Category: Ruth Grove-White

Migrants’ Rights Network: David Cameron’s EU migration speech – what impact on migrants’ rights?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Ruth Grove-White*

Today’s (28.11) speech from the Prime Minister has made a pitch for a new tough approach on EU migrant access to welfare, but it has taken us further away from the evidence-based debate on immigration that we need.

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David Cameron’s speech on EU migration, delivered earlier Friday, was as hotly awaited as any political speech in recent months. In the wake of two recent UKIP wins in by-elections and in the run-up to the May 2015 General Election, the Conservatives were widely expected to punch back with a bold statement which laid out what a Tory government would push for in terms of EU immigration reform.

In the event the speech was a clever piece of political positioning. The PM rejected the temptation to introduce the more lurid proposals hoped for by some Conservative Euro-sceptic backbenchers, such as emergency brakes on EU migration and caps on numbers. Instead he chose a relatively measured tone which aimed his pitch to the public straight down into the centre-ground, and was at pains to reject an overtly anti-immigration stance. This was a call for the continuation of EU free movement but with ‘tough approach to welfare’ – in other words, a UK within which EU migrants can still come here, but have their eligibility for state support significantly scaled-back.

As such Cameron has received plaudits for having apparently made a legitimate attempt to address concerns firmly planted in the public mind about EU migration and access to welfare. Elements of his pitch have been openly supported by organisations ranging from Labour, the Lib Dems and a number of thinktanks. But there has seemed to be little enthusiasm for defending the principle of welfare entitlement for EU migrant workers on the grounds of basic fairness…

For our part, MRN has a number of objections to the content of Cameron’s speech – here are three of them:

1. It does nothing to move us towards a more evidence-based and fair immigration debate

Yes, the tone of this speech was measured, but its implications were not. By putting EU migrant access to benefits at the heart of his speech Cameron has given credence to one of the biggest myths about EU migration – that there is a significant take-up of welfare benefits by this group of workers.

All the statistics show otherwise. We know that less than 10% of all EU migrants claim any kind of welfare, which includes in-work benefits for those working in low-wage jobs. EU migrants contribute £20 billion more in taxes than they take out in any kind of welfare or social security. According to Open Europe, as of February 2014, only 2.5% of total unemployment benefits claimants were EU migrants. Government data for 2013 suggests that only 6.4% of workers claiming tax credits in the UK are from the EU. And just four per cent of new social housing lettings in England in 2012-13 were to people from the European Union – almost all went to people who have been here for five years or longer. The evidence all points in the same direction, but the message sent out to the public today has been the opposite.

The truth is that we have to put this down as yet another missed opportunity to reframe the public conversation about EU migration and advance proposals which could allay fears and point to a more positive engagement with the issue. We needed to hear more about how, if some EU migration creates pressures in certain areas or on certain services, they could be tackled. How could local public service providers or authorities better support local integration? Why are so many EU migrants stuck in low-paid work that British people don’t want to do? Cameron made a brief and welcome acknowledgement that more resources would be needed in these areas, but otherwise allowed his proposals to centre on the more hyped area of welfare support.

2. These policies would create a cohort of workers on poverty wages

A centrepiece of this speech was the proposal to cut in-work benefits, with the claim that this will deter EU migrant workers from coming to the UK in the future. Maybe some will be put off coming, but there are real grounds for concern that a ‘crackdown’ on EU migrant benefits will also create a new cohort of vulnerable workers in the UK. These workers will be able to come and do the lowest-paid jobs in sectors with very little regulation, whilst paying their taxes but with no safety net of welfare support whatsoever.

Many EU migrants are coming here do low-paid but vital jobs like looking after our sick and elderly in care homes. Cutting protections for those in low-wage work would tip them into vulnerability, forcing them to live on incomes between 30% and 60% less than their British counterparts. There would be no complaint from exploitative employers who would find they now have an EU migrant workforce which is desperate to work long hours and accept all manner of ill-treatment if it will help them to make a liveable wage. Instead of accepting this proposal, we should be demanding that the Government introduce wages for all workers at the bottom end of the labour market which are adequate to live on, rather than requiring a top-up from the welfare system in order to make them decent.

3. This speech will do little to solve the public’s disquiet about immigration.

It seems unlikely that Cameron’s speech will do anything to ease public concerns about immigration. We know that there is no magic bullet on this issue, particularly because of its embeddedness in wider issues relating to the economy, education, housing and welfare. But today is a reminder that immigration is, as ever, vulnerable to being held hostage to politics. Short-term promises and pledges – such as today’s suggestion that EU migration can be substantially reduced as a result of these reforms – will in the end do little to build confidence if there is no real delivery. And we think it unlikely that today’s proposals would substantially reduce EU migration for the simple reason that EU migrants do not come to the UK to claim benefits.

Instead, we expect that the main outcome of this speech will be to build the pressure around today’s whipping boy – EU migrants – while continuing to deflect attention from the wide range of policies which are embedding social injustice and inequality across our society. It might be that for the time being Mr Cameron has won a point or two, but with real problems stacking up now and into the foreseeable future around the position of vulnerable migrants, we see no reason for anyone else to celebrate it.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

*Ruth Grove-White is MRN’s Policy Director, responsible for developing the network’s responses to Government policy and legislation, leading on MRN parliamentary work and supporting the Director in representing the organization.

Migrants’ Rights Network: £18,600 income requirement – pricing UK workers out of a family life

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Ruth Grove-White*

New research by MRN shows the uneven impacts of the minimum income requirement across the UK, and calls for change towards a fairer system for family migration.

A few weeks ago, we were contacted by a lady called Margaret, who lives in South Wales. Margaret has worked for the past decade as a legal secretary for a private solicitors firm, earning £13,500 a year. However, her salary is not considered adequate in order to sponsor her Tunisian husband to enter the UK, and so they are living apart for the foreseeable future.

In Margaret’s view, the rules are unfair. She is in stable employment, lives with family so has no housing costs and has low outgoings as the cost of living in her area is low. Margaret says

I’m doing a respectable job, but am now being told that my salary is not enough. It’s just so difficult to find work at £18,600 in my area. It doesn’t make sense because we could both live with my parents when he comes here, and Mohammed wants to work, and pay taxes, too. But if I leave and go to Tunisia, we will never be able to come back together. In the meantime, we are kept apart and are unable to start the family that we planned to have together.

Margaret is not the only person whose earnings are too low to meet the rules and be with her husband. 47% of the working population are reportedly unable to sponsor a loved one, on the basis of their earnings. Because £18,600 is considerably higher than the national minimum wage (approximately £13,200 per annum at a full time rate), some people, like Margaret, are in full-time employment and still fail to meet the rules.

But, crucially, where you live and work in the UK is a significant determiner of your ability to live with a foreign partner. New research by MRN, released today, shows that being able to live with your non-EU spouse is now essentially subject to a postcode lottery.

The research reviews Office of National Statistics earnings data for employees across the 632 parliamentary constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. It finds that, in 74 British parliamentary constituencies, less than 50% of employees have a gross annual income at or above £18,600 per annum. That means that more than half of workers living in these areas are effectively priced out of having a family life with a non-EU national.

family-migration

 

Workers in parts of the North West and South West of England, as well as across Wales, are particularly likely to be affected due to lower than average earnings in those areas. By contrast, the ten parliamentary constituencies with the highest average earnings are all based in London. Someone living and working in Putney, in London, is effectively more than twice as likely to be able to meet the rules than a worker residing in Blackpool South.

Since July 2012, a number of MPs have raised the issue of the regional disadvantage felt by some trying to meet the family migration rules. The Government has resisted calls for a regionally varied income requirement, and largely refused to acknowledge the uneven impacts of the rules across the UK.  But surely the solution is for the Government to reduce the income requirement to a level that can be realistically reached by workers across the UK – with the level of the National Minimum Wage seeming like a sensible place to start. In addition, widening the income sources that can be used to meet the rules would allow families to reflect the full range of resources available to them in their applications.

Currently, many of the families affected by the rules are anxiously awaiting the Court of Appeal judgement on the MM & Ors legal challenge. This is an important case, but we understand that any outcome from the legal challenges, even in the best case scenario, is unlikely to be felt before the next general election.

In the meantime, the mounting evidence that the bar for family migration is prohibitively high needs to reach a wider set of parliamentarians who are more generally disturbed about the widespread disadvantages faced by the UK’s lower-income workers. It is critical that this wider group of MPs and peers, and other potentially supportive stakeholders, are drawn into the public debate about these rules.

Over the coming month, as we build up to the second anniversary of the family migration rules and the Court of Appeal judgement is issued, there will be renewed attention on this issue. If you are interested in campaigning, please put 9th July 2014 in your diary as there will be a parliamentary meeting from 10 – 11.30am in Westminster – you can sign up for that here. In addition, there will be lobbying and campaigning activities organised by MRN, JCWI and Britcits, and others across the Divided Families campaign.

Let’s work together to make the case for political change on this critical campaign.

  • To download the report click here [PDF].

  • MRN has sent copies of the report to the MPs of the 74 constituencies listed in the report. We would encourage all who wish to, to take the opportunity to write again to your local MP, enclosing a copy of the report. Please click here for a template letter. We strongly advise that you adapt the letter according to your personal circumstances – and please do let us know if you get a response.

  • Sign up to receive updates from MRN by registering on the We are Family website here.

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This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

*Ruth Grove-White is MRN’s Policy Director, responsible for developing the network’s responses to Government policy and legislation, leading on MRN parliamentary work and supporting the Director in representing the organization.

 

Migrant Rights’ Network: Campaign for the Right to Family life – next steps

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Ruth Grove-White

Those affected and campaigning against the new rules on family migration will know that we are fast-approaching their 1-year anniversary on 9 July. Over the next couple of months there is plenty that you will be able to do to raise awareness and ask the Government to think again.

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During the year since the Government announced its changes to the family migration rules, MRN has heard from hundreds of families who have been kept apart from one another – couples split across continents, young children separated from parents, elderly relatives kept apart from relatives who wish to care for them in the UK.

There has been plenty of coverage of the heartache caused by these changes in the media, highlighted in papers including the Evening Standard (here and here), the Telegraph, and Independent.

So what can be done now?

Here’s a heads-up on some of the opportunities over the coming months to make your voices heard:

  • Launch of the APPG Family Migration inquiry report on 10th June – the final report of the APPG family migration inquiry will be available for download from the APPG website from 10 June. As an informal inquiry this report will not carry the weight of a Select Committee report. However it will provide an important evidence base to build further scrutiny of the rules.

  • Parliamentary debates on family migration, June/July – as a result of widespread concerns among parliamentarians about these rules, there are now plans to debate the rules on the floor of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords over the next two months. As soon as we know the dates for those debates, we will let groups and affected families know how to feed in.

  • Divided Families Day on 9th July – the most important way of supporting parliamentarians who want to debate these rules is to show that there is a groundswell of concern from many corners. MRN, JCWI, BritCits, the Family Immigration Alliance and many others will be working together over the coming weeks to organise a series of activities around Parliament from 4pm on 9th July. All details will be circulated nearer the time, but the date should be put in your diary now! Activities will include:

    • Demonstration outside the Home Office – 4pm
    • Meet your MP session
    • Public parliamentary meeting with high profile speakers – 6pm

Keep a close eye on the MRN website, as well as those of other groups involved in campaigning on this issue, for further information on how you can get involved and show Government that it needs to think again.

EXPLORE MORE

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This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Viral migrant-bashing

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: This blog entry by Ruth Grove-White of the Migrants’ Rights Network, reminds me of the same arguments that anti-immigration groups use in Finland.  

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By Ruth Grove-White

Chain emails spreading misinformation about migrants have been circulating far and wide – so what’s the secret of their long-life and how can we respond?

I was contacted this week by someone who had had a nasty chain message about pensioners, migrants and the benefits system posted on his Facebook wall. This was a viral message which we have heard about before as it, or a version of it, has been circulating over the past few years. The text he received read like this:

Dear Prime Minister The RT. Hon. David Cameron, MP.

I wish to ask you a Question:- “Is This True?”. I refer to the Pension Reality Check. Are you aware of the following?

The British Government provides the following financial assistance:-

BRITISH OLD AGED PENSIONER
(bearing in mind they worked hard and paid their Income Tax and National Insurance contributions to the British Government all their working life)
Weekly allowance: £106.00?
IMMIGRANTS/REFUGEES LIVING IN BRITAIN
(No Income Tax and National Insurance contribution whatsoever)
Weekly allowance: £250.00

BRITISH OLD AGED PENSIONER
Weekly Spouse Allowance: £25.00?
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS/REFUGEES LIVING IN BRITAIN
Weekly Spouse Allowance: £225.00

BRITISH OLD AGED PENSIONER
Additional Weekly Hardship Allowance: £0.00?
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS/REFUGEES LIVING IN BRITAIN
Additional Weekly Hardship Allowance: £100.00

A British old age pensioner is no less hard up than an illegal immigrant/refugee yet receives nothing

BRITISH OLD AGED PENSIONER
TOTAL YEARLY BENEFIT £6,000?
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS/REFUGEES LIVING IN BRITAIN
TOTAL YEARLY BENEFIT: £29,900

Please read all and then forward to all your contacts so that we can lobby for a decent state pension. After all, the average pensioner has paid taxes and contributed to the growth of this country for the last 40 to 60 years.  Sad isn’t it? Surely it’s about time we put our own people first.

Please share this, I JUST DID!

Familiar?

So how much of the information about migrants in this message is based on facts? Unsurprisingly, the answer is very little. Most migrants pay taxes if they are in employment like anyone else. Overall,analysis suggests that migrants make a small positive contribution to the UK economy and in particular to key growth sectors like healthcare, education, financial services and many more.

Refugees have the same right to access benefits and to work in the UK as a British citizen – no more and no less. Irregular migrants do not have the right to work in the UK and have no right to access benefits – but it is thought that many end up paying tax and NI as their ability to work depends on use of false National Insurance cards.

Both the ‘Weekly Spouse Allowance’ of £225 and the ‘Weekly Hardship Allowance’ that ‘illegal immigrants and refugees’ receive according to this email seem to be works of fiction.

Despite containing such confused information, this email, or a version of it, has been widely shared across the internet – so much so that it was the subject of a Parliamentary briefing paper in April this year. According to this, the email has a long and chequered history:

The House of Commons Library first became aware of the email in early 2010 but it has a much longer pedigree. It contains text from a protest email which has been circulating in Australia for some time now, but which may have originated in Canada. Versions also circulate in the United States, and elements even appear in protest emails as far afield as India. The UK version has been adapted, somewhat crudely, for a domestic audience by someone or some organisation unknown. The figures quoted bear no relation whatsoever to the situation in the United Kingdom.

Given this background, it seems that it is the sentiment behind the message that keeps it in circulation rather than accurate facts. This message pits one group experiencing hardship (pensioners) against another (refugees and migrants), suggesting that compassionate policies for these groups operate according to the rules of a zero sum game. As one benefits, the other suffers. True? No. But it seems to be intuitively persuasive, and especially at a time when austerity measures mean that there is a widespread sense of unfairness among people who are feeling the pinch of conracting state support. Pensioners are undoubtedly facing serious challenges at the moment, facing cuts to tax allowances and other benefits. It is right to raise awareness of their plight – but not at the expense of other vulnerable groups.

If you receive emails of this sort, please take the time to set the sender straight about some of the facts – and to point out that this approach will never have the effect of building compassion and understanding but instead encourages the opposite.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: The battle on family migration will be a long one, but we can win

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By Ruth Grove-White

Every now and again there are changes to the immigration rules which even writers for the Daily Mail voice their objections to. The new rules on family migration to the UK, which came into force on Monday, represent a major assault on family life for Brits and migrants alike. Campaigners now need to work on bringing political opposition to the rules out from behind closed doors.

Monday’s changes to the family migration rules are significant: the UK now ranks among the toughest of Western democracies on family reunification policies.

Among other changes, the government has introduced a new income requirement of £18,600 per year for people who wish to bring a foreign partner to live with them in the UK. This means an estimated 47% of the UK working population would not qualify to bring their overseas spouse or partner here in the future.

The Home Office estimates up to 18,500 people every year will be prevented from coming to join family members here as a result. This may be helpful in inching the government towards lower net migration levels, but will be devastating for the families who are kept apart as a result.

Although the family migration changes have been politically controversial, much opposition has been confined to back rooms in Whitehall rather than aired in public. Press reports earlier this year hinted at internal battles between Lib Dems and Conservatives on family migration, with children and families minister Sarah Teather rumoured to be particularly resistant to tough rule changes.

Although these issues were officially resolved, behind closed doors there is reportedly still opposition among some Lib Dem MPs to the new rules.

Labour has also found itself in a tangled position over the family migration changes. Despite vocal opposition to the family rules among key players such as front bencher Kate Green MP and home affairs committee chair Keith Vaz MP, the Labour front bench has not yet expressed a clear position against these rules.

Still in the midst of a policy review, there has seemingly been reluctance to wade into a debate that could result in Labour once again being painted as soft on immigration. But never say never. What is certain is that the fight for family rights will continue and it has the scope to build political support.

Now that the family migration rules have come into force there will be growing evidence about their negative impacts, with particular problems anticipated for young couples, Asian families, and in parts of the UK with low average incomes.

Families who are affected can help to overturn these rules in the future by writing to their MPs, joining campaigns and building solidarity with others who are affected.

If the evidence can be amassed, Monday’s changes potentially offer up a future political opportunity: to speak out on an immigration issue that will affect thousands of Brits as well as migrants in the UK. And as the next general election draws nearer we hope to see quiet support develop into concerted political leadership, that points the UK in a different direction on family migration.

This article first appeared on the Left Foot Forward website on 11th July 2012.

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This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.