28
Home secretary to make some migrants wait 10 years or more for right to settle in UK
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
28 points (91.2% liked)
United Kingdom
7039 readers
661 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We are desperately dependent on immigrants to keep our nation functioning. Then leaving them living in uncertainty for almost half their lives potentially seems like scumbag behaviour.
If we actually wanted to reduce immigration all we need to do is give migrants more rights, require generous pay and suddenly there wouldn’t be so much demand for them because they wouldn’t be worth the price, but we won’t do that because we need them too badly to fill the hole in our economy, all the bad jobs that there aren’t enough uk nationals to fill. Treating them as equals who can earn their right to live here simply by doing the work we cannot do ourselves anymore feels like the least we can do, a minimum of the respect they are due. Dragging it out as long as possible is the action of a dodgy boss, not a nation worthy of respect.
No we're not. This level of immigration is for wage supreasion. It's big business using these people, and it's sad.We don't need more people when there aren't enough jobs to go around, especially for going people.
You’re not wrong that it suppresses wages. And if we “just” wanted to fix that we could (by increasing the minimum wage for immigrants perhaps). Interesting that all our anti-immigration policies are less about doing that and more about bullying people.
But on the flip side, we do need immigration. Wage suppression is only a part of it, at some point wages can’t go up because the money doesn’t exist (especially for the kind of roles we need, the kind of person who needs a carer doesn’t have unlimited funds), and we’ll need it more and more as time goes on too. We genuinely need a growing pool of workers whilst we have an aging population. We’re not making enough young workers ourselves to care for our aging population. And turns out the amount of money you need to offer people to make them comfortable to have more kids is rediculously high, so immigration is filling the gap at a much cheaper price.
Eventually the world will shift and immigration will dry up because everyone else will be in the same boat as we are now, then we’ll have no choice but to throw money at the birth rate. Probably at a cost so high we’ll have to concider some pretty terrible things to pay for it, but for now immigration is saving us from that fate.
So.. You agree, we don't need so much immigration, we should fix, or try harder to fix, the issues at hand before throwing exploitative cheap labour at the economy. You're just too scared to say you agree.
I do support policies that make immigration less exploiitative, but I don’t support curtailing immigration much, the alternatives suck.
I do accept other options exist (eg encouraging more people to have kids), but they are much more expensive, like multiple percentage points of gdp more expensive. Like we’d have to curtail pensions to afford them, or set a tax increase larger than any in living memory.
We could solve this without immigration eventually if we had the willingness to spend that much money. It’d take 20 years to start working (people take a long time to grow up) and in the meantime we’d need a lot of political will (nobody would enjoy the kind of tax rises we’re talking about), but yeah it could be done.
We’ll have to do it one day, we can’t benefit from immigration indefinitely, but doing it early does mean spending vast amounts more money. It’s not like this gets cheaper over time, we’ll have to keep spending every year. So rushing into it before we need to gives few benefits that I can see. Especially since we’re competing with other countries that aren’t doing it, and therefore can spend their money in ways that encourage investment (ie outcompete the uk for investment) instead. Once immigration settles down (as it inevitably will, unless there’s enough destabilising wars to undo all the progress around the world, hopefully not), all the countries currently depending on immigration will be forced to solve the birth rate problem at once, then at least we’re competing on a level playing field and might not suffer so badly for adjusting our spending.
So no, I don’t agree with doing it now, because there’s a cheaper option and cheaper means we can afford to spend the money on other things. We’re struggling already, think how much harder it would be if we were throwing all our welfare spending into convincing people to have kids instead of into pensions or the nhs. Some issues get worse when you kick the can down the road, but this one just sits and waits for us to confront it, so delaying that as long as possible is the optimal choice.
You should work in government with that logic. Cheaper now, kick the can down the road.
Reap what you sow.
Cheaper now and forever as far as I can see, so yeah, some cans are better for kicking than others.
Disagree. Wait for all those care workers to longer be care workers now they've got ILR, not to mention their dependents then up for benefits.
That was five years in the making. Not that far down the road, was it?
Thankfully people don’t behave that way on average. A few outliers don’t matter much.
How would you know?
Would you keep wiping arses or change jobs, or get on the benefit gravy train?
Naive.
If someone doesn't work for 20 years? No, we don't rely on them.
Unpopular opinion here.. but that's a leech. I'm not from here either but I got to work for it. People native here? Also got to work to get unemployment money.
We don't live in dystopia. Lemmy has some insane takes and this is top of the list. People expect to get stuff for free with literally zero contribution on claim.
If someone doesn’t work for 20 years? Other than any Brits who go to university, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant here.
This is discussing people who do work, and how long they need to work before we trust them enough to treat them like citizens.
If someone comes here at 18 and works for 5 years… this may shock you, but they’ve been a net benefit to the country to the tune of 5 man-years of work (minus their salary, which presumably is less than the labour, or nobody would be throwing money at them). They are already better for the economy than an equivalent Brit since they didn’t spent 18 years being a drag on the economy (instead they were a drag of whatever poor country wasted the resources prepping them for us!).
Hypothetically the absolutely most untrusting and stingy position we could take would be to require someone to work long enough to pay off the cost of caring for them for the rest of their life. That would mean assuming they immediately stop working the moment they earn leave to remain. But that would be like a life insurance company saying “we’ll insure you for £100000 but you need to pay us £100000 to cover the risk”.
Thankfully we can very easily predict how people behave in aggregate. We could pick a number where we’re near guaranteed to come out ahead, I bet it’d be embarrassingly short (most people work to just before pension age). But that’s not what’s driving this policy. This policy exists to look “tough on immigration”, but not too tough because we are actually dependent on immigration. Enough to ruin lives without you know... accidentally having any real effect on immigration numbers, since they would be a disaster.
So it’s just political manoeuvring designed to have no real effect on the thing people want to change (because they thing can’t change, we need it too much) but will still do massive damage.
Might as well “solve” small boats by regularly nuking the English Channel, its equivalent levels of bullshit.
It may be a bad policy, but is it actually morally evil? And if so, how?
It could be beneficial to keep people here for less than 15 years, then replace their positions when there is a UK national to fill the job. There are people who would be happy to work abroad to send money back home, I knew a professional who followed the money and had been to several countries before.
Albeit, you are possibly right. I think the points based idea is a good one
I never said evil, but I do think immoral, as I outlined in my previous comment, we’re talking about benefitting from people dedicating a significant amount of their working lives to this country doing jobs we are failing to do ourselves. Leaving those people in limbo for so long isn’t fair to them. This is just statistics to us, but it’s their lives getting uprooted.
If people are bouncing between different countries and jobs, good for them, and this policy won’t change things for them one bit, because they already wouldn’t be eligible, and if they’re bouncing around they really wouldn’t be interested either.
Eh fair tbh