{"id":146,"date":"2016-10-06T17:09:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T16:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/?p=146"},"modified":"2016-10-06T17:09:23","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T16:09:23","slug":"amber-rudds-speech-monitoring-after-brexit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/2016\/10\/06\/amber-rudds-speech-monitoring-after-brexit\/","title":{"rendered":"Amber Rudd\u2019s Speech: Monitoring After Brexit?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.spectator.co.uk\/2016\/10\/full-text-amber-rudds-conference-speech\/\">speech by Amber Rudd<\/a>, the Home Secretary, was arguably the most policy-heavy presentation at the Conservative Party Conference. It also made a strong claim to be the most controversial, so it is hardly surprising that it provoked a vigorous response from some quarters.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">We seem to have woken up with a UKIP government. Depressing doesn&#39;t even begin to cover it. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/O8DYc6smdE\">pic.twitter.com\/O8DYc6smdE<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/NicolaSturgeon\/status\/783570201858207745\">October 5, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The main focus of ire was Rudd\u2019s proposal \u2013 offered in post-speech briefing notes, rather than in her address itself \u2013 that\u00a0companies &#8220;be clear about the proportion of their workforce which is international\u201d.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">FT Alphaville fesses up to its foreign workers <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/fFE00iMloj\">https:\/\/t.co\/fFE00iMloj<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/lovetheFT?src=hash\">#lovetheFT<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/3vXtxhk2aU\">pic.twitter.com\/3vXtxhk2aU<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Federica Cocco (@federicacocco) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/federicacocco\/status\/783600836823937024\">October 5, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>As the storm exploded, Rudd <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politicshome.com\/news\/uk\/political-parties\/conservative-party\/news\/79591\/amber-rudd-signals-climbdown-controversial\">began to backtrack<\/a>. But, while she argued\u00a0that her\u00a0proposal to \u201cname and shame\u201d businesses was just an idea, she\u00a0continued to\u00a0defend the meat of her address. This included a whole raft of proposals:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a new aim to reduce international student numbers based on the possibility of different rules for students in different courses or universities based on their judged quality<\/li>\n<li>tightening the Resident Labour Market Test<\/li>\n<li>requiring businesses to invest more in training British workers<\/li>\n<li>making it a felony for landlords to rent property to \u201cillegal immigrants\u201d (which they already must check they are not doing)<\/li>\n<li>requiring banks to perform regular checks that they are not providing services to such individuals.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Such policies would represent significant increases in the \u201coutsourcing\u201d of monitoring duties by the Home Office to other sectors and organisations \u2013 businesses, universities, landlords, and banks. This has been\u00a0an unmistakable trend in British migration policy since the elevation of \u201csponsorship\u201d to new levels of importance in the immigration system upon the introduction of the Points Based System in 2008.<\/p>\n<p>With the post-2010 drive to lower net migration numbers, the Home Office has forced the evolution of these visa \u201csponsorship\u201d relationships into ones where organisations are bound to monitor migrants to see that they are doing what they allegedly supposed to do \u2013 that student visa holders are actually attending class, that labour migrants are actually on the job, etc. This has been accompanied by another category of increasing onerousness, where the Home Office has gradually eroded the ability of many non-EU immigrants (especially students) to switch between visa categories and put up greater administrative barriers (raising requirements and visa fees) to come to or stay in the UK.<\/p>\n<p>Rudd\u2019s proposals are then, in many senses, fundamentally familiar \u2013 a rerun of what is by now a well-worn playbook. Familiar, too, is her rhetorical devotion to the benefits of allowing in the \u201cbest and brightest.\u201d Indeed, in her time as Home Secretary, one of Theresa May\u2019s crucial political moves was to ring-fence intra-company transfers, other sponsored \u201chigh-skill\u201d migration, and the ability of reputable universities to sponsor international students.<\/p>\n<p>These accommodations have allowed these powerful constituencies to live with developments they find uncomfortable, with the bulk of\u00a0policy changes affecting\u00a0family migrants, the lower-skilled, and higher educational institutions lower on the perceived pecking order. Again, Rudd\u2019s plans \u2013 subject, as she emphasises, to \u201cconsultation\u201d \u2013 seem to be an extension of these patterns.<\/p>\n<p>So, if this \u201coutsourcing\u201d is just a continuation of existing patterns, why have Rudd\u2019s announcements been received in some quarters as the foretelling of a dark new era?<\/p>\n<p>Brexit has brought forward the possibility of EU migrants falling under such policy changes, which up to now have affected only non-EU migrants. Including Europeans under such a regime would make migration to the UK fundamentally more rigid and would impose much more extensive monitoring duties on institutions that have, up to now, only had to adopt such roles in relation to non-EU migrants.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the government has not exactly decided what rules it will impose on EU citizens in Britain. One thing is for certain, however: the claim that\u00a0Brexit would lead to a relaxation of the government&#8217;s unrealistic target of reducing migration to the\u00a0\u201ctens of thousands\u201d has been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2016\/10\/04\/theresa-mays-devotion-to-david-camerons-net-migration-target-is\/\">dashed<\/a>. The idea of \u201cnaming and shaming\u201d \u2013 while a throwaway as far as the speech was concerned \u2013 echoes what many see as the disturbing new acceptability of anti-immigrant feeling since the referendum. With further restriction being imposed on an ever-growing number of people \u2013\u00a0and with the government&#8217;s renewed emphasis on multi-sectoral monitoring \u2013 we should be in no doubt that this is a process that has just begun.<\/p>\n<p>Mike<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The speech by Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, was arguably the most policy-heavy presentation at the Conservative Party Conference. It also made a strong claim to be the most controversial, so it is hardly surprising that it provoked a vigorous response from some quarters. We seem to have woken up with a UKIP government. Depressing doesn&#39;t even begin to cover<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":227,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/seeing-illegal-immigrants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}