Fewer immigrants could cost Treasury billions

The proposed reform addresses the number of people arriving in the UK while leaving intact the fiscal arrangement that made their arrival indispensable. This is not an oversight. It is the function of reform.

Consider what the Office for Budget Responsibility’s arithmetic from 2024 actually admitted. If fewer migrants come, the Treasury loses billions of pounds. Liberal opinion seized on this as a defence of the migrant, and it is nothing of the kind. It is an invoice. A worker who lands at twenty-five arrives fully grown, schooled, trained and vaccinated, and Britain paid for none of it. The Treasury is harvesting a field that another country ploughed and sowed, and the billions are simply the value of that unpaid labour of raising a human being, entered in London as revenue.

So the restrictionist and the Treasury official are quarrelling inside the same assumption: that the migrant is an instrument, to be judged by yield.

The restrictionist case deserves its strongest form. Cut the supply of labour, it says, and employers must raise wages and train the people already here. There is force in this, since scarcity has sometimes strengthened labour’s hand. But look at the mechanism in this case. The sectors that recruit abroad most heavily, care above all, are paid for out of public budgets. When the recruits stop coming, the employer does not find money for wages. The Treasury, now short of the very billions in question, finds less. The care home closes a wing. The shortage disciplines the patient, not the owner.

Nor was it ever the migrant’s presence that held wages down. It was the migrant’s condition. Picture a nurse from Manila finishing a night shift in a Midlands care home. The payslip shows tax deducted. A health surcharge was paid before arrival. Public funds are barred to them, there is no ballot in a general election, and their visa belongs in practice to the employer, so that resigning means risking deportation. A worker who cannot quit cannot bargain, and a worker who cannot bargain sets the floor for everyone on the ward. The state built that docility by statute, and now proposes to cure its effects by admitting fewer of the people it made docile.

A reform that touched the structure would cut the tie between visa and employer and give the vote to those who are taxed. The state would then have to pay what it costs to raise and train a workforce. Neither party to the 2024 argument proposed any of this, because each needs the nurse exactly as they are: counted by the Treasury and unable to vote on the count.

Their shift ends at seven, and the deduction has already cleared.