It only took a few hours for the British electoral battle to become bloodier. With those from outside. With immigrants. The emergence into the campaign of Nigel Farage, the populist who promoted Brexit and has been altering the political chessboard of the United Kingdom for decades, has unleashed panic in Rishi Sunak’s team by announcing that he will run in the elections on July 4. The prime minister’s response has been to redouble the harshness of his proposals. The Conservatives now promise a fixed limit, which will be reduced annually, on the number of work visas – including qualified positions, which did not have a cap since Brexit – or family reunification visas granted by the United Kingdom.
The problem for someone as methodical, calculating and rational as Sunak is that he does not have the weapons to combat demagoguery. Aware that it is impossible to put a figure on both the future arrival of immigrants and the future needs of the British labor market, the conservative candidate has made the details of his proposal subject to what is suggested by the Migration Advisory Commission, a body attached to the Ministry of the Interior, which since 2007 has offered the Government independent advice on immigration policy. Faced with this supposed prudence, Farage launches his proposal with cannon fire. He announces, for example, punitive taxes for companies that hire foreign workers. Or he makes calculations without any rigor to justify his promises.
“The objective would be to have zero immigrants,” the Reform UK candidate assured the BBC this Tuesday, loosely using the addition and subtraction game of official statistics. “We know that around 600,000 people left the UK last year. So to fill positions in the labor market there would be room for another 600,000 [inmigrantes regulares]although I trust that not so many are necessary,” Farage ventured, in a message with just the right dose of heavy-handedness and apparent compassion that so pleases the politician’s followers.
Faced with this broad-brush offensive, Sunak tries to toughen his own proposals – already quite harsh – but loses steam with the most conservative electorate when he emphasizes the details. The Government exempts from its desire to limit the 600,000 foreign graduates from a British university and the temporary agricultural workers who are hired each year. Likewise, asylum seekers who have entered the country through a legal route are left out.
“We have already taken quite firm measures to reduce the number of people entering our country, and they are working,” Sunak said this Tuesday, when presenting his new proposals. “But the levels are still very high, and we have to go further. (…) The Labor Party intends to declare an immigration amnesty that will turn the United Kingdom into a magnet for illegal immigrants [sic]. They do not have a plan to reduce the numbers,” the still prime minister has attacked his rival, Keir Starmer.
The conservatives cling to the Labor candidate’s promise to end the plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda if he comes to power to place this supposed Labor ‘amnesty’ in the voters’ imagination. He plays in his favor, although the polls indicate, in a very limited way, the ambiguity with which Starmer approaches an issue riddled with electoral mines. He wants to recover the traditional left-wing voters who in 2019 were seduced by Boris Johnson’s speech, and he is convinced that to do so he must show firmness on immigration matters.
Join Morning Express to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
The promise to cancel flights to Rwanda
The Labor Party has promised to cancel flights to Rwanda, but more because of the ineffectiveness and illegality of the proposal than because of its apparent cruelty. And its representatives also promise a reduction in the numbers of immigrants, without daring to propose a number. They simply play with the idea, already tried without success by the Conservative Government, of promising greater job training for British citizens, so that they can access the jobs currently performed by foreign workers.
The net migration figure in the United Kingdom, the total number of new inhabitants minus those leaving the country, was 685,000 people. In 2022, the record of 764,000 was reached.
The toriesThey have been hitting the same wall for years. The then Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, already promised a decade ago to reduce immigration numbers by tens of thousands, but ended up throwing in the towel. The current Government has, for the moment, prohibited foreign university graduates from being able to join family members in British territory. And the minimum wage imposed on companies to hire a worker from outside has risen from almost 31,000 euros per year (approximately $33,400) to more than 45,000 euros (almost $50,000).
Farage’s new appearance on the electoral scene has muddied the debate by putting regular and irregular immigration in the same basket. “Simply, as a country, we cannot continue moving towards population figures that are going to explode,” says the Reform Uk candidate, who immediately takes the opportunity to introduce into the speech one of those phrases that infuriate his followers: “If people “He arrives in our country and does not speak our language or integrate into the community, we end up having towns and cities that become literally unrecognizable,” he told the BBC, a few hours into the campaign.
Follow all the international information onFacebook andxor inour weekly newsletter.
.
.
_
