Hi, Quartz members!
Sometimes, numbers speak more eloquently than words. Here are two from the bleak week gone by in the UK:
$48,687: The newly announced minimum income requirement for skilled worker cisas, up from $33,000. A similar requirement applies for foreign spouses to live with their British partners in the UK, up sharply from $23,400.
$40,635: The median household disposable income in the UK in 2022.
In the gap between these numbers lives a huge misdiagnosis of what the once-formidable British economy requires. And it engenders the potential for the country and its citizens to slide even further in their economic well-being, as a new report from the Resolution Foundation lays out.
Take the income figure first. In the UK, wages stopped growing meaningfully in 2007. This has particularly affected sectors that were already underpaid and overworked: education, healthcare, agricultural labor, construction. The median salary of farm workers is around $30,200 a year; junior doctors make a gross annual pay of around $40,700, while young nurses, after tax and welfare deductions, stand to earn as little as $2,050 a month. The strain on these livelihoods—and the shortages resulting from workers understandably avoiding these professions—led to the biggest wave of labor strikes in decades last year. Those strikes have spilled into 2023 as well.
But with its new income requirement for foreigners, the Conservative government has decided that the country needs more immigrants in its higher-earning brackets, rather than those who may fill the acute labor shortages in less lucrative professions. (Simultaneously, the government has resisted raising public salaries for healthcare workers and teachers to match inflation.) Having already constricted inexpensive labor from the EU thanks to Brexit, the Conservatives are now drying up other pools of workers, even as the UK ages inexorably. In England and Wales, 18.6% of the population is now aged 65 or more.
The new measure caps 13 years of Conservative policies in similar spirit: anti-immigration, hard on the poor and the lower middle class, and corrosive to public institutions. Next year, when the UK heads into a general election, the Conservatives will be burdened by their record of hollowing out the economy and its livelihoods—and by the widespread view that they’ve misunderstood the state of the world and the UK’s place within it.
BY THE DIGITS
27%: The amount by which UK low-income families are poorer when compared to their French counterparts
3 million: The number of food parcels given out by the UK’s largest food bank in 2022-23, up by a third from the previous year
20%: The amount by which UK firms have under-invested since 2005 when compared to compared to companies in the US, France and Germany. The cost to the economy of this under-investment runs to roughly 4% of the GDP
$13,461: The annual cost of lost wage growth per worker as a result of wage growth flatlining since 2007
4: The multiple by which the average income per person in the richest local authority ($66,048 in Kensington and Chelsea) outstripped that in the poorest local authority ($14,718 in Nottingham) in 2019
One-third: The share of young people in the UK who are not undertaking any education by age 18, compared with one in five in France and Germany
6: The number of Britons, out of every 10, who think their country is headed in the wrong direction
A PUNCTURED ECONOMY
In the wealthy West, as populations get older, they will depend increasingly on immigrants to, as the saying goes, get their jobs done. Workers don’t merely fill staff shortages in indispensable sectors like healthcare and transport; they also provide a tax base to support social security.
As a result, immigration policies will move closer and closer to the center of all political conversations in these countries. They will definitely feel the ill-effects of anti-immigrant sentiment at first, Manoj Pradhan, who founded Talking Heads Macroeconomics, a research firm in London, told Quartz. “But even if politics is a little unstable for the near future, I have no doubt that, in the long term, people will begin to see immigration as the great benefit it can be.”
So it may appear that the UK’s new moves against foreign workers—as well as its outlandish, possibly illegal idea to offload asylum-seekers to Rwanda—merely fall into this roiling public anxiety over immigration. Except: it seems there’s really no public anxiety there. The Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch, in a series of excellent chart-tweets, pointed out that British attitudes towards immigrants have been warming for a decade, to the point that the number of Britons who want fewer immigrants are in a minority now. More than 60% of the country thinks immigrants are good for the economy. Even among Conservative voters, just 8% think immigration is one of the most important issues facing the UK, compared to 61% in 2016.
It’s hard to believe that the government has misunderstood public sentiment when the numbers are this stark. Much more likely, it is pursuing a policy of distraction to mask its dire economic failures. If you compel Britons to think long enough about refugees and immigrants from the developing world, perhaps they’ll forget that they’re growing poorer themselves compared to French and German people, once their economic peers but not really any more. Or so the government must hope.
ONE 🩺 THING
The new income-based rules for foreign workers will exempt health and social care workers—an implicit admission that these sectors are sorely in need of labor, and that they pay too poorly for the rules to apply. But the government has cracked down in another way. Care workers moving to the UK to work will now be unable to bring their dependents with them.
The restriction is certainly a deterrent. Earlier this year, Quartz wrote about overseas nurses securing UK care worker visas to tend to the elderly and infirm. It’s a job below their actual skill levels. But they’ve sought it, in large part, because it promises better times for their family: an improved quality of life, finer schools for their children, and, eventually, a transition into the better-staffed, better-resourced hospitals of the National Health Service. The ban on dependents may, in the long run, keep much-needed care staff and nurses away from the UK. In the short term, though, it’s a cruel way to squeeze workers in difficult jobs with poor pay, by depriving them of their families around them.
Thanks for reading! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with comments, questions, or topics you want to know more about.
Have a reviving weekend!
—Samanth Subramanian, Weekend Brief editor
