200. Should Asylum Seekers Be Given Jobs?

0:00We've mentioned reform but also we've heard Keir Starmer say immigration does not generate economic growth. What would you say to that? There is a dishonesty in the way the government is talking to us about immigration. It's just economically illiterate to say that. Hello, you're listening to The Rest is Money with me, Steph McGovern. And today, alongside me is Zoe Gardner, who is a campaigner on the rights of migrants and migration policy in the UK. Now, Zoe, I mean, it's the perfect time to be chatting to you, given everything that's going on at the minute. I mean, there's so much rhetoric around immigration being bad that we've let too many people in and, you know, we're going to get your thoughts on all of that.

0:45But before we get into it, can you just give us a bit of background on yourself? You know, how did you get into campaigning on this issue? Yeah, sure. So thank you so much for having me in the first place. I have been working on immigration throughout my entire career. So I started out working for, I've worked for a bunch of small charities that support migrants and refugees of all kinds in the UK and also across Europe. And what most charities have as their model is they're primarily sort of service delivery. So the bulk of where their funding and their efforts go is to directly assisting people who are experiencing the sharpest edge of the hardships of immigration.

1:28And then they have a small part of their budget that goes towards sort of policy development, advocacy work, and so on. And basically, over time, we've seen the conversation about immigration become, as you mentioned, so much more at the forefront of our politics and become so much more heated, and frankly, so much more hostile and racist now. And I started to see that what I really wanted to do or what I needed to do in order for people to be able to obtain the help they need to settle in this country is to work on changing that conversation and so then I went freelance a couple of years ago to focus mostly on the sort of policy research side and the advocacy for a better immigration system that respects the rights of migrants but also that works well for the UK because I don't think we have that right now.

2:19Yeah okay so then getting into this then the specifics of what's going on at the minute I mean with this there are so many negative headlines about immigration you know the social unrest around it as well whether it's problems at hotels where migrants are staying, the small boats crisis, the pressure on services, the cost of the economy. Can you take us through the situation as you see it? Yeah absolutely I mean And as you've mentioned, the sort of the hotels and the small boats are absolutely dominating the discourse around migration to an extent that is very worrying. We've seen a lot of demonstrations, including ones that have turned very racist and violent outside of asylum seeker accommodation centres.

3:06And we've seen the rise of the Reform Party as, you know, polling the highest in the UK, which has a sort of very aggressive stop the boats rhetoric. and then we've seen that the Conservative Party, I mean, essentially entirely captured by that same agenda and to a very large extent actually the ruling Labour Party following also in the footsteps of putting, stopping the boats as their sort of primary communications strategic sort of output in terms of what they say they're going to do for this country. It's really important first off to say that last year in 2024, people arriving on small boats in the UK made up 5 % of immigration.

3:52So we are vastly over-focusing on a very, very small proportion of immigration. And I think that that's interesting because a recent YouGov study showed that only 19 % of the country know that irregular migration makes up such a small part of the question. And the vast majority of people think that it's the majority of immigration. And that's normal. Why wouldn't you think that? It's all we ever talk about. What that's creating, because of the huge opposition to people arriving on small boats, which, by the way, I share, and I think literally everybody shares, nobody wants people arriving on small boats.

4:35We're now in a sort of doom loop where politicians feel that they have to attack all immigration. And that's producing really bad outcomes for society and for the economy. So the way into understanding this problem is understanding how the small boats has come to represent immigration as a whole. Yeah. And I want to come back to some of that. So then, you know, as you say, that's a small proportion of the people who are coming into this country as migrants. So when we look at those statistics on who is coming and why and everything else, you know, the figures that are often quoted are the ONS stats on net migration.

5:18We know it reached a record high of over 900 ,000 people end of June 2023. It then dipped a bit in by June 2024. It went down to 728 ,000. But overall, we have heard net migration being described as off the scale by politicians. You know, we've had a white paper come out with changes aimed at reducing net migration. As you say, reform have built quite a big popularity around trying to solve immigration. Similarly, you know, we've talked, we've heard Keir Starmer talk about it as being a problem. You don't think it is though, do you? well i think that there's no i don't think immigration is a problem first of all absolutely not i think immigration is something that human beings have well migration is something that human beings have always done that since the dawn of time it's the most natural thing in the world we move from where there is no possibility of living where there are no opportunities to where we can live where our children can have a future where there are opportunities to grow and to live in safety.

6:28That's completely natural. And there isn't a politician on this earth that will ever stop that from happening. And I think that there are ways to manage it well, and there are ways to manage it extremely poorly. We unfortunately have been managing it extremely poorly for a long time now. But talking specifically about those historically high numbers that we've had recently, those are true, and they encompass all of immigration, not just the small boats. And so essentially, what Boris Johnson's government did was implement a few specific policies that led to those very high numbers on a temporary basis.

7:07So essentially, those extremely high numbers that we saw in sort of 2022, 2023, they were driven by four things. The first was a very big, and I do mean very big, resurgence in people coming to the UK to study after the COVID lockdown period where people deferred their opportunity to study in the UK. That was by far the biggest group of migrants who entered during that time and who contribute to those very high figures. And I'm talking like over 450 ,000 people in a year, really very high numbers of foreign students. Those tend to leave again overall after a few years completing their course, completing their further studies and so on.

7:54But they contributed massively to that spike. And then there were two other key things, which was the introduction of the care workers visa, which brought in a very significant number of people over the course of a couple of years time. and the introduction of the Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes, each of which were essentially, to differing degrees, humanitarian schemes to let people who were at threat when the Chinese government was enacting repression in Hong Kong and when obviously Putin invaded Ukraine, to allow people to come to safety from there. So we got, in the course of a couple of years, 200 ,000 Ukrainians and almost 180 ,000 Hong Kongers come as well.

8:42So the combination of those four things meant that we had staggeringly high numbers of immigration net for a couple of years. But all of those things have now come to an end. Yeah, but there's still the prediction that on the whole, the UK population is going to grow based solely on net migration. So you know, the ONS is saying by 2032. It expects our population to have grown in that decade before it by something like 4.9 million, of which all of that will be net migration because births and deaths will probably knock each other out and therefore this is net migration. So it's still a figure that is going up.

9:23Yeah, I mean, while it's dropped already by half and it's expected to drop further still, running at a predicted roughly 340 or so thousand per year for the next few years which is back to where it was pre-pandemic it will contribute to about a 7.3 percent increase in our population and yes as you're you're right to say that natural growth i.e just people having more babies than people dying that's not contributing to any growth at all at the moment and thank god thank goodness that those immigrants are likely to come to the UK and to keep our population tell me why you're saying that because you know obviously all the chat is that's not a good thing but you're saying this is really important so why this is a fundamental importance because if you don't have a growing economy and sorry if you well that's the outcome essentially if you don't have a growing population.

10:21You will have an aging population. That's what we have. So let me get this straight, just in case any of your listeners are older people. I think this is a very wonderful thing. The fact that we're living for longer, we have longer, healthier and more productive lives. That's a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I only want it to continue. However, we have a birth rate of 1.5. That means that for every two people, we're having 1.5 children. And that's been the case for several decades. And the birth rate is actually continuing to drop. So that evening out of births and deaths is creating a population that is older and older.

11:06So the share of the population during that time until 2032, where the population as a whole will increase by 7.3 % thanks to immigration, the share of the population of pensionable age is going to increase by 13.8%. That's almost double. There'll be more people who need healthcare, there'll be more people who need to receive pensions, and we need the working age population to provide that. Our welfare state is entirely dependent now on the arrival of immigrants. Are we getting the right people coming here though to do that? Because for example I remember we were talking to Steph Flanders about this who's obviously an economist and she was you know talking about how the types of people who are coming to UK now are not the kind of younger people who'll be less dependent on public services.

11:58It's actually older people who are choosing to settle and therefore will put more pressure on public services and not necessarily be the kind of people who are going to solve and fill those jobs that we need? Well, I'm not sure where those figures come from. The stats that we're seeing from HMRC, from ONS, from the OBR and from the government immigration stats all show that immigrants are on average much younger than the local population. They're on average higher are educated than the local population. They are on average just as likely to be in work and to be earning slightly more than the local population, regardless of where they fall along the income spectrum, although some people obviously are low earners and immigrants as well.

12:49So the net contribution that they're making is just totally unarguable in terms of supporting our ability to pay those pensions and provide services. But not only that, they're also the people who are doing jobs. Because obviously, it's more than just money in and money out of the exchequer. It's also a question of literally having the people who are working in essential areas of the economy. So that includes care, it includes farm working, and so on. so because i'm really interested in this because i have my kind of big beef in life um is about education basically i just think we silo people too young we decide they're either smart or clever um based on whether they can pass exams it's why we've seen recently with the a-level results coming out there's again a big divide between the north and the south in the uk i think that's a lot to do with you know that the deprivation is much higher in the north a lot of these young people don't have the structure at home to be able to pass formal assessments, but they do have other skills that we need in our economy, but they're just not presented as being something attractive or something worth doing.

14:02And can we not fill these jobs ourselves? Do we not just need to think about how we present the jobs, how we educate? And maybe it's a mix of everything that we need to do, but I feel like we're really missing a trick there. I mean okay so on the one hand I absolutely agree with you um I think that we write off potential and I think that we do it in loads of different ways throughout our economy and we do it to local British people but our immigration system also does it to immigrants as well right and the way we talk about immigrants um and specifically the way you know the reform party and the Tory party talk about immigrants as being like people who arrive on the lower pay end of the spectrum or people who arrive as asylum seekers, i.e.

14:46not, you know, not here on work visas whatsoever. The idea that the fact that they are low earners or not earners in the first place on arrival means that they have no potential to grow. And that's absolutely, I mean, it's disproved by the data, but it's also disproved by anyone with a human experience of seeing potential developing people. So I 100 % agree with you in terms of the need to invest in our towns and our young people and especially in apprenticeships. I mean, you look at the construction sector, right? I mean, since Brexit, the construction sector has been totally decimated and it's contributed to a real crisis in housing availability that we have.

15:26The construction sector estimates that in order to meet the Labour government's projections for house building year on year, I think they need about 140 ,000 more people per year coming in. right and that's over the next five years now you asked can we not meet that with our own people the simple answer is no we can't we could meet some of it with our own people and we absolutely should because that's skilled work and it's work that we should value it's not necessarily university educated work but it is really really decent work that can earn you a good living and that is vital for our society and potentially earn you more than if you went to uni Oh, definitely.

16:10You'd earn more than me, most likely, if you're a skilled engineer or electrician or something like that. But we're not helping our own young people into that kind of work, and nor are we accepting that we don't literally have enough young people to meet our needs across the economy for those kinds of work. So both are true. One is that we could invest far more in our own people, and the other is that we will still need immigration. But it feels like it's a short-term rather than a long-term problem, I'm like, you're right, we're not suddenly going to be able to skill everyone up in the next couple of years.

16:42Like this, I personally think, you know, this plan to build these houses is not going to happen in the time frame they want because there aren't the people. And so, yes, you're right. Like we, hence why we need people to come in, hence why there's been more engineering visas given. But in the longer term, we don't, we shouldn't have to rely on people coming to the country, though, to do those jobs. I'm not arguing against like we should allow migration and immigration just for general life, you know, prosperity and people should be able to move and things like that. I'm not I'm not arguing that point.

17:18My point being we shouldn't have to rely on that, though, for us to be able to meet the needs of our economy. so then you come across a like really really big and sort of fundamental question there right which is that it comes back to this birth rate problem and this aging population problem that the entire western world the entire western world has the same problem um and in the long term we cannot solve that problem through immigration because um migrants themselves will grow old and we will need to continue to replace our working age population. And eventually the forecasts are that the entire global population will stop growing and that the birth rates will decline everywhere.

18:04So you're right that, you know, for the long term, we can't rely on immigration forever. But for the next couple of decades, we have absolutely no choice. If we were to manage to significantly increase our birth rate, we could start to rely less on immigration in a few decades time but how to do that has absolutely it's a nut that has not been cracked you can obviously do some things you can work on the affordability of housing you can create affordable child care you know these are things that are good in and of themselves anyway I think we should absolutely do them and they can help people to have babies but essentially we've seen that other countries have tried it and it may slow the decline in birth rate, but it doesn't turn it around.

18:49Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned other countries. Tell us a bit about how we compare to other countries when it comes to immigration. So the UK has a history of being a relatively high immigration country as compared to, say, other European countries. But my model that I'm looking to at the moment in my research, that I'm finding really interesting is Spain. So the Spanish model on immigration is at the moment yielding extremely successful results. The Spanish real GDP is expected to grow by 2.6 % in 2025. That's streets faster than the rest of the EU and it's streets faster than the UK, even than the US as well.

19:32And economists are putting that down to sort of growth in service industry, tourism, growth in manufacturing, and growth in immigration. And they're managing the immigration. I mean, they have much higher immigration per capita now than any of the other big European countries. And they are benefiting from that massively, in part because they're bringing in people with great skills, but in part also in how they're managing the arrival of people who are coming as asylum seekers. What are they doing differently then when you say it's how they manage the arrivals? Well, Spain receives far more asylum seekers than us.

20:10In fact, this last year, Spain has become the number one country of arrival for asylum seekers in Europe. And what they do is not only do they grant them the right to work while they are still in the asylum system, which we don't, but most countries in Europe do with a differing level of barriers and wait times and so on. We are the most restrictive by far on that front. But they got them the right to work, but they also have programs where they match asylum seekers with industries where they have severe labor shortages. And they do training programs and integration programs, Spanish language classes for those who aren't Spanish speakers and so on, in order to funnel the arrival of people into the areas of the economy where they are desperately in need.

20:59God, that just sounds like common sense, Zoe. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? Do you think, because I've talked about this a lot, actually, about the fact that, as you pointed out, asylum seekers in the UK can't work as they're seeking asylum. Do you think it would make a big difference to how they're viewed? If they could contribute more as soon as they got here, that would make a difference. And what would that look like? Because, you know, the argument is it would be really difficult to actually to do. yeah it is it's not i'm not going to pretend it's not a challenge to administer this but i think that it's absolutely obvious that it would cut off the legs of some of the most effective um arguments against the reception of asylum seekers right which is the the cost of the hotels and you know i can't get a gp appointment but these people are entitled to xyz what we've seen from research there's a coalition of organizations called Lift the Ban who campaigned to lift the ban on work for asylum seekers and they've done some research where in 2022 they found that 80 percent of the public support giving asylum seekers the right to work that it tracks right because even you know whether you you see it from a sort of positive angle like me of like these people deserve the opportunity to support themselves or you see it as like you know why should we be supporting them Either way, you think that people should be working.

22:27And then they did some calculations on what that would bring us. And obviously, it wipes out the cost of accommodating people. Now, I'm not saying that absolutely every single asylum seeker would be able to work because there are some who are so traumatized, have been tortured, etc. They just need to be supported. But overall, most asylum seekers would be able to work. And they calculated this, the bank coalition, that it would bring in an additional 280 million to the economy per year. So that could also be then reinvested, particularly into providing the kind of accommodation that is needed in local communities that feel like they have been used as, to use a kind of ugly phrase, a dumping ground for asylum seekers.

23:13Yeah. The only thing is though, you're talking about the millions there, but isn't it costing billions at the moment to have asylum seekers in hotels yeah and and and that's on top of wiping out the cost of of accommodation um but also i think when when we're talking about the cost of the asylum system there's a part of it a huge cost that we never talk about that i'd really like to to bring up here which is that the cost of attempts to keep people from arriving in the uk are astronomical. So if we look at the last 10 years, we've sent almost£900 million to the French in order to prevent crossings, which we all know has been, well, just not effective.

24:00But additionally to that, we've spent at least£5 billion. Researchers at the University of Sheffield have uncovered contracts worth at least five billion to private contractors providing us with things like infrared cameras at Calais ports or drones that patrol the channel or you know and so there is a huge business opportunity for surveillance tech firms and for people also running private detention and accommodation facilities to maintain a sort of status quo where we're always fighting against the arrival of asylum seekers, but they never stop coming, right? And that is a very significant cost to the public purse that we don't actually discuss.

24:47And that money could also be redirected into running programs like the ones that they do in Spain for training, for integration and for getting people into productive areas of work. Also, there's loads more I still want to ask you. But if you sit tight for a couple of minutes, we're just going to go to a quick break. For all the Ulfs on Wall Street and Tauben Geckos out there. For all the people who have blood, that's for you. Until the 28th of February, the depot is open and we take your first order provision to 500 euros. FlatEx. Better to deal with right. Investing, bring loss risks, and the conditions are valid.

25:22Excerne costs fall on. Coming back to the politics around all of this at the moment. You know, we heard, we've mentioned reform, but also we've heard Keir Starmer say immigration does not generate economic growth. Would you disagree with that then? I mean, I'm guessing you would, given everything you've said. But what would you say to that? Would you vehemently disagree? I do. I mean, if you look at the white paper where the argument was put forward that immigration does not produce economic growth, It doesn't provide any evidence for that at all. And it directly contradicts the OBR. It directly contradicts HMRC data on, you know, the tax take from migrant work.

26:07It's just economically illiterate to say that. I mean, for example, the white paper, Yvette Cooper argues that the white paper will result in a reduction year on year of about 100 ,000 immigrants to the UK. The OBR says that that will increase the deficit by£7 billion per year. It's very interesting that at the same time as they were going through the tobacco of the white paper and they were essentially proposing a policy that was going to increase the deficit by£7 billion. seven billion pounds was roughly the amount that they were trying to cut off the welfare bill wasn't it before they failed to get that through so i think that there's a a huge amount of just frankly and i can't put it another way it's dishonest right there is a dishonesty in the way the government is talking to us about immigration i mean obviously they would argue that that it isn't the case um you know obviously but yours and and i guess different statistics can be used to argue different points.

27:06So, I mean, either way, whether you, you know, you're right or wrong on that, there's definitely a deep-seated negativity, which is being used, essentially weaponised in some ways. And, you know, I'm from an area where the popularity for reform is growing. It's an area where they voted for Brexit. You know, these are people I grew up with it's people I know it's people who they would say this is not racist this is not about the people coming into the country it's about a lack of control so it's the the fear people feeling that they are losing control of their country well there's big problems with jobs there's problem with services and infrastructure and all of these things and yet at the same time as we've discussed they're seeing people come into the country who are living in hotels for free and things like that so there's that you can you know you must be able to understand why some people feel the way they do when you think about it from a control point of view no sure and that's why i think that this issue of the small boats is the the by far the crux of it because again if you ask people about you know do you want less immigration the majority of people say yes much less immigration then you them what they mean by that and as I said you know the YouGov polling shows us actually they they think they mean small boats irregular arrivals right people who are staying in hotels and when you ask them about the vast bulk of what makes up immigration care workers construction workers hospitality workers um nurses doctors etc students Ukrainians Hong Kongers they don't actually want to reduce those groups at all so what you have to do is you have to take away this incredibly powerful image that has been exploited so effectively of the small boats, because despite the fact that they are just 5 % of immigration, it doesn't matter.

29:05They are being used to such effect. And the way to do that is to provide people with an alternative way of coming to the UK. And that is simply the only way that will actually wipe it out, right? And if we provide people with a safe alternative way of coming to the UK they won't get on the boats we have the proof of that no Ukrainian got on a small boat and entered the country irregularly and had to live in a hotel because we offered them ways to come here that were safe that were regulated that we knew who they were and we gave them a place to stay in our community everybody would choose that option over a small boat do you but I don't know if I totally agree with that in the sense of it's all about small boats because the small boats to me feels like quite a southern thing that's where they you know arrive it's less about people in the north seem to care more about the issues with hotels and things like that because they're not seeing the people arrive on small boats they're seeing them in the newspapers or whatever but for them it feels like it's much more about and obviously I'm not speaking for every northerner I shouldn't do that but I would But I wonder if it's less about small boats for them and more about just that hotels.

30:23I would put that in the same category, definitely. So to be fair to the government, who I have unending criticisms of, they do have a plan, actually, to end the use of hotels. They have enacted it far too slowly. It's created immense harm. But they do have a plan that they are starting to put into place to move people out of hotels. But unfortunately, that does not include enabling people to work. Because if you enable people to work, as we've seen with the data, they can support themselves. They no longer are seen as receiving something for free. Yeah. So then I guess to kind of conclude, bringing in everything we've talked about, what's your dream vision for what migration looks like?

31:10How does it work and what does it look like? Well, I think what we have at the moment is a system that is, it's so like, it's, okay, let me give you an analogy. If you're in a relationship with somebody, and you are so scared of losing them that you try to control their every movement, you try to track where they go on their phone, and you ask them where they've been every five minutes, and you get paranoid and controlling, you're going to lose them, right? And we all know that, that in order, you have to have a degree of flexibility and allow things to happen naturally in order for them to work well.

31:47And that is the case with immigration. At the moment, we have a system which is completely absurd that has grown out of years and years and years of piecemeal changes, each aimed at making, you know, it sound like we've been more hostile to this group or the other. And essentially now we have a different visa if you're coming to work on a farm than we have if you're coming to work in a hospital than we have if you're coming to work in engineering, if you're coming to work in any other sector. age one has a different visa, a different set of rights, a different set of restrictions, a different time period until they can become settled.

32:21And they have to pay all sorts of complex fees and the process last years and years and years. And all of that contributes to migrants being separate from our communities, to not becoming full members of our communities, to not being able to fully integrate and put down roots. And it contributes to that churn that people don't like, right? People don't like temporary migration. People are coming and people going and people coming again. People want people to put down roots and I think fundamentally we want to know our neighbours. So I would redesign that immigration system with a focus on integration, on allowing people to put down roots and to settle here and to invest in housing and services that are available to everybody, regardless of whether they happen to have been born here or in the local community to ensure that everybody's accessing the same thing in a way that is fair that we have the same access to changing jobs in the labour market that we have the same access to collectively bargain for better conditions and pay in our workplaces and that we have the same responsibilities towards our communities as well and that is unfortunately a million miles from the immigration system we have now but I think that it would produce both better outcomes for migrants, but also significantly better outcomes for our communities.