Labour's plan echoes the hostile environment and is shortsighted - especially considering the UK's growing care needs

13 May 2025, 11:14 | Updated: 13 May 2025, 11:28

What the Labour government is proposing to curb immigration is shortsighted.

It will curb recruitment when the future care needs that face the UK are growing.

Rather, efforts should be directed towards improving working conditions of health and social care workers, which will subsequently greatly benefit the UK beneficiaries and service users.

We also need to look at how migrants are viewed. Back in 2023 the University of Essex funded our project ‘Economies of care: migrant health and social care workers in the UK post covid’.

Some of the testimonials from migrant care-workers in the South of England highlighted the issues they faced:

“So, I feel valued sometimes and other times. Yeah, I don't.”

“When as a migrants worker I come here, and this is all I've got. This is what's brought me here. That’s it. But I lack any knowledge of the labour force rights in the country”

“The salary is not right at all. We are being taken advantage of greatly and sadly, too.”

Those are just some of the voices we heard.

The words went on to inspire the play Lightstreams written by Dr. Mazzilli, about the tough choices a migrant carer makes during Covid-19 Pandemic.

The testimonials we collected highlighted several issues, such as high levels of workload with endless shifts, working very long hours; isolation and alienation; racialised and gendered micro-aggressions as well as struggles with mental health and well-being due to a combination of all these factors.

Such testimonials from health and social care workers don’t make headlines. The headlines we see portray migrant social care workers as ‘low skilled’, ‘cheap labour, and the ‘problem to migration’ in the UK.

Yet, care workers have the ability to provide care to service users with complex conditions often with comorbidities, who would otherwise not survive without their care demonstrates that their skill level is not low.

They provide care for a combination of physical and mental health needs associated with these conditions on a long-term basis.

Migrants are not people here.

They are a means to an end.

The whole current global political rhetoric plays within demonising migration or pitting the migrant as the problem.

Labour is just working within the same frameworks the Conservative government had started several years ago with Theresa May’s Hostile Environment that increasingly led to a host of anti-migration policy and sentiments.  

Including the policy plan in December 2023 to stop overseas care workers from bringing their dependants to the UK.

What the Labour government is proposing, I believe, plays within the migration hostile environment.

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Dr Mary Mazzilli – Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex

Dr Matumo Ramafikeng – Department of Health and Social Care, University of Essex

Dr Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki – Department of Sociology, University of Essex

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