Labour cannot out-Farage Farage. Right to remain shouldn’t depend on your salary

Yesterday in parliament, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, set out the final shape of “earned settlement”. Part of that announcement was welcome. In an important U-turn, care workers who came here in good faith will keep the five-year route to settlement they were promised. That is a win for the trade unionists and campaigners who showed how self-defeating these plans were. But this concession only highlights what is wrong with the policy.

If it’s wrong to change the rules for care workers halfway through their stay, why is it OK to do the same for others who came here on the same understanding? For almost everyone earning under £50,000, the wait for indefinite leave to remain will double from five years to 10. That includes the chef, the warehouse worker and the IT technician who were told that five years of work would qualify them settle. Someone earning over £125,000 will wait just three.

Settlement is not being earned so much as bought. Refugees will be treated more harshly still. Those who come to Britain through the few safe and legal routes can settle here after five years. Most others will wait 20, and anyone who arrived by small boat could wait up to 30. Adding a decade because of how someone was forced to flee their home country punishes refugees for the way they arrived, something the Refugee Convention is meant to prevent.

Once again, hostility to migrants and asylum-seekers risks breaching international law. Most worrying of all, these changes will apply to people who are already here and who have kept up their side of the bargain: those with children in local schools, mortgages and roots in their communities. This will ruin lives. The Windrush generation learned that the hard way when the “hostile environment” forced them to prove their right to be here.

Many lost jobs, homes and healthcare. Some were deported to countries they had only seen as children. Related articles: Britain’s slavery debt can’t be wished away – no matter how hard the new right tries Tiny homes could fix the housing squeeze, if we can just find a place to park them The government seems to recognise this danger because Monday’s statement protects people on Windrush routes. But the full impact assessment will be published only during implementation, when it is too late to stop the policy.

None of this adds up economically either. The Office for Budget Responsibility has lowered its forecast for the economy’s growth potential because net migration is falling and the UK is an ageing society. By protecting care workers, the government has admitted that whole sectors depend on people who came here from abroad. The same is true of hospitality, food production and construction. So why is the government doing this? Earned settlement was a policy born in the Starmer years, when we were told that Labour only ever lost votes to Reform.

The answer was to echo Farage’s platform. That approach failed badly. Support from Black and Asian voters collapsed. We have a new leader now . We now know that the government can be moved; it must also go further. Trying to outdo the right is a race we cannot win. Nigel Farage has pledged to abolish indefinite leave to remain entirely. The Conservatives would deny it to anyone earning under £38,700. Every step Labour takes to follow Reform moves us further from our own voters.

The people affected are our neighbours, our colleagues and the workers who care for our loved ones. At the very least, the government should extend the five-year promise it has made care workers to everyone already here on a route to settlement. It should also drop the pay-based ranking and the 30-year penalty for refugees. That is what fairness would look like. Instead, while claiming fairness, the home secretary is being unfair to all those who benefit from the labour of migrant workers, and deeply unfair to the migrant workers themselves.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy is MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill Photograph by Carlos Jasso / AFP via Getty Images Labour Politics Immigration Asylum Indefinite leave to remain