Legal migration white paper “delayed”

For a brief moment, we were gearing up for the Home Office’s legal migration white paper to appear this week. The Sunday Times had heard that it would arrive before the pre-election period – that time the government and civil service agrees to dial down politically sensitive policy announcements, formerly known as “purdah” – in the run-up to local and mayoral elections on 1 May. This would have meant getting it out the door by Thursday.

Anyway, this does not now appear to be happening. The Times instead reports that it will be after the elections, in part due to turmoil around the Trump administration tariffs, but also because of:

…disagreement between Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, and Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, over attempts to introduce further restrictions on overseas students.

For fans of inter-department horse-trading, we also get:

A senior government source in a separate department predicted the Home Office would prevail because of the prime minister’s determination to oversee a “sharp decline” in net migration but defended the delay, insisting it was “a fine balance” and the government was “refining the details”.

The article also functions as a useful round-up of the measures affecting international students that the government is said to be considering. We looked over plans for enhanced checks on students’ bank balances as part of coverage last week of asylum claims – the other proposal that gets an airing is this thing about “forcing graduates to leave the UK unless they get a graduate level job.”

As I went over the last time this proposal got trotted out, despite its billing (and the nerves this has engendered) this appears unlikely to relate to the Graduate route. Rather, it would seem to be an attempt to damp down the number of Graduate route visa holders who are able to move onto Skilled Worker visas, by fiddling about with salary thresholds and potentially occupational codes.

It’s worth having a quick think about how exactly this could work. Currently eligibility for the Skilled Worker route depends on factors including salary, which needs to be at least £38,700 but can be much higher for certain roles, depending on what the average pay is in a given field.

This is unlikely to change dramatically – but there are various “discounts” available, depending on the field you work in, the “new entrant” discount (including for Student or Graduate visa holders, and/or for those under 26), for holders of relevant PhDs, and for certain postdocs.

For the Graduate route specifically, it’s worth remembering that the “new entrant” discount does not apply in perpetuity – there’s currently a limit on total stay in the UK at four years. This might be something to keep an eye on, along with restrictions on the ability for migrants to move into health and social care roles, which looks fairly likely. Indeed, the Home Office has already slipped out quite sizeable changes to how care sponsorship will work, coming into effect from Wednesday.

Whatever ends up being the case, we now won’t get confirmation until early May, shortly before the publication of annual net migration statistics for 2024 (which will show a large fall from 2023, by the way).

What’s also missing from the leaks to the papers – predictably – is anything around pro-international student policy measures. But we know that the Office for National Statistics is hoping “in early May” to say something about “an alternative measure of net international migration which excludes students” – in some form, though it has largely ruled out making this change in official statistics. There’s also the question of the government’s updated international education strategy, which there has been no word of for a few months.

Elsewhere in the press today there is gossip that the Migration Advisory Committee could fall foul of the “bonfire of the quangos” – an exceedingly unlikely turn of events, surely, given how prominently it has featured in promises around skills, work, and industrial strategy – or that its remit could be widened to take on functions of other culled arm’s-length bodies.