One of the most common misconceptions in the immigration debate is that cutting back on numbers means cutting back on skilled migrant workers. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Two-thirds of the public think immigration has been too high over the last decade, but one type of migration a narrow majority of voters do rather like, at least in principle, is skilled migration – doctors, engineers, tradesmen and so on.
That is why the 2019 Conservative manifesto promised not just ‘overall numbers will come down’ but also a more selective system – ‘fewer lower-skilled migrants’. Having overseen the creation of the new immigration system, which came into effect from the end of 2020, this was entirely within the Johnson government’s gift to deliver. Strategically, it also gelled with the levelling up agenda and the ambition to create a ‘vibrant science-based economy post-Brexit’, transforming Britain into a science and technology superpower.
Unfortunately, Home Office data paints a rather different picture of what has actually happened since the start of 2021: we have issued over 3.64 million migrant visas – but just 0.6% went to scientists and engineers.
Obviously scientists and engineers aren’t the only skilled migrants, as some immigration maximalists were keen to point out when I highlighted this rather depressing stat on X the other day. And indeed, slightly under 0.8% of visas went to doctors, for example, and 2.0% to nurses. Or take manual crafts: 0.1% of visas went to migrants in electrical and metallurgical occupations, and another 0.1% to those in the construction and building trades. Or one final example: teachers and university professionals accounted for 0.3% of visas. So all pretty small numbers – thousands or at best a couple of tens of thousands – out of 3.64m visas.
We know all this is because the Home Office helpfully breaks down work visas by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) to a reasonably granular level. Thus we can pull out, for example, Engineering Professional (SOC minor group 212) or biochemists and biomedical scientists (SOC unit group 2113) and other categories of scientist.
But if we zoom out a bit, just how many visas are going to skilled workers in total?
Well, this is where it gets tricky. First, it’s important to remember that due to lobbying by vested interests, the Shortage Occupation List (SOL) was massively expanded, resulting in notionally skilled work visas being given out to migrants who were not coming to do particularly skilled jobs. Unfortunately, the level of detail in the Home Office SOC data limits our ability to disaggregate the effects of this.
Second, while we tend to think in broad-brush terms about work, study, family or humanitarian visas, there are actually around 50 distinct visa sub-types currently in use, such is the tangle of our immigration system. This includes around 20 different niche work routes.
Nevertheless, we can work towards an upper limit for the number of work visas going to skilled workers. In the first place, there’s the actual ‘Skilled Worker’ route, which accounts for 1 in 20 of all visas issued since Q1 2021 (to Q1 2024). If we also include workers on all the other routes bar ‘Skilled Worker – Health & Care’, that takes the upper bound up to almost 1 in 10. But this does include jobs like domestic staff alongside start-up founders, so again, a bit of a mixed bag.
And only with the inclusion of Health & Care visas does the total get to 17%. But while this includes doctors and nurses, it also includes over 150,000 visas for social care work. No one doubts that social care can be a difficult, draining and sometimes unpleasant job. But it is not skilled in the conventional definition of the word.
In other words, at least 83% of visas issued in the last few years were not for skilled work; arguably, far fewer. So what of the other 3.02m visas?
Well, around 914,000 (so 25% of the 3.64 million total) went to dependants on work and study routes, as well as 215,000 (6%) on family and dependant routes. Another 1.35 million (37%) went to students, often on one-year Masters courses of highly dubious quality before switching to the Graduate visa – the ‘Deliveroo visa’ phenomenon. And a further 550,000 (15%) were humanitarian visas.
That means if we want to reduce overall levels of immigration – and therefore pressure on housing, infrastructure, the public purse, growth and living standards – there is a lot of fat to trim before we get anywhere close to turning down applications from high skilled workers such as scientists, engineers and medical professionals.
We could have a system where overall numbers are lower and standards are higher, so that 6% of visas go to scientist and engineers. The fact that we don’t have this system is entirely down to policy choices.
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