Here’s what all the top parties at the election are saying about immigration

Nigel Farage, Rishi Sunak, Carla Denyer, Keir Starmer and Ed Davey (Picture: Getty/PA/Rex/Reuters)

There’s an awful lot to talk about in the 2024 General Election campaign, but with a month to go, immigration is proving to be a key battleground.

The issue is made up of two distinct parts: illegal immigration, most visibly the small boats crossing the English Channel; and legal immigration, which largely revolves around visas.

According to the Conservatives and Labour, the number of both illegal and legal migrants coming into the UK is too high – but they disagree on what to do about it.

And we can expect to hear a lot more about this topic over the next four weeks thanks to Nigel Farage’s announcement that he’ll be running for a seat as the new leader of Reform UK.

Here’s how the main parties at the election are tackling immigration.

Conservatives

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has put his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ at the centre of his term in office (Picture: PA)

You might remember that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak revealed a list of his five priorities at the start of last year, telling people he fully expected them to ‘hold my government and I to account on delivering those goals’.

Arguably the most prominent of those five was ‘stop the boats’ – a reference to the small boats carrying migrants and refugees across the Channel to enter the UK illegally.

The centrepiece of that effort is the Rwanda plan, which involved sending those who arrived in the UK illegally off to the central African country permanently, in an effort to deter people from choosing to come.

Sunak has admitted the first flights to Rwanda aren’t going to take off before July 4, but one of the points on the Tories’ ‘clear plan of bold actions’ for the election is ‘seeing the Rwanda plan through’.

As for legal immigration, the party announced its plan to introduce a new annual cap on visas late last night.

Ministers have pointed to figures from the Office for National Statistics showing a reduction in net migration last year as evidence their current efforts are working – though the total the previous year, in 2022, was historically high.

Net migration is worked out by subtracting the total number of people who left the country by the total number of people who entered the country, to show how immigration has affected the UK population.

Labour

Labour leader Keir Starmer brought Dover’s Tory MP over to the party in an attempt to boost his border security credentials (Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Last month, Keir Starmer controversially welcomed right-wing Tory MP Natalie Elphicke over to Labour.

The main reasoning behind this decision was her constituency: she represented Dover, right on the front line of the small boats crisis, giving the party leader an opportunity to talk about how he was planning to tackle it.

Like Sunak, he has also listed illegal immigration among his priorities, though the entry in his ‘first steps’ reads: ‘Launch a new Border Security Command.’

This would involve ‘hundreds of new specialist investigators, officers and prosecutors’ and ‘tough new counter-terror powers’ to destroy the criminal gangs who operate the small boats enterprise. Expect to see more when Labour’s manifesto is launched.

Much of the party’s plan to curb legal immigration, meanwhile, was spelled out in an article in the Sun on Sunday a couple of days ago.

Starmer told the newspaper: ‘If you trust me with the keys to No10 I will make you this promise: I will control our borders and make sure British businesses are helped to hire Brits first.’

According to his proposals, businesses applying for foreign work visas would first have to help train British people to do the jobs.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has confirmed Labour supports recent visa changes brought in by the government that hiked the minimum salary requirement for certain skilled work visas by nearly 50%.

Liberal Democrats

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey took a boat trip earlier in the campaign (Picture: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire)

Unlike Labour and the Conservatives, the Lib Dems haven’t said much about immigration on the campaign trail at this General Election.

Instead, the party has chosen to focus on issues like water quality, apprenticeships and personal care.

But its website cites the UK’s ‘proud history of welcoming newcomers’, and argues for easing asylum rules that have ‘closed down safe and legal routes to sanctuary’.

The Lib Dems would invest in ‘officers, training and technology to tackle smuggling, trafficking and modern slavery’, while introducing a standard of three months for ‘all but the most complex asylum claims’ to be processed.

Their website criticises the new Conservative visa rules, saying they have meant ‘British employers can’t recruit the people they need and families are separated by unfair, complex visa requirements’.

But there are no suggestions for what rules they would bring in to replace them.

Greens

Green Party co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay (Picture: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images)

The Green Party has an asylum and migration policy working group that writes up its ideas in those areas – then puts them all in an easy-to-read format on their website, ideal for political journalists who are writing up an article like this.

Under their plans, the Home Office would be split into two parts: the Department of the Interior and the Department of Migration.

The Department of Migration would ‘deploy no physical or administrative barriers to prevent or deter’ asylum seekers wanting to come into the UK.

It would also treat all claims as admissible ‘regardless of the route by which the applicants have arrived’ and immigration detention would be abolished.

Any minimum income requirements for visas would be scrapped, along with any language requirements. Free language classes would be made available ‘to promote and encourage integration’.

Residents on a visa would be free to bring over to the UK family members who would usually live with them in their home country, while any undocumented migrants who have been in the country for more than five years would be invited to apply for settled status.

Reform UK

Nigel Farage has been talking about immigration for his entire political career (Picture: Guy Bell/Shutterstock)

Nigel Farage, who until yesterday was simply a campaigner for Reform UK, has said the election coming up on July 4 ‘is and must be the immigration election’.

As leader and candidate, the arch-Brexiteer is likely to be spotlighting the issue for the rest of the month before we go to the polls.

According to the Reform website, the party would ‘stop the boats’ with a six-point plan:

Recognise a national security threat

Leave the European Convention on Human Rights

Zero illegal immigrants to be resettled in the UK

Offshore processing for illegal arrivals

New Department of Immigration (an unlikely crossover policy with the Greens)

Pick up migrants out of boats and take back to France

However, when Farage was interviewed on the Today programme this morning, he suggested point four – about offshore processing – would be scrapped, as he considers it ‘terribly impractical’. It was unclear which other policies might also be changed.

Reform has said it would freeze all non-essential immigration, which was defined by Farage in the same interview as ‘unskilled labour’.

However, he added that he does not consider care workers – who are usually included in that definition – to be unskilled.

Asked if he would be happy to still allow around half a million people to migrate to the UK in order to bring net migration to zero (since around half a million people left the UK last year), the Reform leader told Mishal Husain: ‘It’s far too many, but if that’s what we need and it makes you happy, that’s what we’ll do.’

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