Reports that Boris Johnson intends to scrap the £30,000 salary requirement for importing foreign workers will see immigration “spin out of control”, a think tank has warned.
“The Conservative Government has committed itself to delivering the ‘people’s priorities’ and has promised a reduction in the overall level of immigration,” Migration Watch UK recalled in a press release seen by Breitbart London.
“Yet, without waiting for publication of the report due next week from their Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), they are already briefing the press that their version of an ‘Australian-style’ Points Based System (PBS) will not include the present £30,000 salary threshold,” the think tank lamented.
“Nor, apparently, do there appear to be plans for a future cap on work permit numbers (as exists currently in both the UK and Australia).”
Dr Ben Greening, Executive Director of Migration Watch UK, warned that “A post-Brexit immigration system with no cap on work permits and no pay threshold means no control at all,” and would in effect be “harking back to the worst days of Tony Blair but throwing the doors open to the globe even wider.”
“That is not what voters in the ‘red wall’ seats want,” Greening added, referring to the formerly Labour-supporting, working-class constituencies primarily in Northern England, the Midlands, and Wales which switched to the Tories under Boris Johnson because of his pledge to “get Brexit done”.
The Migration Watch release was at pains to stress that Johnson’s plans for an “Australian-style points-based immigration system” will not be “Australian-style” at all if he jettisons the cap on numbers which is the Australian system’s key feature.
This, Migration Watch believes, is an absolute necessity “in the face of potentially massive demand by UK employers and from workers in much poorer, and much larger, countries around the world who will be attracted by higher relative pay and a work permit that will also be a route to permanent settlement.”
Boris Johnson, however, is unlikely to govern as the migration hawk his Brexit-backing new voters still, for the most part, perceive him to be, having been a long-time advocate for loose borders and even amnesty for illegal migrants.
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