Did Brexit Level the Playing Field?

The UK's new points-based system opens its borders to some migrants, but shuts them for others.

Image: House of Commons Library https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-does-the-latest-brexit-delay-mean-for-the-uk-and-eu/

During a recent, lighthearted WhatsApp conversation, I asked friends living in the UK whether they thought Brexit was a good idea. The response I received (after considerable griping about having to discuss such a well-worn topic) was unanimous in its ambivalence. One of my friends succinctly captured the group’s sentiments, writing: “The answer is both NES and YO.”

No, those are not typos.

The UK left the European Union at 11pm on Jan. 23, 2021, having secured a last-minute trade deal after years of negotiation. But, though the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement avoids the prospect of a “no deal” Brexit, only time will tell whether this unprecedented move will pay off for Britain. In short, it is too early to say whether the UK will be better off without the EU (though there are signs of emerging friction in some industries).

Though the future remains uncertain, the UK’s exit from the EU means that new laws have come into immediate effect with respect to immigration. Specifically, EU citizens, who previously enjoyed the right to free movement throughout the union, will now have to apply for visas like non-EU citizens if they wish to live and work in Britain.

But the question is whether the new immigration rules do, as the government proposed in a February 2020 policy paper, institute “a system that works in the interests of the whole of the UK and prioritises (sic) the skills a person has to offer, not where they come from.”

New rules for old migrants

After World War II, the UK encouraged immigration from its former colonies or dependencies – now known as commonwealth countries – to fill labor shortages in its ravaged economy. Specifically, the 1948 British Nationality Act afforded commonwealth citizens the right to settle in the UK, jumpstarting post-war immigration from countries like Jamaica, India, and Pakistan. But, with racial tensions rising in the 1950s, some in the British government argued in favor of curtailing non-white immigration. The resulting 1971 Immigration Act was the first major piece of British legislation that subjected commonwealth citizens to immigration controls.

While settling in the UK became less permissive for non-EU citizens in the decades that followed, the establishment of the European Union in 1993 granted EU citizens the right to live and work freely in any member state, including Britain.

That is, until Brexit changed the rules of the game - particularly when it comes to working in the UK.

Under the new, points system (see below), both EU and non-EU passport holders will have to demonstrate their eligibility under the skilled worker visa category. Prospective migrants need 70 points to apply, with points being awarded for having a job offer from an approved employer, meeting a minimum salary threshold, educational qualifications, and speaking English at a required level.

Image: Screen capture from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-policy-statement/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-policy-statement

For EU-nationals, the new skilled worker category is similar (if not exactly like) the pre-Brexit Tier 2 work visa. What has changed, however, is that the points based system eliminates caps on the number of work visas offered. More importantly, the new system does away with the “Resident Labour Market Test”, a pre-Brexit policy which required employers to ensure a job vacancy couldn’t be filled by a UK resident (including British citizens, EU citizens, and non-EU citizens with “Indefinite Leave to Remain” in the UK) before offering it to a migrant worker.

Without these handicaps, non-EU and commonwealth citizens – who made up 60% of migrants entering the UK in 2019 according to a House of Commons report – can compete directly with EU citizens for high-skilled jobs. 

This means that Brexit has instituted a more egalitarian immigration system for groups that had previously faced progressive barriers in trying to migrate to the UK.

To be clear, however, this is not the result of increasing immigration as a whole, but a policy of subjecting previously unencumbered EU citizens to immigration controls.

And this is where it’s worth considering how the new rules affect a particular class of prospective migrants.

Immigration for the qualified

It is difficult to forget the anti-immigration sentiment surrounding the Leave campaign’s “Take Back Control” slogan. Indeed, exit polls from the 2016 referendum show that immigration was a significant issue for many, with a third of leave voters saying the main reason they wanted to withdraw from the EU was so that the UK might “regain control over immigration and its own borders.”

Such sentiment was no doubt fueled by Leave campaigners like the United Kingdom Independence Party’s (UKIP) Nigel Farage, who, in a 2015 interview with BBC, said “we’re not against immigration, but we’d like to have a… point system so that we can choose who comes to Britain from all over the world, and not have an open door to the rest of Europe.”

That Farage’s comments were couched in the claim that refugees arriving in France could be issued EU citizenship and then promptly move to the UK, and that UKIP used borderline xenophobic campaign posters to warn against non-white immigration, is evidence of the Leave campaign’s nativist undertones.

Farage’s goal to “choose who comes to Britain”, though, is realized in the new point-based immigration system that actively shuts the door to so-called low-skilled workers like cleaners, construction workers, paramedics, and others who earn below £25,600 a year. This is because there is no low-skilled worker category under the new immigration rules. Since low-skilled, non-EU citizens were already ineligible for a work visa under the old rules, the lack of this category disproportionately impacts EU citizens from A8 countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia) and A2 countries (Bulgaria and Romania) who can no longer avail free movement and who, as recently as 2019, made up over half the low-skilled workers in the UK.

Image: The Migration Observatory https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-labour-market-an-overview/

What does that mean? In its current form, the new system eliminates cheap labor from abroad. In practice, that amounts to immediately eliminating the ability of EU citizens that come from seven out of the 10 EU countries with the lowest GDP-per capita to find low-skilled work in the UK.

Egalitarianism for some?

Whether the new immigration system will work “in the interests of the whole of the UK” is yet to be determined. In the meantime, what’s clear under the new laws is that a prospective migrant’s nationality is no longer a factor that determines whether they can live, work, or study in Britain. If this is an acceptable way to appraise a country’s immigration policy, then one can argue that the UK has become friendlier to migrants post-Brexit – at least on paper.

But it is important not to forget that the points-based system, which determines a migrant’s eligibility for a visa based on their qualifications, relies on directly eliminating low-skilled workers from the UK’s migrant workforce. Such a policy ends up obliquely targeting EU citizens from particular European countries – and especially countries that joined the EU between 2004 and 2007.

As it turns out, whether Brexit has precipitated a new immigration system that emphasizes the “skills a person has to offer, not where they come” seems to depend entirely on some migrant’s skills and, at least in the immediate future, others’ nationality. For qualified, non-EU residents who have traditionally lost out to EU nationals in sectors like banking and healthcare, settling in the UK is easier without the Resident Labour Market Test. On the other hand, for some EU nationals, the likelihood of living and working in Britain appears indirectly tied to their country of citizenship, with individuals from low GDP-per capita countries having a lower chance of migrating as it currently stands.

As with most things Brexit, then, the answer seems to be “nes.” Or perhaps “yo.”