Addicted to Immigration: Even After Record Breaking Year of Arrivals, UK to Import More to Fill Nursing Shortages

Even though the United Kingdom has a new ‘right wing’ government it remains stubbornly addicted to mass migration as a sticking plaster for a variety of challenges faced by the state, including staffing the socialised health provider, the NHS.

Despite tough words from the new Home Secretary — only today talking up plans to slash immigration to fulfil the promises of Brexit — the health secretary is sticking with the long-standing government orthodoxy, saying she will stick with importing health workers from abroad.

Therese Coffey, a close ally of the new Prime Minister who was made both health secretary and Deputy Prime Minister in the new government seemed extremely laid back about the prospect of propping up the national health with even more immigration. She told government-adjacent The Daily Telegraph that: “I don’t mind if they are coming from abroad or are home-schooled here… I think it’s a case of recognising there’s a lot of vacancies.”

The Telegraph, which elicited these comments from Coffey in interview notes the inbuilt contradiction here, and notes, dryly:

The position foresees a tussle coming for the Truss government – between department heads who want more foreign workers to help fill skills shortages and others, not least Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, pushing to bring down overall immigration numbers.

It is not exactly new that the UK’s state healthcare provider has grown considerably beyond the ability to be self-sustaining. Indeed, the NHS has needed propping up with fresh immigration basically every single year since it was created.

And the idea that the British government “plunders” less wealthy countries abroad for trained nurses is decades-old, but it is a serious concern for some countries which suffer major ‘brain drain‘ of trained professionals going to Britain to serve the NHS, one of the largest employers on earth. As Nursing Times notes, three of the top seven countries the UK recruits from are on the World Health Organisation ‘red list’, denoting a critical shortage of medical staff.

Yet the immigration-as-a-salve idea appears to be one without end. The indication by the health secretary that more migration is needed to fix the NHS’s considerable problems comes after the largest year for immigration to the United Kingdom in the history of the country ever, with an incredible 1,114,065 new visas issued. If immigration really does work to prop up the NHS and fix labour market holes, it doesn’t seem to work very well.