Nearly one in 5 staff within the UK right this moment was born overseas.[i] Migrants fill as many as 25% of well being and care jobs, and 22% of all jobs in communication and IT.[ii] This isn’t simply an consequence of mobilities previous. Business leaders venture that migrant labour can be crucial to the supply of strategic authorities aims, together with constructing extra housing for a era of Britons who don’t but personal a house,[iii] caring for an more and more older inhabitants,[iv] and sustaining development.
But regardless of this very important contribution to the UK, the way forward for work migration seems to be daunting. Within the 5 years because the UK formally left the European Union (EU), the federal government has changed a system of largely free motion with an archaic system of sponsorship the place migrant staff’ mobility is to a big diploma managed by their employers. Stories of labour exploitation soared, as hundreds of unscrupulous bosses[v] used their energy over visas to deceive, overwork, underpay, and threaten migrants who complained with deportation. However it’s the authorities’s response to this exploitation that casts the largest shadow over the way forward for migrant staff – and with it, over the way forward for progressive politics within the UK. On this article, I mirror on how we acquired right here and what’s at stake.
The tip of free motion and the rise of sponsored work visas
The UK’s exit from the European Union on 31 December 2020 opened a brand new chapter within the historical past of labour migration. Simply days earlier than the tip of free motion, on Christmas Eve, a triumphant Boris Johnson declared that the UK had “taken again management of legal guidelines and our future […] each jot and tittle of our regulation.”[vi] However phrases alone have by no means stuffed vacancies, and as companies continued to wish migrant labour, the Residence Workplace needed to give you a system that might meet enterprise necessities, whereas retaining the picture of strict border management. That is how we got here to “the factors primarily based system” – extra precisely referred to as the system of employer-sponsored visas.
From January 2021, companies had been allowed to recruit overseas nationals, supplied they obtained a licence from the Residence Workplace, and requested the division to subject ample Certificates of Sponsorship (COSs) to fulfill their recruitment wants. Employers would grant a COS from their batch to each overseas nationwide they wished to rent, and the COS enabled migrants, in flip, to acquire the important factors to acquire a piece visa. All visas below this technique had been strictly tied to the sponsoring employers. If employment ended, migrants formally had simply 60 days to search out one other sponsor, or risked sliding into irregularity.[vii] The tie of sponsorship may solely stop if, after 5 years of steady employment, migrants utilized for Indefinite Go away to Stay. In some ways, this was much like the migration system utilized to non-EU nationals earlier than Brexit – solely this time it was wider, it grew sooner, and employers needed to soar by way of fewer hoops.
Extra companies get a licence to sponsor
On the floor, sponsorship was working. Inside the first couple of years, the Residence Workplace had licensed nearly 30,000 new companies (Fig 1). This nearly doubled the general variety of employers entrusted to sponsor migrant staff long-term.
Determine 1 – Complete variety of employers with a Tier 2 licence to sponsor expert staff. Supply: Transparency in Migration statistics, final up to date Q2 2025.
In that very same interval, as many as 661,000 sponsored work visas had been issued to fundamental candidates and their dependents (Fig 2), in sectors like care, which took the lion’s share of worldwide recruitment, but additionally hospitality and IT. It didn’t take lengthy, nevertheless, for the cracks within the system to look – and stories of labour exploitation soared.
Determine 2- Entry clearance visas issued to fundamental candidates and dependants. Supply: Residence Workplace statistics, final up to date Q2 2025.
The primary stories of staff exploited by visa sponsors
All of the sudden, then irreversibly, across the begin of 2023, the Work Rights Centre, the employment rights charity I run, began getting a brand new and worrying sample of enquiries.[viii] Folks from India, Bangladesh, then progressively from Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, who had come to the UK hoping to work in grownup social care, but additionally different sectors, contacted the charity to report an uncommon sample of economic and labour exploitation.
In nearly each case, the story adopted the identical arc. Migrants had offered land, stop good jobs and borrowed cash to pay eye-watering charges to brokers who pretended they may place them with Residence Workplace-approved employers. The employers had been licensed, and the visas they opened entry to had been legitimate. Upon arrival, nevertheless, the work promised by no means materialised. The employees who dared to talk up had been usually threatened with deportation, normally, but additionally with violence. In the meantime, they had been caught on a visa that was so managed it neither permitted them to entry public funds nor to take up different full-time work. Too indebted to return to their international locations of origin, most of our shoppers had been getting by on informal work, with loans, help from mates or meals banks, hoping solely that sooner or later they’d discover a fairer employer to sponsor a brand new work visa.
Requires reform of the sponsorship system intensify
Inside a 12 months, the story of how the Residence Workplace had constructed a system ripe for exploitation featured in each main information outlet.[ix] By that time, the Work Rights Centre wasn’t simply supporting victims of scams. We had been additionally bringing tribunal instances for victims of compelled labour who had been severely overworked, underpaid, and threatened in the event that they dared to blow the whistle. Our stories had been joined by different charities, MPs, the Unbiased Chief Inspector for Borders and Immigration,[x] the Public Accounts Committee,[xi] and the Unbiased Anti-Slavery Commissioner.[xii] Collectively, we left the federal government in little question: sponsorship is a piece migration system that dangerously deepens the ability imbalance between staff and employers, and is in pressing want for reform.
The coverage options, we on the Work Rights Centre argued, had been evident. The bold possibility could be to finish sponsorship, a system that’s extra paying homage to Tudor vagrancy legal guidelines than is suited to right this moment’s dynamic labour wants, and exchange it with a system the place visas don’t tie anybody to a single employer. This might be higher for staff, easier for the Residence Workplace to manage, and considerably cheaper for employers. The much less bold model could be to implement safeguards to curb the ability of sponsoring employers.[xiii] This included imposing fines and penalties for rule-breaking employers, giving staff 6 months (not the present 60 days) after the tip of employment wherein to search out one other sponsor, and instituting a Office Justice Visa to empower victims to report exploitation, with out concern of shedding their immigration standing. All these measures are already in place, in some iteration, in Australia, Canada, and Eire. Sadly, it isn’t what the UK authorities did.
The federal government learns the flawed classes
Confronted with mounting proof of exploitation, the Residence Workplace improved due diligence on the level of licensing new sponsors, and radically elevated actions in opposition to employers already on the checklist. Having began with a laissez faire strategy, by 2024 the division was revoking tons of extra licences each quarter (Determine 3).
Determine 3 – Licence suspensions and revocations, and complete variety of sponsors. Supply: Residence Workplace: Quarterly sponsorship transparency information. Final up to date Q2 2025
The unhappy irony, nevertheless, is that with each story of profitable immigration enforcement in opposition to employers, migrant staff had been collateral injury. As soon as a enterprise misplaced its licence, all staff tied to it risked having their visas curtailed. Formally, this meant that folks had been left with simply 60 days to discover a new sponsor. Unofficially, the Residence Workplace gave some staff (notably within the grownup social care sector) extra time. However this momentary leniency was no match for the structural obstacles that stood in the way in which of re-employment. By the point migrant care staff had been on the lookout for new roles, indebted and with months of involuntary unemployment accumulating, few had the funds to take up driving classes and buy automobiles, to fulfill the necessities of employers.
Re-employment was additionally impeded by the truth that, regardless of the protests of business leaders and unions, the federal government made hiring overseas staff more and more costly. Successive governments raised the minimal wage necessities and prices of compliance (although none utilized any monetary penalties to non-compliant sponsors). After the most recent modifications imposed by Labour, a small bona fide employer within the care sector who needs to rent a migrant employee for 3 years must make an upfront fee of over £2,500 to the Residence Workplace, up from £1,870 earlier than.[xiv] Set to “wean companies of migrant labour” in any respect prices, from July 2025, the federal government additionally banned recruitment for roles under RQF stage 6 (undergraduate diploma), and completely ended the worldwide recruitment of care staff below the Well being and Care Employee visa.[xv]
But now, identical to earlier than, civil servants have needed to pull the rabbit out of the hat; re-invent one other contorted system that initiatives a picture of strict border management, whereas quietly catering for enterprise wants. In the identical breath, the immigration white paper introduced the exclusion of roles under graduate stage from the checklist of jobs eligible for sponsorship, and the re-introduction of a few of these roles onto a brand new Momentary Scarcity Record. Temporariness performs right this moment the identical political function that sponsorship performed after Brexit. It’s the sticking plaster that desperately tries to marry the 2 competing aims of financial mobility and border management, however manages solely to extend enterprise uncertainty and delay the distress of migrant staff.
What’s at stake?
It appears like now we have been right here earlier than. It’s endlessly irritating to watch how so many lives get caught within the crosshairs of political communications technique, and the way average coverage choices that might safeguard migrant staff get buried within the rush to look ever harder.
Not one of the hundreds of migrant staff who had been exploited by Residence Workplace-approved visa sponsors had been compensated – although their employers walked away freely. The hundreds extra who will proceed to reach on employer-sponsored visas face the identical dangers of exploitation, as a result of they face the identical radical power-imbalance. Most disappointingly, migrants who hoped that their sacrifice was not in useless had been not too long ago dealt a blow when, unexpectedly and with out session, the federal government introduced it’s going to double the time to settlement, from the present 5 years to 10 years. That’s one other 5 years of precarious work, on the mercy of visa sponsors; 5 years of visa charges and yearly Immigration Well being Surcharge funds; and 5 years of exclusion from social safety.
Employees’ rights advocates will little question have gleaned the bitter irony of seeing a Labour authorities betray migrant staff so ruthlessly. There’s extra. The federal government has sacrificed the scope of the Employment Rights Invoice, in order that key provisions just like the adoption of a single employee standing are delayed. Journalists have additionally reported that authorities insiders had been contemplating introducing Employment Tribunal charges – a tried and beforehand binned provision that might put justice out of attain for the poorest staff. Then there may be all the pieces the federal government is unknowingly sacrificing by going again to the politics of management: enterprise and client confidence, that are each crucial to development; religion in progressive values, which are actually rebranded as “patriotic progressivism”; and our neighborhood cohesion, which is more and more splintered by the language of us and them.
We have to say no to this. On the Work Rights Centre, now we have a small however fierce group of attorneys who empower migrant staff to take motion in opposition to rogue employers. We use each win to reveal the system that fosters exploitation, and lift consciousness of the reforms wanted to safeguard migrant staff. Everybody can be part of, whether or not it’s contacting their MP to name out the hurt the federal government is inflicting to migrant communities, or getting their union to marketing campaign. Unite and the Royal Faculty of Nursing have led the refrain of union voices who condemned the degrading therapy of sponsored staff, and requested for an immigration system that ends the poisonous tie of employer sponsorship. Given the dangers that lie forward, it’s time for these voices to get louder.
Dr. Dora-Olivia Vicol is an anthropologist and CEO of the Work Rights Centre, a charity that gives free employment and immigration authorized recommendation, and that makes use of frontline intelligence to advocate for higher protections for migrant and weak staff.
[i] Marina Fernández-Reino and Ben Brindle, ‘Migrants within the UK Labour Market: An Overview’, Migration Observatory, 2024, https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/sources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-labour-market-an-overview/.
[ii] Fernández-Reino and Brindle, ‘Migrants within the UK Labour Market’.
[iii] Gino Spocchia, ‘RIBA Says Authorities’s Immigration Clampdown Dangers 1.5m Houses Goal’, The Architects’ Journal, 15 Could 2025, https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/information/riba-says-governments-immigration-rhetoric-risks-1-5m-homes-target.
[iv] Aletha Adu and Aletha Adu Political correspondent, ‘Labour Axing Care Employee Visa Will Put Companies at Threat, Say Unions and Care Leaders’, Society, The Guardian, 11 Could 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/might/11/labour-axing-care-worker-visa-will-put-services-at-risk-say-unions-and-care-leaders.
[v] ‘Report Numbers of Visa Sponsor Licences Revoked for Rule Breaking’, GOV.UK, 2025, https://www.gov.uk/authorities/information/record-numbers-of-visa-sponsor-licences-revoked-for-rule-breaking.
[vi] ‘Prime Minister’s Assertion on EU Negotiations: 24 December 2020’, GOV.UK, 24 December 2020, https://www.gov.uk/authorities/speeches/prime-ministers-statement-on-eu-negotiations-24-december-2020.
[vii] Adis Sehic and Dora-Olivia Vicol, ‘The Systemic Drivers of Migrant Employee Exploitation within the UK’, Work Rights Centre, 2023, https://www.workrightscentre.org/information/report-the-systemic-drivers-of-migrant-worker-exploitation-in-the-uk.
[viii] Sehic and Vicol, ‘Report’.
[ix] Rosie Swash et al., ‘Rape and Sexual Harassment Reported by Overseas Care Employees throughout UK’, International Improvement, The Guardian, 12 March 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/mar/12/health-care-worker-visas-abuses-exploitation-rape-sponsors-right-work-uk; ‘Migrant Carer “drowning” in Debt after £15k Visa Rip-off’, Cornwall, BBC Information, 21 February 2024, https://www.bbc.com/information/uk-england-cornwall-68337205.
[x] ICIBI, ‘An Inspection of the Immigration System as It Pertains to the Social Care Sector (August 2023 to November 2023)’, GOV.UK, 2024, https://www.gov.uk/authorities/publications/an-inspection-of-the-immigration-system-as-it-relates-to-the-social-care-sector-august-2023-to-november-2023.
[xi] ‘Parliamentary Report Acknowledges Scale of Exploitation on the Expert Employee Visa | Work Rights Centre’, accessed 3 October 2025, https://www.workrightscentre.org/publications/2025/parliamentary-report-acknowledges-scale-of-exploitation-on-the-skilled-worker-visa/.
[xii] Shanti Das, ‘Flawed UK Visa Scheme Led to “Horrific” Care Employee Abuse, Says Watchdog’, World Information, The Guardian, 16 March 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/16/flawed-uk-visa-scheme-led-to-horrific-care-worker-abuse-says-watchdog.
[xiii] ‘Safeguarding Sponsored Employees: A UK Office Justice Visa, and Different Proposals from a Six-Nation Comparability | Work Rights Centre’, accessed 3 October 2025, https://www.workrightscentre.org/publications/2025/safeguarding-sponsored-workers-a-uk-workplace-justice-visa-and-other-proposals-from-a-six-country-comparison/.
[xiv] ‘No Match. Why Funding Rematching Hubs for Displaced Migrant Care Employees Is Not Sufficient to Deal with Exploitation | Work Rights Centre’, 10, accessed 3 October 2025, https://www.workrightscentre.org/publications/2025/no-match-why-funding-rematching-hubs-for-displaced-migrant-care-workers-is-not-enough-to-tackle-exploitation/.
[xv] ‘Newest Modifications to the Immigration Guidelines: “A Sub-Optimum Option to Make Coverage” | Work Rights Centre’, accessed 3 October 2025, https://www.workrightscentre.org/publications/2025/latest-changes-to-the-immigration-rules-a-sub-optimal-way-to-make-policy/.
Picture credit score: Steve Sharp by way of Unsplash
