The proposed “Australian-style” points system to reduce immigration has been criticised for failing to understand how vital low and medium-skilled jobs are to the UK economy and for giving a false impression to voters of radical change. The scheme would separate future immigrants into three tiers with entry for exceptional and talented people, skilled workers with a job offer, and unskilled for short-term schemes.
He said “Australian-style” was a phrase that performed well in focus groups, which is why Labour’s then immigration minister, Liam Byrne, chose to use it as far back as 2007, because it implies regulation and control.
Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics at King’s College London and senior fellow at the research group ‘UK in a Changing Europe’, said: “It’s not radical. Most likely it will not look that different from what we have now.”
“There’s a damaging misconception in this debate that there’s a binary divide between the brain surgeons and the people who pick strawberries – most ordinary immigrants are somewhere in between. Doing jobs that require skills but aren’t necessarily highly skilled, and they would not pass this particular test. Butchers, for example, or people who work in abattoirs – this is hard work and you need training. Most come from eastern Europe but are unlikely to make the highly skilled cut.”
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