Mass migration has been a disaster for Britain. It’s time to cut the numbers

Those who say the UK cannot function without mass immigration are simply scare-mongering

Whenever it’s suggested that Britain could manage without importing 1.2 million people every year, out come the usual voices with the usual lines.
The NHS would collapse overnight, care homes would go unstaffed, our best universities would implode into a financial black hole, the ravens would leave the Tower of London and the last trumpet would sound as Britain sank slowly, gracelessly into the frigid waters of the North Sea.
This is scaremongering. Britain would be fine with massively reduced immigration; the only thing standing in the way is the Government.
Let’s start with the NHS. 2022, it hired some 12,148 foreign doctors. Over the 2022-23 financial year, they were joined by an additional 24,000 nurses. You could cut the numbers arriving by over a million before touching this tiny group. The health service is not a barrier to reform.
Even if it was, we could work around it. Every year, hundreds of qualified students are turned away from medical school due to the Government capping places. This has left Britain significantly more reliant on overseas staff than its peers, and hasn’t necessarily increased quality, either.
Doctors trained overseas are significantly more likely to face serious complaints than their domestic counterparts, and it is notable that the countries providing the most – Nigeria, Pakistan, and India – have two universities in the top 500 worldwide between them, compared to 54 in Britain. We might find it worth looking at what’s obstructing supply at home.
The university sector, on the other hand, does rely on funding from overseas students. It’s not hard to work out why; frozen domestic tuition fees have seen their real value fall £3,000 per student. Fees for foreign students, meanwhile, are uncapped.
The result has been an explosion in student visas, driven by huge numbers from poor countries attending the least selective, cheapest universities. These institutions are not selling education; they’re selling the right to work on the post-study visa.
Nobody is suggesting that the likes of Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial should be forced to turn away talented students. But at the lower end of the scale, we should either raise fee caps, or let failed institutions fail. Allowing what amounts to a backdoor work visa fee is absurd.
The social care sector, too, could probably function without massive immigration. It’s true that large numbers are recruited from overseas – 101,000 last year. But this isn’t because British workers aren’t capable of doing the job. It’s because it doesn’t pay enough. The median care home worker earned just £10.11 an hour in March. Aldi and Lidl pay £11.40, and Amazon warehouses around £13. It’s no wonder people are leaving.
The primary issue, again, is the government. Local authorities are responsible for publicly funded care; their real terms budgets have fallen 29 per cent between 2010 and 2022. The Treasury could dig into its pockets, and let wages rise. It wouldn’t cost that much; the full time equivalent social care workforce is about 1.2 million people, so giving every single worker a £2/hour pay rise would cost about £5 billion. The net cost would be even less if we could shift some of the 5 million on out of work benefits into employment.
Rather than do this, the Government is bringing in people willing to work for less. This looks great in the short run; the Chancellor can stand at the despatch box and promise tax cuts, with the OBR dutifully plugging in fancifully low spending assumptions for the larger population.
The problem is that it’s a ponzi scheme. People on care visas are eventually eligible for permanent residency, and free to work elsewhere, requiring more migrants to replace them. Meanwhile, studies have shown time and time again that these low skilled, non-EU workers almost inevitably turn out to be a long run fiscal drain.
But by the time those costs show up, the politicians have moved on and the mess is someone else’s to fix. It’s a pattern repeated from sector to sector. Britain deserves better than this reliance on immigration to cover the government’s incompetence.