Keir Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ immigration warning is a xenophobic dog whistle

12 May 2025, 14:39 | Updated: 12 May 2025, 14:41

Sir Keir Starmer is blowing a dog whistle, warning that we are at risk of becoming an ‘island of strangers’ because of immigration.

Everyone wants to feel they live in stronger communities, but his announcements today will work against integration and only produce a more divided society.

We all want to know our neighbours; to feel connected with the people around us. But Labour’s announced immigration measures will make it harder for people to put down roots, by putting settled status and citizenship further out of reach for migrants. More people on a precarious, temporary status for longer periods is bad for all of us, while you only have temporary leave to stay, you are subject to harsh employment conditions and visa renewal fees, and denied the safety net of support from the state. This creates a two-tier workforce, with employers able to take advantage of immigrants’ more precarious situation to lower wages and standards, and politicians using that to drive a wedge between us.

After several decades of cuts to public services that have undervalued our communities and the strain caused by an ageing population requiring more services, schools are closing, hospitals are crumbling, and the care system is in tatters. It is largely immigration that is keeping our services afloat, with most immigrants who come here working in the public sector, in the NHS, care, and as teachers. Labour, the Conservatives, and the Reform party all want to blame immigration but the reality is a lack of investment and chronic underfunding that none of them have any plans to change.

Starmer is reading the right-wing press, but not the opinion polls. He’s right that people want a change on immigration, but actually very few of us want fewer care workers, students, or other essential workers. What we need and want is honest leadership, so let’s be really honest here, immigration is essential for the UK to function. Take the care sector, which still has 130,000 vacancies today, and Starmer has said there will be no more migrant care workers.

A huge worry for us all is that our elderly loved ones' care is being compromised as Age UK’s research found that two million elderly people are unable to meet their care needs due to a lack of staffing in the sector. Today’s announcement threatens any chance of filling this essential skills shortage, with Starmer choosing to lean into a culture war against Farage instead of acknowledging the vital role that immigration, plays in creating a society which cares for our elderly.

Visa applications have been falling dramatically in the last year. Social care visas have fallen off a cliff, plummeting by 82%. Other areas have fallen too, including students, where a post-pandemic boom in arrivals has tapered back off to more usual levels. Ukrainians and Hong Kongers have stopped arriving in such high numbers also, so the overall net figures are going to be much lower again this year. There is no need to pursue this culture-war agenda.

Meanwhile the government promises that they will increase the rate of house building, when the experts from the construction industry estimate they will need 250,000 more workers over the next three years. Some of that may be able to be met by increasing training for Brits, but mostly, we need skilled workers from overseas to provide that labour.

This attempt to compete with the parties of the anti-migrant right is a bad idea for Starmer, with negative consequences for the people who come here to work some of the toughest jobs required for our economy to function.

His plans will do nothing to address the widespread exploitation of migrant workers, and by making it harder and harder to stay here legally with a settled status, just funnel more people out of the formal system and into the grey economy. Given the huge hit that our public finances are going to take from the reduction of migrant workers and students that we’re already seeing, this should be the last thing a government that says its priority is growth should be doing.

Labour have a golden opportunity in the fact that immigration numbers have already come down so significantly, to take the heat out of this debate and combat the Reform threat by offering a new and more honest story about immigration. But they are fully on board with the demonisation agenda, convinced that’s the only thing that will save their political skins. As the economic hit from reducing migration kicks in, the government’s pledge not to increase taxes on the wealthiest will leave them nowhere to go but to find more places to cut our services: they’ve trapped themselves in a doom-loop of political inadequacy.

At the end of the day, whether Labour, Conservative or Reform, we are surrounded by Westminster elite parties who care more about feeding a vicious cycle of xenophobia and devastating cuts, and much of the country will be looking to more progressive options as the two-party system falls apart.

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Zoe Gardner is an independent immigration expert.

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