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Immigration regime after Brexit ‘risks new Windrush scandal’

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Author: Peter Walker

The government’s post-Brexit immigration system would cost employers more than £1bn in administration costs over five years, harm the higher education sector by putting off EU students and risk a new Windrush scandal, according to an analysis of the plans.

The report by Global Future, a thinktank that supports more open immigration, says the NHS would also face almost £120m a year in additional costs to recruit overseas staff under the system laid out in the immigration white paper.

The long-delayed plan imposes the same £30,000-a-year minimum salary threshold for EU citizens looking to work in the UK that already applies to those outside the bloc, as well as various visa fees and other charges.

Using Home Office modelling for the number of people expected to apply for visas of different lengths, and a calculated average cost to employers of almost £12,500 per EU national, the study comes to a five-year total of £1.14bn, with £337m faced by the public sector.

The study separately estimates the cost to the NHS by using figures for the likely number of EU workers needed under the service’s long-term plan and fees and other charges they would incur. This would, it said, total £118m a year.

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It also says the £30,000 threshold could eventually leave as many as 100,000 jobs social care and nursing jobs unfilled and cause difficulty in many other sectors.

Students from the EU who decide to base themselves in the UK would incur visa and health surcharge costs of almost £1,300 over a three-year degree, the thinktank says, making a total of £80m a year across the sector as a whole.

The report also says that in requiring people based in the UK under freedom of movement to suddenly prove their status, the scheme risks mirroring the Windrush scandal, in which UK nationals of Caribbean origin who had been in the UK for decades were denied rights or even deported because of a lack of documentation.

This could happen again through a lack of awareness, Home Office errors and technicalities such as people having spent time out of the UK.

Fergus Peace, a researcher at Global Future, who wrote the report, said the white paper “represents an unambiguous shift towards a more complex and burdensome immigration system that will damage our country’s prospects”.

“The government presents ending free movement as the great prize at the centre of its Brexit strategy, but ultimately this white paper is a plan to close ourselves off from the world. That’s not something to celebrate. It’s a dreadful mistake.,” he said.

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Source:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/11/immigration-regime-after-brexit-risks-new-windrush-scandal

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