have a difficult history to defend. The successive conservative governments promised to reduce net immigration to less than 100,000 a year, but ended up presiding over the net migration numbers nine times that level.
