Immigration

I inform the House that Mr Speaker has selected amendment (b) in the name of the Prime Minister.

I call the shadow Home Secretary.

I beg to move,

That this House regrets that there have been a record-breaking number of small boat crossings, amounting to over 12,000 this year alone and a lack of action from the Government to tackle this; further regrets that the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill scraps the Government’s ability to remove illegal immigrants to a safe third country, designed as an effective deterrent; and calls on the Government to support the Immigration and Visas Bill introduced by the Shadow Home Secretary, which will prevent foreign nationals, including rape gang perpetrators, from exploiting the courts with spurious human rights claims to avoid deportation, double the residency requirement for Indefinite Leave to Remain and ensure that those who have become a burden can be removed, introduce tighter visa rules for civil partners, allow deportation of all foreign national offenders, and introduce a binding cap on migration, to be set by a vote in Parliament.

For decades, the British people have demanded and politicians have promised dramatically lower immigration. For decades, successive Governments, including the last one, have failed to deliver that. That failure over decades has undermined faith and trust in democracy itself, and it is now time to end that failure and deliver what the public want. That is why we have tabled the Immigration and Visas Bill, which presents a serious, credible plan to fix immigration issues.

According to Ipsos last week, 67% of the British public think that immigration is too high. The British public are right. There are around 11 million foreign-born people in the UK, and for too long immigration numbers have been far too high. Immigration at that level has serious consequences. Some 48% of social housing in London has a head of household who was not born in the UK. In the last 10 years, migration has absorbed around 50% of new housing supply, and some nationalities are exceptionally dependent on social housing—for example, 72% of Somalis live in social housing compared with only 16% of the population more generally.

I think the right hon. Gentleman may have revealed something early on in his speech. He has told us that now is the time for “a serious, credible plan”. Is he therefore admitting that in the 14 years when his party was in government, there was not one serious or credible plan?

I will talk a bit in a moment about the record of the last Government, but I have already said that for decades, under successive Governments—including the last one, but previous ones, too—immigration has been far too high. That is a failure by Governments over a period of decades, and it is now time to listen to the British people and put that right.

High levels of immigration, especially when there is not proper integration, undermine social cohesion. A nation state and a society cannot function properly when there are fractures in social cohesion.

Will the shadow Home Secretary give way?

I will give way in a minute. In advancing the case that we have a problem with social cohesion and a lack of integration, I will present some evidence—it is not an assertion—in support of that. The most recent census revealed that a million of our fellow citizens do not speak English at all or properly. In one part of east London, 73% of children do not speak English as their first language. Some nationalities have extremely low rates of economic activity or very high rates of economic inactivity. For example, among people born in the middle east and north Africa, economic inactivity rates are 40%. That is double the rate for people born in the UK. Among people born in south and east Asia, the economic inactivity rate is 50% higher than it is for people born in the UK. By contrast, the economic inactivity rate for those born in Australia or New Zealand is only half the level of the UK-born population.

I am afraid to say that when it comes to crime and offending, there are some immigrant groups where levels of criminality are very high. For example, Afghans are 20 times more likely to commit sex offences than average. People of Congolese origin are 12 times more likely to commit violence, and Algerians are 18 times more likely to commit theft.

Will the shadow Home Secretary give way?

I will give way in just a moment. These figures illustrate that we have a problem with integration, and that is why we need to get these numbers dramatically down, until such time as we can address these issues.

Let me turn to the economy, because it has long been thought that net migration is an unalloyed economic good. Indeed, that is one reason why successive Governments of both colours over some decades allowed immigration to get so high and to stay too high. [Interruption.] Both Governments, over many decades. Recent analysis, however, has shown that that belief is simply not true. Office for Budget Responsibility analysis last year showed for the first time that low-wage migration costs the Exchequer money. It is not a net contributor, but a net draw on the Exchequer. It costs other taxpayers money at low-wage levels, particularly where there are large numbers of dependants. It has reduced per capita GDP, which affects the level of affluence enjoyed by the population, and it is one reason that productivity in our economy has flatlined for so long. Businesses have reached for mass low-skill migration instead of investing in technology or automation, or simply becoming more productive.

That has all happened while 9 million of our fellow citizens of working age remain economically inactive. Many of those have caring responsibilities, some genuinely cannot work and others are studying, but many of those 9 million—likely more than half—could and in my view should be in the workforce, instead of large numbers of low-wage, low-skilled migrants being imported.

It is time for a different approach. We need to end the era of mass low-skilled migration and instead focus on small numbers of very high-skilled workers who should be welcomed. We need to invest more in technology and we need to get more UK residents of working age into work, including by investing in training and by reforming the welfare system. I think somebody wanted to intervene, so I will give way.

When the right hon. Member has finished denigrating every community that has made its home in this country, will he reflect for a moment on the massive contribution made in education, in health, in transport and in many other industries by people who have come to this country? When he goes into a hospital, does he criticise those people who have come from another country and are working in our hospitals, looking after us and the health service, or is he interested only in denigrating people because they were born speaking a different language and they look different from him?

I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman was listening very carefully. I expressly said that highly skilled migrants do make a contribution and should be welcomed, and when I referred to issues involving social housing, economic inactivity and criminality, I was reading out facts. I was reading out census data published by the Office for National Statistics. Those are facts. The right hon. Gentleman may not like the facts, but they are facts none the less. [Interruption.]

The hon. Member for Burnley (Oliver Ryan) has just said, from a sedentary position, that my right hon. Friend was “race-baiting”. My right hon. Friend was simply reading out official statistics in contributing to an important debate about the future of our country. Does my right hon. Friend think that the hon. Gentleman should stand up and put his views on the record, and tell his constituents what he thinks about their legitimate concerns?

I think he should do that, because the British public have expressed very clear views on this issue, and if we cannot, in this House of all places, lay out the facts—published data—as a way of having an honest debate about it, I do not know where we have got to. That kind of shouting down, saying that it is somehow beyond the pale to discuss these facts, is precisely why we ended up in this mess in the first place.

Let me come on to some of the steps taken late in the time of the last Government—[Hon. Members: “Too late!”] Yes, they were too late: that is right. Those steps took effect in April 2023 and April 2024, and they included preventing social care workers and students from bringing dependants, and raising various salary thresholds. The official forecasts published by bodies such as the Office for National Statistics and the Office for Budget Responsibility show that, thanks to those measures, net migration is likely to fall by 500,000 compared to the peak—and those measures are already having an effect. If Members compare the number of visas issued in the second half of last year with the number in the second half of 2022, they will see a 76% reduction in the number of social care visas, a 21% reduction in the number of student visas, an 89% reduction in the number of student dependant visas, and a 45% reduction in the number of skilled worker visas; many of those people were not, in fact, skilled.

The truth is, however, that we need to go further, and the White Paper published last Monday does not go far enough. On the Laura Kuenssberg programme, on the Sunday before last, the Home Secretary said that the Government’s measures would have an impact of only 50,000 on net migration, whereas the number accompanying the White Paper was 100,000. Whichever number we take, however, it represents only between one tenth and one fifth of the impact of the measures taken by the last Government. That simply does not go far enough.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

I am going to make some progress.

I have a question for the Immigration Minister. She is welcome to intervene if she wishes to do so, or else respond in her speech. The last Government set out a plan to increase the salary threshold for family visas to £38,000, which was due to take effect on 1 April this year, just seven or eight weeks ago. The new Government suspended that measure, which will obviously have the effect of increasing immigration. Will the Government implement the increase in the threshold, as set out by the last Government? As I have said, the measures in the White Paper go nowhere near far enough, whereas we have delivered a detailed plan.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that not only are the measures inadequate, but they potentially open a big new route for inward migration? At the weekend, the Paymaster General suggested that the youth mobility experience scheme that we have with the EU was comparable to the scheme that we had with Uruguay. That involved 500 visas a year. We read in the papers today that the EU is asking for hundreds of thousands of youth visas. Is my right hon. Friend as concerned as I am about the possibility of this being a back door to very substantial migration?

Yes, I am. It could create an enormous new loophole. There are potentially around 60 million people eligible for that visa route, and we have no idea at all of the cap. A couple of days ago, the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister what a numerical cap might be. Characteristically, he did not answer the question. There is no answer to the question of whether people coming over on the scheme could claim benefits, and no answer to whether they could bring dependants. Some European countries grant citizenship to illegal immigrants just three years after they get asylum, and they would be eligible to come as well. It seems to me that this route could create an enormous loophole in our asylum system.