We Must Make Britain’s Immigration System Work for the British People

For too long, voters in this country have told Parliament that the immigration system isn’t working for them. The media and politicians have often been tempted to focus their attention on the very visible part of this: the small boats and dinghies crossing the channel to illegally circumvent Britain’s borders.

There is another element too, which has not received the coverage it deserves. Millions of people arriving at UK airports with visas in hand to work, live or study in the UK. The vast majority of these people have done nothing wrong. They have diligently and legally followed the system designed by the British Government.

But in many cases, their arrival has happened as a result of a system which isn’t working. And in some cases, it has happened as a result of loopholes in our legal migration system which can be – and are being – exploited by malicious actors to buy a life in Britain.

These are the Backdoors to Britain and they are the subject of a new report that I have written. This report is the result of more than 100 questions to the Home Office and months of research work by my team to identify the areas of our legal migration system which aren’t working for the British people. I wanted to set out some of what we have uncovered.

There are nearly 140,000 entries on the register of organisations able to sponsor workers – and nearly 17,000 of those organisations are tiny, with a workforce of 5 or less. The system clearly isn’t enforceable at that kind of scale or for organisations that small, so my report recommends banning visa sponsorship for the smallest organisations and introducing greater transparency measures so that the public can have confidence the system is working as intended.

The public also expect that companies who flaunt the system should not be able to do so repeatedly; so organisations which become B-listed for breaches of visa rules should only have one chance to re-gain their status.

We have created a system of university funding that provides a commercial incentive for universities to allow students into the UK who do not meet the highest standards – including by allowing universities to perform their own English language testing. A degree at a UK university helps international students to overcome a number of barriers in our immigration system for their whole lives; we must do more to ensure that universities with a commercial incentive don’t undercut our visa system.

Student visas do play an important role in the UK’s soft power – but only if we are using them to provide access for the world’s best and brightest students to the UK’s top universities. My report would make changes to the system to make that happen.

Thousands of people are coming to the UK through smaller visa routes with astonishingly low financial requirements. These visa routes must be reviewed and my report recommends closing the various religious and charity worker routes as a first step.

Right now, it is easier for a visa holder to bring their non-British spouse to the UK than it is for a British citizen to do the same thing. That cannot be right in an immigration system that puts British citizens first. My report recommends a number of changes to fix that.

Our public sector using British taxpayer money to sponsor thousands of visas; whilst youth unemployment rockets to nearly 1 million people. Visas should be an exception in exceptional circumstances; not an alternative to training up British workers for the public sector.

There are around half a dozen areas where the availability of data and compliance with visa conditions need to be seriously looked at. Not least that the Home Office has no idea what the current home address of visa holders is between visa renewals – that makes it too easy for visa holders to slip away if they fail to comply with conditions or renew their visas on time.

I make no claim that the above is an exhaustive list – nor that implementing the 30 recommendations contained in the report would fix the system overnight. But I hope it will start a conversation about immigration which acknowledges that a system that works for the British people must do more than just stop the boats; it must also close the backdoors in the system and ensure that the people coming to Britain are predominantly the world’s best and brightest.