When I moved to the UK in 2014, I thought it would be easy to get a well-paid job and kickstart my career in London.
Just like many young immigrants I know in London, I came here in my early 20s after finishing university to chase my dreams in a big, cosmopolitan city.
I had a degree from a German university, spoke English and had relevant work and volunteer experience. I hoped to make it in PR or communications, so I fired off applications for entry-level jobs and internships to dozens of agencies in London.
But after months of trying to get on the ladder, I was still nowhere closer to starting work, with many employers looking for a candidate who had some prior experience of working or studying in the UK. I became desperate for money and parked my career aspirations to take any job that would pay my bills.
I took a job in the monitoring department of a communications firm that paid roughly eight pounds an hour for making newspaper clippings. It meant scanning newspapers, clipping articles and translating headlines and summaries. It was a very manual and repetitive task.
Today Priti Patel told the BBC that the government wanted to ‘encourage people with the right talent’ to take up higher skilled jobs. She added that they want to ‘reduce the levels of people coming to the UK with low skills’.
It’s for this reason that I believe the Government’s new proposals for an immigration points-based system after Brexit point towards a misunderstanding of how the labour market works.
It is not that the UK isn’t already attracting migrants that would qualify for higher wage, higher skilled jobs. Many of these high-skilled workers are already here, but, as I was, they are trapped in low-paid, insecure employment.
A country like the UK, which functions on patronage, often excludes people who did not attend private schools, elite universities or other such institutions. It’s for the same reason that working-class Brits, who are also shut out of these institutions, will find it harder to reach the top of their chosen profession.
According to a briefing on migrants in the UK labour market published by the Migration Observatory last year, more than half of highly-educated workers born in ‘new’ EU member states such as Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic were in so-called low and medium-low skilled jobs.
Workers from Pakistan and other South Asian countries are the second most likely migrant group to be among the lowest earners whilst being overqualified.
Rather than addressing these root causes of inequality within the UK, pitting working class Brits and migrant workers in competition against each other to breed resentment, has long been at the heart of Government strategy, as proven today.
Salary doesn’t always adequately reflect a person’s skill level or the value their work contributes to society – otherwise why would social care sector jobs be paid so poorly – so the government’s reforms reinforce a narrative that sees people purely as commodities to serve the needs of the economy, not as human beings.
There are many reasons why people decide to move to a different country. It could be as simple as wanting to experience a new culture, learn a language or follow a loved one. Often it is because they face deprivation or discrimination in their home country. Stories of immigration are always personal and complex and cannot be pressed into a simple economic framework.
This is why I find the new immigration proposals so worrying. It tells us that a person’s worth is determined only by their economic output. This is the same logic that underpins much of the harsh austerity cuts to welfare and public services that we have experienced over the last years. If someone cannot give ‘their fair share’ through economic performance, we are not deemed worthy of a life in Britain.
The fact is that many of us who came here, developed our careers and made Britain our home, would not have qualified under the new rules. I came here without a job offer, to live with my ex-boyfriend, and had an undergraduate degree in politics. Had this system been in place I would not be where I am in this country today.
I work in a communications agency now and earn comfortably above the salary threshold. But there is no chance I would have got this job had I applied from outside the UK. The years of building a network and UK experience were absolutely necessary to reach this stage.
Britain will now miss out on a lot of young people, keen to work, who would have otherwise come to Britain. We are pulling up the drawbridge instead of being a more ‘global Britain’. For me, as someone who lived through the whole Brexit process, it is just another disappointing government move that makes me feel unwelcome and undervalued here.
The whole policy reinforces a worrying narrative about who is valuable in this country. Britain will be all the poorer for implementing these reforms.
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