Starmer’s Immigration White Paper ‘Light on Solutions’ – Guido Fawkes

Think Tanks: Starmer’s Immigration White Paper ‘Light on Solutions’

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Westminster’s wonks have weighed in on Starmer’s Immigration White Paper – and the reviews aren’t glowing. Free-market think tanks dismiss it as “light on solutions” and “too weak, too slow”, while left-leaning voices blast the cut to foreign care workers. Hardly a standing ovation…

• The Adam Smith Institute’s Maxwell Marlow warns “the policies intimated at in the paper are, overall, too weak and too slow to come into force. The entire system needs a radical overhaul, with encouragement to invest in automation for core sectors and policy dealing with the complex causes of unemployment in the UK.” Much more to be done…
• Left-wing think tank/Labour press arm the Institute for Public Policy Research – whose recent former directors are embedded in the No 10 policy unit – praises the deal as “the biggest shake-up of the immigration system since Brexit” at the same time warning that “extending the standard route to settlement to ten years risks making it harder for people to contribute and settle into their communities while doing little to bring down numbers.”
• Centre for Policy Studies says the paper the “right rhetoric, but light on solutions”. Research Director Karl Williams warns: “The measures proposed fall some way short of those actually required to get migration down to the kind of levels which the public would be happy with.” The think tank also notes there is “no decisive action on deporting foreign offenders”…
• Migration Watch slams the paper as an “admission of failure with no plan to fix” the crisis. Chairman Alp Mehmet says: “The paper itself includes a few crumbs of comfort but not much on how a ‘significant reduction’ in migration is going to be achieved.” 
• Director of the left-wing think tank British Future Sunder Katwala blasts the measures: “The public is certainly not crying out for fewer migrant care home workers – seven in ten do not want reductions. Some of its measures could damage rather than encourage integration. The government should be proactive on citizenship, not punitive.”
• Policy Exchange’s Stephen Webb warns: “The announced tightening in immigration rules today in some areas is to be welcomed. But in many cases, including the salary threshold, restrictions on the graduate work visa and curtailing applications for care visas for candidates outside the UK, the actual changes are due to take place some time in the next year.” A full timeline on when these measures would actually take place are so far unknown…