What can labour do about immigration?

[CrispyEye]

Current poles showing Reform is way ahead of labour now. I’m so worried Reform will win the next general election if Labour don’t get a grip on this issue. And I say that as a Tory voter.

Realistically, what can Labour do, what should they be doing and do we think they will do it?

Correct, although I'm not sure how that's relevant to immigration.

Everyone knows that immigration doesn’t cause those things. Everyone knows that immigration exacerbates those things, as immigrants are a financial net drain on society.
The top one per cent pay 30 per cent of all income tax revenues.

Immigration is going to become more and more of an issue in coming years. And one thing about Reform is that they have a clean slate, Labour can't say "look at what they did last time" and neither can the Tories.

YANBU that Labour can fix it, YABU to worry that it will lead to a far right government. Reform will crash and burn soon enough, I doubt they will ever be in a position where they can challenge for power. At best they might challenge the Lib Dems and SNP for third place and hope to get into a coalition.

Even if they did take power outright their support will quickly fade once people realise how terrible they are. Half their support will be appalled by the reality of deporting everyone who has migrated into this country since WWII and their descendants, and the other half will accept nothing less than that happening. So either way they'll destroy their own base and be unelectable in future.

I'm not sure how feasible it is to even deport so many people. One, where do you send them if they won't go voluntarily? A lot of them have British citizenship and nothing else. Other countries don't have to accept them and it's not as if Britain has an Empire where people can be forcibly deported to. If you can't deport them, what then - lock them up in concentration camps? It would be seriously unlikely that other countries would just sit by and let that happen. Even if there was no military intervention there would certainly be sanctions, and I doubt most Reform voters have the stomach to endure the kind of privations the North Korean public has suffered over the last few decades.

Two, how do you determine who is "British enough" to remain? Do we have a US-style "one drop" rule whereby anyone with any trace of foreign blood is removed? If someone has one great-grandparent who was an immigrant, but their other great-grandparents were British, do you remove them?

These questions and points may sound ludicrous or even offensive, but these are the realities of implementing the far-right policies that most (not all) Reform voters want. The point is, the practicalities haven't been thought through - or if they have, they've not been explained yet.

Someone will undoubtedly claim that Reform don't actually intend to do these things but that in itself would be another reason Reform are doomed - a lot of their supporters expect and demand it, and will move to a party further to the right if Reform don't meet their expectations.

That is a separate issue. The fact is we have enough of our own to support without adding hundreds/thousands more who are a net drain.

Don’t forget the large extended families that follow. Children need school places. Many hundreds of thousands of lifetime cost to NHS, especially for sick and elderly relatives who have never contributed anything to the system. They are also many times over likely to use social housing.
The left finds all these facts really inconvenient. It’s always tax the rich. The same rich who are leaving in their tens of thousands each year because they can. What they mean is tax everyone but them because their virtue signalling and moral indignation is about as much contribution that they are prepared to make.

Immigration may not cause this entirely but definitely exacerbates it.

The rich are already paying a lot. Wealth is different to income.

The rich can choose to leave if they are poked enough.

There is no doubt in my mind that Reform will get in next time.
Tories are toast, and I think Labour are going to waste their chance to cut immigration numbers down to explainable numbers, like ‘40k NHs workers, 30k care workers, 30k IT specialists, 100k various building trades, 100k miscellaneous and family’.
They won’t even put a hard numerical number on visas.
If they just said ‘This will take a while to sort out, in the meantime 200k visas will be issued + unlimited NHS/care workers until we get a grip on it’. At least that can be sold easily to the public and is an easily defensible policy.

Lol where have you even got the idea that Reform wasn't to deport British citizens who aren't white? And there is no evidence Reform voters want to do that either. And some people have the cheek to say Reform voters are uneducated and ill informed. They HAVE said they'll deport legals which is perfectly possible as bad orange man has proved (and Pakistan had deported 100,000 Afghans this year alone but don't think they pay taxpayers money to even failed asylum seekers as we do!). https://www.gov.uk/asylum-support/what-youll-get

I think you have a very short memory.

Stop pretending there is not a problem - particularly with low skilled, single men.

Automatically deport any immigrant who commits a crime that carries a prison sentence of 5 years or more. Ignore arguments that they are an essential role model for their nephews.

Divert government funds to the areas most impacted by low skilled migration to mitigate the impact on schools, housing and health care.

Build more affordable homes. We need the equivalent of six cities the size of Leeds.

more people have been returned by the labour government in 9 months or so than the Conservatives managed in years

Really?
There were 29,551 returns for the year ending June 2024 under the Conservatives - Labour have only announced 24,103 returns thus far.

With regards to asylum seekers:

In the year ending June 2024 [Conservatives] there were 7,698 asylum-related returns

Of the total returns since 5 July 2024 [Labour] 6,781 were asylum related returns [to 22 March 2025]

Regarding small boat arrivals:

In the 12 months to June 2024 [Conservatives] 31,493 people arrived by small boats

More than 30,000 migrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats since Sir Keir Starmer became Prime Minister [9 months]

Everyone knows that immigration doesn’t cause those things. Everyone knows that immigration exacerbates those things, as immigrants are a financial net drain on society.
Clearly everyone doesn't or everyone'd be lobbying for something that might actually improve their life opportunities. What happens when immigration is reduced and they're still poor, will they go after the elderly next because they're the biggest 'drain' on society
The top one per cent pay 30 per cent of all income tax revenues.
The rich have tax-efficient wealth not income: income and those who work for a living are heavily taxed; wealth doesn't requires effort or attract tax. That needs to change - but politicians aren't going to inconvenience their benefactors so they'll just keep distracting the electorate with asylum seekers and immigrants and people on benefits while the rich keep stuffing their pockets.

@Watermelonice Meanwhile there are people who genuinely need the benefits as they cannot work or are full time carers, nurses and teachers are being made redundant etc. Plus, many people are simply cannot make a GP appointment due to the lack of funding in GP surgeries which means there aren’t enough doctors.

I doubt that all these asylum seekers that you spoke of are getting homes and benefits, many are working and don’t receive minimum wage. Just because you might come across a few asylum seekers who aren’t keen to work for whatever reason, that doesn’t mean that they’re all the same. Perhaps there should be more focus on skilled migration to attract talent, and the Tories clearly have dropped the ball for over a decade.

This in spades. It’s like the fear-mongering that if you tax the rich more, they’ll simply leave. It’s almost as though it’s a way to keep the masses fixated on certain things and to vote against their best interests.

@WooleyMunky
Immigration is the single issue dog whistle that they will push the media and moron electorate to focus on.
The real issues that people care about are bins, and potholes/parking.

To be fair to Reform, they have focused heavily on bin collection, potholes and parking charges as well. Your ill-informed assumptions underestimate Reform's appeal - and I say this as a Conservative supporter who intends to vote Conservative.

@MidnightPatrol - I really don't. Farage created it in his own image & mugs fell for it. The history of Euroscepticism in this country has nothing to do with immigration.

Maybe not all but a significant proportion. Believe me we all notice it and discuss it regularly.

They seem to know what to say to get what they want

Although tents have clearly been used in other European countries to house asylum seekers and refugees in recent years:

https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/61329/video-frustration-grows-at-germanys-largest-refugee-shelter
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/12/tents-in-the-snow-new-emergency-refugee-housing-in-nl/
https://gript.ie/tents-to-become-primary-accommodation-for-ukrainian-asylum-seekers/
https://www.voanews.com/a/austria-largest-refugee-camp-readies-for-winter/2987042.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/12047281/Migrant-crisis-inside-Swedens-first-tent-city.html

The UK is at least as thick and self-serving as the US electorate, if not more so
@WooleyMunky
Noooooooo, we can't be as dumb as them ding-a-lings, surely😱

Reading about the Iranian today re the recent terrorism arrests this is the issue Labour won’t resolve, despite their attempts with many immigration headlines.

I don't understand why Labour is obstinate about immigration. They know it's an issue that is costing them votes, so why the hesitancy to do anything about it?

Maybe because many Labour voters associate these policies with extreme right wing political parties and they don't want to loose those voters!

Traditionally left wing parties were pro welfare state and tight boarder controls / low migration because you can’t redistribute wealth and lift your poorest out of poverty with open borders.

By contrast, right wing free market capitalists were pro immigration.

This is why Labour was against joining the EEC in the 60s/70s while the Tories took Britain into the EEC without a referendum.

Sadly, neither Labour nor the Tories will have the courage to challenge Reform's narrative on immigration.

Instead, they will each try to compete with Reform by showing how "tough on immigration" they can be. In doing so, they will simply reinforce Reform's central (and fallacious) argument that immigration is at the root of all of our problems. This is likely to propel Reform to even greater success in the polls, because no mainstream political party is ever going to be able to compete with a far right party with regard to their deployment of anti-immigrant rhetoric. It is a strategy that is doomed to fail.

Both Labour and the Tories would do so much better if only they were courageous enough to make the case for a different approach and an alternative vision for the future of the country. Sadly, they don't seem to willing to risk it. I guess that they're afraid of being crucified by the right wing media and misrepresented on social media etc. And they know that people tend to prefer simplistic solutions to complex problems even if they don't work, rather than having to engage with ideas that are a bit more challenging to understand. Or maybe they are just out of ideas.

I just wish that they would at least try. All of these attempts to out-Reform Reform are so pointless, because they merely serve to further shore up Reform's support.

It's a depressing state of affairs that doesn't bode well for the future of our country at all.