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Post by Dan Dare on Mar 2, 2024 9:03:57 GMT
An article in the Times last week reported on the activities of bogus agents ripping off would-be migrants looking to move to the UK on the recently introduced ‘care worker’ visa.
One agent told an undercover reporter that they would not even have to work as a care worker once in the UK. Their wife could also easily find a job and children could come as well.
In the year to December the 105,887 care workers who came to the UK were accompanied by more than 203,000 children. Those same migrants are sometimes then given children to traffic to the UK.
Fraudulent middlemen are commonly operating in India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Border Force identified one migrant who was sponsored by a care provider who had been granted 498 visas since May 2022. The CQC subsequently confirmed that this care provider had been dormant since September 2021 and was no longer providing any services.
Another migrant had provided false employment letters for care work in a hospital in their home country. When the sponsor was checked, it was found to be dormant on Companies House despite having sponsored more than 40 care worker visas in a short period. This was only one of several other examples. UKVI has found widespread evidence of care homes not paying salaries to migrants and effectively forcing them to do unpaid work. One person had not received a salary in six months. The same company had sponsored 263 applicants.
So guess where these migrants ostensibly admitted to work in the care industry actually go? That’s right, it’s into the Deliveroo industry instead.
We’ll get into that next. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Mar 2, 2024 17:28:30 GMT
The Conservative MP in question is Neil O’Brien, MP for Harborough, Leicestershire since 2017. He was a junior minister in the Department of Health with responsibility for social care until he resigned in November. The reasons why should become apparent as we go on.
O’Brien is an unusually articulate communicator but for reasons unknown he shuns the national media and shares his thoughts mainly on the Substack platform. Many of his contributions there are sharply critical of current government policy especially concerning, but not limited to, immigration.
This thread is concerned with an article he posted in December 2023:
The Deliveroo Visa Scandal: The growth of policies that deliberately encourage low wage immigration
It’s quite a long read – 18 minutes per Substack - so I will leave readers to do that if they wish. O’Brien spends about twenty pages discussing several different aspects of labour migration, but I’ll just be commenting on a few of the highlighted points here.
First off, he reminds us about Boris Johnson’s pronouncements from 2018-19 concerning the importance of replacing what he characterised as low-skill, low-wage immigration under Freedom of Movement from the EU with highly skilled talent sourced on a global level. The idea would be to create a brand-new immigration system that would encourage the ‘best and brightest’ to migrate to Britain, and which would make it much simpler for them to do so – no numerical caps and relaxed thresholds for qualifications and experience. Simpler employers too thanks to a new ‘streamlined’ system of sponsorships and the abolition of the rules requiring local candidates to be given priority.
Well, that was the theory, at least. The first couple of years following the introduction of the ‘new system’ and abolition of FoM coincided with the pandemic so it was difficult to make an assessment of its success or otherwise. Did it bring in the ‘best and brightest’, or did it not?
That question has now been answered. Per O’Brien:
The migration policies he refers to as the two biggest recent drivers of low wage migration are the two year (post graduation) student work visa, and the social care visa.
More on both of those next. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Mar 4, 2024 18:11:51 GMT
Next then, the two year post-study work visa, which was originally introduced by the Blairites in 2004, then abolished by the coalition in 2011, and subsequently reinstated by the Johnson government in 2019. As a reminder this entitles any foreigner graduating from a British university to stay for a further two years, whether or not they have a job. If the student can find an employer willing to sponsor him during the two-year period, he can then apply for a skilled worker visa which after five can then lead to permanent residence. A government press release at the time hailed it as a move which would “help recruit and retain the best and brightest global talent, as well as opening up opportunities for future breakthroughs in science, technology and research.” One dissenting voice was the government’s own Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), a group of academics tasked with scrutinising proposed changes to immigration policy and advising accordingly. As the MAC stated: “…In our 2018 report, we recommended against the introduction of a separate graduate visa, due to concerns that it would lead to an increase in low-wage migration and universities marketing themselves on post-study employment potential rather than educational quality.’” And so it has come to pass. As O’Brien notes: “…the effect of turning it [the post-study work visa] off and then on again can be seen very clearly: it’s had no effect on the numbers coming from rich countries, but has made a huge difference to the numbers coming from poorer countries. This is shown very clearly in the following graphic.  The MAC also note the rising number of students who bring (adult) dependents with them: “The number of dependants coming to the UK under student visas has increased significantly, and at a much faster pace than the rise in total student numbers, as illustrated in Figure 3.12. Dependants accounted for 148,000 visas in 2022, 24% of all student visas. The majority of dependants are adults.” [emphasis added]  Note that O’Brien’s statistics do not cover the full year 2023 where, as shown separately elsewhere, both student numbers and dependents from poor countries have increased further. O’Brien has much more to say about the effect of all this on universities themselves and the efforts they are making to cope with this unanticipated demand. One ‘solution' he reports is the increasing tendency for second and third-tier universities, such as The University of the West of Scotland [?!] to open satellite campuses in London to cater to students from poorer countries who would be reluctant to move to places like Paisley, Dumfries or even Sunderland when the work they are really seeking isn’t available there. |
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