Immigration policy isn’t a neutral filter separate from domestic training, but migrants aren’t the cause of weak training systems. When employers and governments underinvest in training, migration becomes a convenient fix, and the pressure to rebuild those institutions can be masked. The fault lies with employers who choose to recruit rather than train, redesign jobs, or raise pay, and with policymakers who let them. Migrant workers, who bring real skills and fill real shortages, then inherit conditions that weak enforcement of pay, the visa sponsor model and labour standards allows.

Those conditions reflect a failure of regulation, not the presence of migrants. The remedy is not fewer migrants but stronger training, better jobs, and rights that protect migrant and domestic workers alike.

In most circumstances, this relationship between immigration and skills development should be read not as immigration policy leading to a training failure, but as a training failure creating demand for an immigration “fix” which can temporarily displace and/or mute the original pressures to fix the system. The architects of this backsliding are austerity and the profit motive.

The Home Office’s existing levers do little to break this cycle. The Immigration Skills Charge is billed as a way to encourage training, yet its success is unclear, and too many see it as a hiring fee rather than a vehicle for investment in the domestic workforce. Because almost all people seeking asylum are banned from working, and the two-year graduate route has been reduced, we risk wasting the skills of people already in the UK while continuing to recruit from abroad to fill the same gaps that, in many cases, people already here can fill.

Skill is not an objective property of an occupation. It is socially constructed, politicised and often gendered, and the public does not share the government’s classification. Shortage is just as hard to pin down. If a shortage really reflects low pay, filling it through immigration entrenches the problem rather than solving it. Neither concept is a sound foundation for policy.

The deeper flaw is treating people purely as units of labour. Under employer-tied sponsorship, a worker’s right to remain depends on a single employer, a short window to find another and no safety net if they cannot. That dependency invites exploitation and silences those who experience it. The earned settlement proposals compound this by prolonging exposure to NRPF, which risks driving away the very workers the system claims to want. Skills policy can reduce reliance on international recruitment, but slowly, and a mixed workforce, ethically recruited, is a better aim than self-sufficiency.

People seeking asylum are currently permitted to work only where a claim has been outstanding for over a year, and then only in Appendix Skilled Occupations. This is doubly counterproductive. Those roles require UK-recognised qualifications and substantial experience, foreign-earned qualifications are often disregarded in hiring, and further training is prohibitively expensive for people who receive less than £10 a week in asylum support. The result is documented deskilling: refugee doctors and teachers are prevented from re-entering their professions, and highly qualified people see careers interrupted to the point that they cannot be rebuilt.

The fiscal case for reform is well evidenced. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research finds that lifting the ban after six months could save the Government £4.4 billion a year, increase tax revenue by £880 million and add £1 billion to GDP, while the Commission on the Integration of Refugees estimates that it would generate £1.2 billion for the economy within five years. The cost of the ban is also borne by the people it affects. The Migration Advisory Committee has noted that preventing groups such as asylum seekers from obtaining safe and legal sources of income “may push people into exploitative situations”, a finding echoed by the British Red Cross and UNHCR, and Women for Refugee Women has documented the current restrictions driving women into sex work. The ban on work creates the conditions for exploitation that many fled their homes to escape.

The Home Office could act without primary legislation, removing the occupation restriction and reducing the twelve-month wait to six months, as the Scottish Government has proposed. Where Holyrood has already set out a workable position, Westminster would do well to endorse it.

For these reasons, we’ve joined the Lift the Ban Coalition and taken an active role in their Scotland group. We believe the rationale for change and the reform proposed by the coalition will lead to a more mutualistic, productive system for everyone in the UK.