Nigerian care workers coming to the UK set to be hit hard by new clampdown on immigration

NIGERIAN social care workers coming to the UK are set to be hit hard by new Draconian measures just introduced by the British government aimed at curtailing immigration which involve banning their families from joining them.

In a severe clampdown, British home secretary James Cleverly has responded to pressure from his Conservative Party backbenchers who are angry about the latest thwarting of the Rwanda deportation scheme in the courts and net migration hitting 745,000 last year. He has thus introduced a new five-point plan to cut immigration which includes banning care workers from bringing over their families and raising the minimum salary for a skilled worker visa.

Under the far-reaching plans, overseas care workers will not be able to bring family dependants to the UK and care firms that want to sponsor people for visa applications will be regulated by the Care Quality Commission. In addition, the threshold for an application will rise by nearly 50% from £26,200 to £38,700.

Also, the government plans to scrap cut-price shortage labour from overseas by reforming the way people working in short-staffed sectors can apply to come to the UK. This will include axing the 20% discount applied to the minimum salary for people looking for a visa for shortage occupations and the types of jobs on the list will also be reviewed and reduced.

In addition, the minimum threshold for a family visa will also be raised to £38,700 to ensure people only bring dependants whom they can support financially. Currently, it stands at the 2012 rate of £18,600.

With regards to student visas, the government will ask the Migration Advisory Committee to review the graduate route to prevent abuse and protect the integrity and quality of UK higher education. Barely three weeks into the job, Mr Cleverly has seen his polling among Conservative members plummet as he faces pressure over legal and illegal migration.

This latest clamp down is seen as a win for the immigration minister Robert Jenrick, who is understood to have been pushing for a more hardline approach. Discomfort in the Conservative Party has been palpable after the net migration figure for 2022 was revised up to 745,000 last month.

In 2019, the Conservative Party manifesto pledged to bring down net migration, with the then prime minister Boris Johnson talking about cutting the number to 250,000 a year. According to Mr Cleverly, with this new package on top of recent plans to reduce student dependents, more than 300,000 people who came to the UK last year would now not be able to.

Mr Cleverly also re-announced plans to raise the increase of the immigration health surcharge from £624 to £1,035.  He added: "When our country voted to leave the European Union, we voted to take back control of our borders.

"Thanks to this Conservative government, we now have a points-based immigration system through which we control who comes to the UK. We prioritise the skills and talent we need to grow our economy and support our NHS and we have a competitive visa system for globally-mobile talent."