With immigration limits, the U.K. vows to end a ‘failed experiment in open borders’

LONDON — Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced tighter British immigration rules, declaring an end to what he called a “squalid chapter” and a “failed experiment in open borders.”

In a speech Monday, Starmer vowed to “take back control” with new rules that make it harder to obtain work, family and student visas to the United Kingdom. Migrant rights advocates criticized his wording as being more typical of the far right than of his center-left Labour Party.

“The damage [immigration] has done to our country is incalculable,” the prime minister wrote in a policy paper.

Starmer said the changes, which still need Parliament’s approval, are needed to maintain social cohesion, drive investment in the local workforce and prevent Britain from becoming “an island of strangers.”

His proposals come less than two weeks after the far-right anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party, led by Nigel Farage — a confidant of President Trump — made big gains in some local and municipal elections across England.

Data shows net migration to the U.K. has more than tripled in the past decade. Indians are the largest recipients of U.K. visas. And in recent months, Americans have been applying for British citizenship in record numbers.

Experts say the changes aim to reverse an unexpected spike in immigration after Britain left the European Union.

“After Brexit, a new immigration system came in under the previous [Conservative] government that was surprisingly liberal, and there was a big and unexpected increase in migration to the U.K.,” says Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. “When they saw how big the numbers were, they started to roll back some of those liberalizations and made some restrictions.”

“The current government is keeping those existing restrictions and rolling back the liberalizations, taking us back to a system that’s broadly similar to what we had for non-EU citizens before the U.K. left the EU,” she says.

Restrictions on most types of visas

Several of Starmer’s predecessors focused on cracking down on illegal migration, including with a controversial plan to deport people in the country without legal status to Rwanda, no matter where they’re originally from. (That plan was struck down by courts and ultimately scrapped when Starmer defeated then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in last summer’s election.

While some immigrants who enter illegally go undetected or uncounted, government figures show the vast majority of immigrants to the U.K. arrive legally. The changes announced Monday govern them, making it harder to obtain most types of U.K. work and residence visas.

Immigrants and their dependents will have to pass higher-level English proficiency tests for some types of work visas. And most immigrants will have to spend at least 10 years in the country before applying for citizenship, rather than the current five years.

Employers, in turn, won’t be allowed to recruit as many overseas workers — particularly for low-skilled jobs.

In recent years, the U.K. has also started requiring travelers who don’t need a tourist visa to buy a visa waiver online before being allowed to board a British-bound flight.

Sumption estimates the changes will translate into a roughly 10% decline in visas issued. Immigrants will also spend more time, and money, on temporary visas, she predicts.

“Having temporary status is obviously not very good for migrants themselves. Because the U.K. immigration system is actually very expensive for people on temporary visas,” she says. “On the other hand, the benefit for the government is that they bring in a lot more revenue, and that money gets redistributed across the health service, across the skills system — though that’s not the justification the government is using.”

Polls show most Britons want their government to do more to fight illegal types of migration, especially smugglers carrying people to England in small boats across the channel from France.

But the rules Starmer announced Monday govern only legal types of migration. One recent poll found most Britons do not want to see numbers of migrant worker visas reduced, especially for certain sectors, including workers in nursing homes.

Critics say Starmer’s language could incite violence against migrants

In a statement emailed to NPR, Steve Smith, CEO of Care4Calais, a charity that works with migrants and refugees, called Starmer’s language “dangerous.”

“Shameful language like this will only inflame the fire of the far-right and risks further race riots that endanger survivors of horrors such as war, torture and modern slavery,” Smith wrote. “Starmer must apologize.”

One of Starmer’s own Labour members of Parliament, Nadia Whittome, wrote on social media that the prime minister’s language “mimics the scaremongering of the far-right.”

Another left-wing lawmaker, Zarah Sultana, questioned whether Starmer’s speech had actually been written by far-right lawmaker Farage.

And another former Starmer colleague, parliamentarian John McDonnell, compared the prime minister’s “island of strangers” reference to the “divisive language of Enoch Powell.” Powell was a Conservative member of Parliament who made an infamous 1968 speech that’s widely considered one of the most racist and incendiary in modern British history.

(Both Sultana and McDonnell were suspended from the Labour Party last year after voting against one of Starmer’s welfare policies, though they remain in Parliament.)

Opposition lawmakers, meanwhile, questioned Starmer’s commitment to cutting migration numbers and said his proposals don’t go far enough.