The Home Secretary recently announced a new anti-migrant “net migration” package that’s come into force. This package includes increasing the minimum income required for sponsorship on a family visa, increasing the minimum income needed for a Skilled Worker visa, ending the ability of almost all students to bring their dependents to the UK, and eroding the ability of care workers to bring family members.
These measures reinforce racism and classism against low-paid migrants. They pit migrant workers and non-migrant workers against each other, obscuring the same institutions and systems that are responsible for the exploitation of them all. And they erode the right to a family life to a racialised and gendered class privilege that can only be accessed by migrants with enough money.
These measures also split up families, increasing the isolation that many migrants already feel amidst the Hostile Environment.
The persistent fixation on net migration figures is a political distraction technique that has devastating consequences for migrant communities. Viewing migrants only as numbers and not as people is dehumanising. For many workers in low paid jobs, the UK has had a hand in creating the conditions in which they were forced to emigrate to work, whether through the legacies of past colonial exploitation, support for neoliberal economic policies that disadvantage workers, or support for repressive governments.
We cannot let this Government divide us and manufacture problems to blame on migrants.