Weak Budgets and Even Weaker Borders

This week, the Chancellor told us his Budget would bring “breathing space for today, fresh hope for the future”. On immigration, it is anything but. Buried in the small print is a collection of liberalising measures that exposes the gulf between the government’s rhetoric about control and its real priorities.

From next spring, ministers will cut occupation-specific salary thresholds for sponsored workers from the median to the 25th percentile of wages. They will expand the High Potential Individual visa to even more international graduates. Certain sponsored workers will receive up to six months to find another job, while graduates of some universities will again receive a two-year graduate visa. Individually, these seem like small concessions; but together, they amount to another ratchet towards higher immigration, weaker incentives to train British workers and a more complicated system full of exceptions.

This is especially perverse when the Budget itself admits that nearly one million young British people are not in education, employment or training. Lowering the price at which employers can recruit abroad will not rebuild domestic skills. It simply papers over the disastrous legacy being left for the native young.

The graduate visa route reversal is particularly indefensible. Labour’s immigration white paper promised to reduce the visa from two years to 18 months. It also admitted that more than half of students finishing their studies in 2022, 2023 and 2024 moved on to another visa route, compared with fewer than 20 per cent in 2019 and 2020. Nearly 240,000 Graduate-route applications, including those from dependants, were recorded in 2024, yet fewer than one-third of surveyed holders were in occupations that could confidently be classed as graduate-level. Or, put another way, over two thirds of migrants living in Britain on graduate visas were not actually working in graduate level jobs!

Migration Watch warned about precisely this. Our 2025 report, The Future for Student Visas, argued for a cap on study visas, an end to the Graduate route, tighter rules on dependants and proper Home Office interviews. Our Chairman wrote then that universities had become “immigration machines”, too often using overseas fees to sustain poor-performing courses while the student route became a path to long-term residence. This weak Budget makes the problem even worse.

Furthermore, the Home Secretary has proposed new routes that would allow charities, communities, universities and employers to sponsor asylum seekers. Our chairman, Alp Mehmet, told the Public Bill Committee for the Immigration and Asylum Bill what he fears these proposals could lead to:

“My fear is that this will put the Boriswave in the shade. The numbers the measure attracts may become a serious problem, in the same way that those who arrived over the preceding five years became a problem. It is probably too late to do anything about that, but I have a feeling that, three years down the road, we will be talking about legislation [to close these routes].“

You can read the full oral evidence session here.

Nor should anyone take comfort from the latest headline fall in net migration. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects it to drop to 120,000 in the year to mid-2026, then climb steadily to 230,000 by mid-2031 under current government policy. The OBR has given no explanation of how it arrived at these figures, which we judge could significantly undercount the eventual total.

Meanwhile, the Budget sets aside £150 million of capital funding in 2027–28 for additional large asylum-accommodation sites. That is only the infrastructure bill. Where is the estimate of continuing running costs? When will the sites be operational? And if ministers genuinely expect to stop the boats, why are taxpayers being asked to finance more long-term capacity while families face another squeeze?

The government should have set a binding objective to reduce net migration substantially, close the Graduate route, cap student numbers, enforce genuine-student tests, keep salary thresholds high and remove those with no right to remain. Mr Burnham’s government is doing the opposite on almost every front.

The message we take from the Budget is that, when forced to choose between immigration control and demands from universities and employers for easier access to overseas labour and students, the government sides with vested interests. Britain’s migration crisis requires clear, targeted policies: limits, proper enforcement and political courage. Pandering to open-border apologists and left-wing backbenchers simply won’t solve it.