British Prime Minister Theresa May promises to take measures to reduce migration
One of the main messages of the Conservative Party's election manifesto will be further measures to curb immigration. The BBC came to this conclusion after reviewing the document ahead of its publication. British companies will be required to pay more for hiring foreign labor, and migrants themselves will be expected to make higher contributions to the National Health Service (NHS).
Theresa May intends to reaffirm her commitment to her goal of cutting net migration to the country to tens of thousands per year, as high levels of migration, she says, can harm the integrity of society. In addition, May is preparing to announce a series of measures aimed at coping with the rising cost of social support. However, the main emphasis in the Conservative manifesto is on migration issues.
The manifesto contains a promise to reduce immigration from non-EU countries across all visa categories. Furthermore, the Prime Minister intends to set her government the task of reducing and controlling immigration from European countries after Britain leaves the EU: according to sources close to her, May makes it clear that Brexit will mean the end of freedom of movement in its current form.
May plans to use economic levers to reduce employers' desire to hire foreign labor. To this end, she proposes doubling the fee that businesses pay to the treasury for each skilled worker from outside the European Union. Currently, the so-called skills charge, introduced in April 2017, is £1,000 per year per worker. Revenue from these payments is planned to be directed to a fund for improving the skills of British workers.
Critics argue that the Conservatives' plan to radically reduce net migration is impossible to implement in practice without harming the country's economy. Net migration, the difference between the number of people arriving in the UK for more than a year and those leaving the country over the same period, stood at 273,000 as of last September. The last time this figure fell below 100,000 was in 1997.
According to an editorial published on Wednesday in the Evening Standard (the newspaper's editor is former Chancellor George Osborne), ministers privately call the targets unrealistic. The article states that these targets, set by David Cameron when the Conservatives were in opposition, were economically illiterate, so it remains a mystery why Theresa May insists on them. The newspaper calls on the Prime Minister to "scrap this bad policy from the past."