Migration Watch UK has warned the Government’s plans for immigration after Brexit will lead to an influx “even more massive” than the record levels Britain is already experiencing.
Delayed for almost a year, the White Paper on immigration after Brexit has now been unveiled by Home Secretary Sajid Javid, who campaigned for a Remain vote as Business Secretary during the EU referendum.
The United Kingdom has never had particularly strong immigration controls and Tory manifesto promises to cut the net annual inflow “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” in 2010, 2015, and 2017 have never been realistically achievable due to the country’s EU membership — as Brussels mandates unlimited and effectively unvetted intra-bloc migration under its Free Movement regime.
The Brexit vote held out the prospect of finally making progress on this long-standing commitment — and indeed, the vote alone resulted in EU net immigration falling to 74,000, accompanied by a significant rise in wages and starting salaries for workers in industries where employers had been exploiting cheap foreign labour to the full, such as hospitality.
But, despite the Government’s own Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) defying expectations to admit that mass migration has been of no real benefit to Britain and turned into a “lower wage, lower productivity kind of economy”, the Government appears to have caved to bosses’ demands to maintain a continuous supply of cheap foreign labour by providing an uncapped number of visas for low-skilled migrants from anywhere in the world.
“These are shocking proposals which run completely against the current of public opinion and which are likely to result in even more massive levels of immigration,” commented Migration Watch UK chief Lord Green of Deddington in a statement received by Breitbart London.
“The chief winners from this White Paper will be business, as they exploit the bonanza of a huge new pool of labour from around the world while continuing to avoid their responsibility to the public to recruit and train up local talent,” he explained.
“The chief losers will be young people who are trying to find work or to get on the housing ladder. More widely, even current levels of immigration are already a real concern for those who are worried about our increasingly overcrowded country and who wish to preserve our way of life for future generations.”
The think tank also warned that the fact the low-skilled worker visas will only be valid for 12 months could be a way of “fiddling the immigration figures”, which only include migrants set to stay in the country for over a year.
They further note that the country would have no real capacity to monitor or remove migrants who overstayed, given the Government’s already lamentable record of deporting immigration offenders.
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