Starmer’s immigration plans aren’t just mean-spirited, they’re anti-growth

So, what are we to make of Keir Starmer’s “serious, pragmatic” reforms of migration rules?

At his press conference this morning, the prime minister said his government’s long-awaited white paper will “take back control of our borders”, tighten up every area of the UK’s “broken” immigration system – and reduce “significantly” migrant numbers by the end of the parliament.

Under the proposals, skilled work visas will be largely be restricted to degree level jobs, and visas will no longer be issued for care workers coming from overseas. English language requirements will be tightened, and there will be further restrictions on international students. Most migrant workers will have to spend a decade in Britain before they can apply for citizenship.

Some of this makes sense. If – and it is a big if – the government is finally serious about improving pay and conditions in the care sector, then recruiting from residents (including the many care workers living here who are originally from overseas) could allow a reduction in the historic reliance on new migrants.

And there are even some really welcome liberalisations, in particular the pledge to allow children who have grown up here to regularise their migration status and settle.

But all this is overshadowed by a mixture of frankly risible analysis and rhetoric which is, at best, dishonest. The prime minister said last year that “growth is the number one priority of this government”. But today he pledged that “migration will fall – that’s a promise”, and that the measures set out today will cut numbers by around 100,000 a year.

How to square this circle? The white paper rightly points to the UK’s low growth since the global financial crisis of 2008, but fails to present any remotely serious evidence that this is the result of high levels of immigration, as opposed to austerity and Brexit. Hardly surprising, since there isn’t any.

Similarly, the claims that the UK’S lamentable failures on skills or training, or the recent rise in the number of people leaving the workforce because of ill-health or disability, are driven by the operation of the immigration system are just that – claims, not facts.

And the prime minister’s rhetoric is even more divorced from reality. He tweeted this morning that “the Tories ran an immigration system that relied on cheap foreign labour”. In fact, recent data from HMRC shows that employees of migrant origin (both from the EU and beyond) have slightly higher earnings than UK-origin ones, and indeed that the gap has if anything widened (slightly) recently.

So the incessant claims, repeated today by the prime minister and the white paper that the recent growth in migrant workers has been mostly or entirely driven by “low-skilled migration” isn’t reflected in the government’s own data – which is probably why the white paper says little or nothing about the actual wages received by migrant workers.

There are certainly plenty of recent migrants on relatively low pay – but equally many on average or better wages. And, perhaps more importantly, they seem to be seeing quite rapid earnings progression, so the longer-term impacts may be even more positive.

That means that large cuts to immigration are likely to reduce growth. And by growth, I do not simply mean the size of the economy overall, but average household incomes and living standards.

Given that the migrant workforce is growing considerably faster than the overall population, and their earnings are higher and growing faster than those of UK-origin employees, it follows that – as the ONS concluded earlier – they are boosting rather than subtracting from per-capita GDP.

This matters for the public finances and our ability to finance public services. Recently, the Centre for Policy Studies claimed that if recent migrants were allowed – as they mostly are after five years of residence – to settle, then the lifetime net fiscal cost would be £234 billion. However, this used the wrong data for earnings and employment. Simply correcting the errors suggests that they actually should have reported a lifetime net fiscal benefit of approximately £125 billion, although the uncertainties here are considerable.

So the white paper measures to make it harder for people to come here to work, study or stay here may indeed “get immigration down” – but they will also “get growth down”.

Making the former a priority over the latter means betting that voters prefer fewer foreign students and workers, even at the expense of growth – not just in the headline statistics, but manifested in closed universities and care homes, and even more dysfunctional public services.