Mahmood must not retreat on migration reform after Left revolt

After voters backed taking control of our borders, Britain flung them open between 2021 and 2024. This saw some four million people enter the country. Many were low skilled and low paid, and now threaten to be a drain on Britain’s already depleted public purse. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary , appeared to grasp the seriousness of this. Under current arrangements, 1.6 million arrivals – some 600,000 of whom came on health and care visas or as their dependents – are forecast to become eligible for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) by 2030.

With it comes access to the munificence of Britain’s welfare state. Ms Mahmood was right, therefore, to propose doubling the minimum period a migrant has to wait for ILR from five to 10 years, and to make foreign care workers wait up to 15 years. But now, under pressure from the Labour Left, Ms Mahmood is reportedly considering whether to water down this change . That would be a grave error. The lifetime net fiscal contribution of each migrant care worker with ILR is estimated at minus £36,000, and minus £67,000 for their dependants.

The Labour Left has, predictably, been waging a campaign against Ms Mahmood’s plans . Angela Rayner, has declared them “un-British”, while Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Energy Secretary, has blandly called for “compassion”. It is a strange kind of compassion that suppresses carers’ wages in Britain by importing cheap labour from elsewhere in the world. And surely it is “un-British” to expect British taxpayers to foot the bill for an open-borders policy they have never once voted for.

The situation is depressingly familiar. The Left insists that it supports border control, then objects to every measure that might actually deliver it, using the language of “kindness” as cover. Ms Mahmood once promised to take decisions her party may not like. But she has already announced she intends to create yet more legal routes for migrants, inevitably increasing the numbers she professes to want to bring down. Now she may be minded to retreat from necessary changes to ILR in the hope of getting what remains of her proposals past her party.

The Home Secretary must reject this Faustian pact. She was right the first time round.