Before the Brexit referendum, many British voters believed that migrants were taking advantage of the UK welfare state and that newcomers to the country should not be entitled to the same benefits as citizens. The government followed this view when after Brexit they removed the obligation previously imposed by the EU to grant working migrants from EU countries the same benefits as working UK citizens and accepted working residents.
Since 2021 a new points-based immigration system has allowed only skilled workers and applicants for jobs where employees are badly needed to apply for UK working visas; successful workers may bring children and a partner, but they will not be entitled to child benefits, support with childcare expenses, housing or other income support for at least five years. They also must pay visa fees and a healthcare surcharge for themselves and for every family member. Thus, since 2021, all migrant workers have been paying higher contributions but are entitled to less support than UK citizens working in the same jobs.
Our recent article in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice explores what this exclusion from state support and the obligation to pay extra fees means for the household incomes of new migrant workers coming to the UK after 2021, when compared with UK citizens or residents. Would these migrants be a lot worse off than citizens in identical jobs with identical gross earnings? And would the higher fees and lower support mean that migrants face poverty risks residents would not have to endure? In other words, we wanted to know what the unequal access to benefits of migrants and citizens means for the extent of inequality between them and for their poverty risks.
To study these questions, we constructed seven workers, earning wages typical for the main professions in the UK, based on official wage statistics for 2021. Of these, five were in professions with annual earnings above £25,600, an amount skilled applicants should have had in 2021, according to the Home Office. We also included two workers on lower wages (£20,480 and £13,520), who could apply for visas in the UK to work in ‘shortage occupations’, such as care work. The net income of these seven workers was calculated for three types of households: singles; one-and-a-half breadwinner households with one full-time worker, one part-time worker and one small child; and one-breadwinner households with one full-time worker, one full-time homemaker and one small child.
The study’s most important finding was that the new system creates stark inequalities between migrant and citizen families. Migrants who live in one-and-a-half and in one-breadwinner households have significantly lower net incomes than UK families despite identical gross earnings because they are excluded from the support the state gives to such families and because they must pay fees. This exclusion means that migrant families are also more likely than citizens to have incomes below the poverty line. Thus, the post-Brexit visa system creates large inequalities between migrant and non-migrant families, and it leads to higher poverty risks for migrant families. In contrast, there is no big difference between the incomes of single migrant workers and single citizens, because the latter are entitled to little state support.
For example, in 2021 a one-breadwinner migrant family aged 25+ on a gross annual income of £28,080 would have been £180 worse off per week than an equivalent UK family. A one-and-a-half breadwinner migrant family aged 25+ with joint gross earnings worth £40,319 would have been £207 worse off per week than a UK family counterpart. This second migrant family would fall £147 per week short of the poverty line. The equivalent UK family would be £60 per week above the poverty line.
The new migration rules thus respond to the dominant view that benefit differences between migrants and citizens are fair because adult workers coming to the country should not be entitled to extra public support. However, extensive research conducted before Brexit showed that EU migrants contributed to economic growth in the UK and their contributions much exceeded what they received in benefits. For such contributions to continue, it is important that the UK is an attractive destination for skilled young migrants. The new system suggests that they would be better off choosing an EU country as a destination if they want to start a family, because there they would not be excluded from family-related benefits. The UK could well lose out on these young and skilled workers as well as their children. Finally, the new system implies an acceptance that children of working migrants face higher poverty risks than those of citizens. This is contrary to the UK government’s commitment as signatory to the 1989 UN Convention on the Human Rights of the Child.
Traute Meyer is Professor of Social Policy and Paul Bridgen Associate Professor of Social Policy at the School of Social, Economic and Political Sciences, University of Southampton. They are also members of the ESRC Centre for Population Change.
Read more from the authors in their Journal of Poverty and Social Justice article ‘Open for the childless skilled only: the poverty risks of migrant workers with children under the UK points-based immigration system’.
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