Immigration

Carol Monaghan Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie]

That is precisely my point. If that drop in numbers continued for more than a few years, the health service and other caring sectors would have a serious problem. It is not simply EU citizens but all migrants—all new Scots—who deliver benefit to our country. I will concentrate a little more on EU and European economic area citizens, but I will shortly move on to the contribution made, and the problems faced, by people from beyond the European Union who come here, either permanently or for short visits.

We should be thankful to the Government for the publication of “EU Exit: Long-term economic analysis”, which puts a hard GDP number on the benefit from EEA migration. We know that Brexit is bad economically, but every single non-EEA Brexit scenario modelled, including no deal, average free trade agreement, and the now lost and forgotten Government White Paper, was worse with a zero net inflow of EEA workers—around 2% of GDP worse over the forecast period. Net zero EEA migration has a hard-number impact; we know that, as do the Government, because they published it.

No one who cares about the economic wellbeing of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or the UK as a whole should ever embark on a hostile environment policy that makes it difficult for people to come to the UK, or that in any way, shape or form stops EEA citizens living or working here, yet that is precisely what the Government have done, and it is not only EEA citizens who suffer.

I will give two brief examples of the unnecessary and arbitrary obstacles faced by people who wish to live here permanently or make a short visit. The first is of a South African lady who married a Scottish man who lived and worked in South Africa more than 15 years ago. They moved to Scotland. The lady travelled initially on a tourist visa, but was told that she had to go back to South Africa, where they no longer had a home, job or income, to apply for a UK visa. That obviously caused distress, and had a significant financial cost to a household with modest earnings. Forcing that lady to return to South Africa to apply for a visa that would allow her to live in Scotland with her husband delivered absolutely no benefit to the UK. It was a nasty, pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary piece of hostile bureaucracy that could be changed tomorrow if this Government cared anything for the people who live here.

The second example I wish to give is of a very successful Pakistani gentleman. He travels regularly overseas and has never overstayed on a visa in any country. Indeed, on his last visit to the UK, he left after only a couple of weeks, having visited all the friends and family whom he wished to see, which was the reason for his stay. Even though he had an excellent sponsor and an exemplary record from previous visits, his last visa application was rejected—and not on what you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I or a reasonable person would consider real grounds; he was told, wrongly, that he did not have

“enough incentive to leave the UK on completion of”

his

“proposed visit”.

Indefensible! That arbitrary judgment was handed down by some bureaucrat in the absence of any evidence whatever.

Weddings and funerals are missed, and family relations are destroyed, because of ludicrous, arbitrary decision making. If these decisions were made by some tin-pot despotic country, we would all rightly say, “That’s appalling. The rule of law has been abandoned in favour of arbitrary decision making.”

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend talks about evidence being ignored. In many cases, significant, substantial evidence is not just ignored, but thrown out and abandoned. What is the point of the Government even attempting to collate a portfolio of evidence if it is to be completely ignored by decision makers?

[Stewart Hosie]

Every MP must have examples of fantastic applications being rejected, even when submitted with every conceivable relevant piece of paper and certificate on the planet, and even when there is a brilliant, solvent sponsor, so my hon. Friend is right. That is the nub of what this Government’s hostile environment has delivered. It has brought about economic harm and ludicrous net migration targets, ignores the social and cultural benefits of immigration, and strips much-needed staff from Scotland’s growth sectors.

The UK has in essence abandoned an evidence-based, rules-based immigration system in favour of arbitrary decision making that panders to the screeching headlines of the right-wing, Brexiteer-friendly press, but that causes, and will continue to cause, real distress to real people and their families, and ongoing economic harm.

--- Later in debate ---

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

I want to concentrate on the issues that education—particularly further and higher education in Scotland—has experienced and could experience as a result of a hard Brexit. First, I would like to talk about the post-study work visa, especially in my capacity as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on photonics. Right across the central belt of Scotland, we have an extremely large amount of strength and expertise in photonics, but photonics and quantum technology are very sensitive to developments in the market. We are currently bringing our international students here, training them up and ensuring that they have the necessary intellectual capacity, but then sending them home to their own countries so that they can challenge or work against companies in our own constituencies. What we should be doing with these talented people is ensuring that they stay to contribute to our economies and that that intellectual property is not lost to our competitors and those who would seek to undermine those companies.

We know that international students are a huge benefit to our local economy, and they pay fees of up to £35,000 per annum. That is a massive amount of money for them, so coming here to do a course—particularly a longer course—as an international student is a huge financial investment. When it comes to their graduation, however, what do we say to their parents? We say, “Well, actually, there’s no guarantee that you can come to the graduation ceremony and go home again. So although you have paid the best part of £100,000 for your child’s education, we’re not even going to allow you to come and join in the celebration of their graduation.” That is shameful.

Conservative Members have talked a lot about the £30,000 salary threshold, and there have been many strong words about that this afternoon, so I urge the Members who have raised concerns about the threshold to join us in voting against it. We know that £30,000 is no indication of the skills of a particular person or of a particular sector. When the White Paper was first published, I asked a series of written questions about what was meant by low, medium and high-skilled positions. I was told that high skills equated to degree level, that medium skills equated to college level or A-level, and that low skills would describe somebody whose highest qualification was at GCSE level, or in Scotland, National 5 level. That was how the Government were designating skills, but I know many people with degrees who do not command salaries of £30,000. We also know that salaries in Scotland are significantly lower than in the south-east of England. Once again, policies are being developed that are particular to one area of the UK and do not take into account the requirements of others.

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady makes a strong case on income thresholds. Does she agree that the minimum income rule, which continues to divide families in a spouse visa situation, is equally disgraceful? Many people in my constituency earn nowhere near £18,600. It is yet another example of the hostile environment created by the Government.

[Carol Monaghan]

It is £18,600 if they do not have any children; if they do, it is even greater. If they have children, we put in extra barriers to ensure that those families cannot be together. It is utterly disgraceful.

Many people in research and academia will not come close to the salary threshold of £30,000, such as early career researchers, technicians and many of the EU nationals working in our universities. We should be rolling out the red carpet for such people and doing everything in our power to ensure that they stay, contribute to the success of our universities, and continue to contribute to our communities. Yet once again, we put barriers in place.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) mentioned Professor Alison Phipps, the UNESCO chair at the University of Glasgow. I will say a little more about her. Many of the projects that she is involved in are funded by the Department for International Development. The UK Government are funding those international projects, yet the academics involved in them—partners across Asia, the middle east and Africa—are unable to come and be part of that collaboration.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I, too, pay tribute to Professor Phipps, who works so hard on these issues. I wish to put on the record another case—that of the head of international relations at the Islamic University of Gaza, Amani al-Maqadma, whose visa has been denied despite the fact that her project is fully funded by Eramsus+. She wants to come here to contribute to the work of the university, and once again the refusal is self-defeating. It defeats the purpose of the grants that the Government are handing out. Perhaps the Minister will be able to look into that before the end of the day.

[Carol Monaghan]

It is, of course, a ludicrous situation, given that the UK Government are giving money to these projects. Flights are booked, sometimes costing thousands of pounds, in the hope that the visas will appear in time, and then we get refusals so flights have to be changed. People can no longer book fixed flights; they have to be flexible flights, which are many times more expensive. It is an utter waste of money.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one huge problem that we now have, which we did not have in years gone by, is that there is no right of appeal against many such decisions? Everybody has to contact their MP, and we are consistently trying to raise cases here and in newspapers. That is the only way anyone can get justice. We need to get back the right of appeal against all these decisions.

[Carol Monaghan]

That would make a huge difference, because once the application has been refused it is dead, and there is very little that we can do with it. We can support subsequent ones, but not the one that has been refused.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith also mentioned academic conferences. That is a serious issue, because it is not just about the economic benefits of hosting academic conferences in cities across the UK; it is about saying that we are open for business, we are outward looking, we are ready to collaborate, and we want to have such relationships with experts from across the world. If we cannot have conferences because people cannot get visas to come to them, we utterly diminish our position.

We have recently been raising the issue of the European temporary leave to remain that has been suggested for after Brexit. It will be a visa, or some sort of certificate, for potential students that will allow them to study at our universities, and it will be for three years. Of course, in Scotland our university courses are four years. Let us imagine for a second that EU students end up being classed as international students and have to pay international fees. We could be talking about £50,000, £60,000 or £70,000 in fees over the course of their degree. Are we expecting them to pay that huge amount of money on a gamble that they might get the tier 4 visa to complete the fourth year of their course? That is insane. Let us be clear: it is discriminatory. It will affect Scottish universities, which have longer courses, far more than other universities.

I will quickly mention the tier 5 religious workers visa. I have been contacted by a constituent and by many priests across the diocese who say that they cannot get supply priests from Africa and India because there have been changes to the visa. I have written to the Minister about that, and she responded that they can get a tier 2 visa. I am sorry—it is too expensive, and the archdiocese of Glasgow can get only two of them. It does not work. The hostile environment is also targeting faith communities.

[Patrick Grady]

I have parishes in my constituency, such as that of the Immaculate Conception on Maryhill Road, experiencing exactly the same issue. Priests have been coming for years on tier 5 visas without any problems at all. It is a law of unintended consequences, because the ministerial guidance on the matter is not about Christian preachers. It is a very serious issue, and the Minister knows that there will be a debate in Westminster Hall next week specifically about it. I hope that she comes prepared to justify the policy.

[Carol Monaghan]

The Minister will also have to justify it to the archdiocese of Glasgow and other archdioceses across the UK, whose bishops have been contacting MPs on this very issue.

I will mention Windrush very briefly. A constituent of mine has been told that he can get a maximum of £5,000 compensation for everything he has gone through. He is more than £50,000 out of pocket. The hostile environment has wrecked his life.

Finally, I quickly want to mention Helen, who came to see me last week. She fled Eritrea and, in the process, was separated from her two children. With the help of the Red Cross, she located her children and applied for them to join her. Her son was granted a family reunion visa; her daughter, who is now 13, was refused. So one child is still living displaced in Ethiopia and one child is living in Glasgow. Where is the humanity? I appeal to the Minister, if she has an ounce of humanity, to look into this case. The hostile environment has absolutely devastated that family.

--- Later in debate ---

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

It is a real pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands). As he said towards the end of his speech, there really could be no more appropriate topic than immigration for the SNP to choose for our first Opposition day debate for nearly a year. The inept and damaging approach of this Conservative Government to immigration typifies how this Westminster Parliament is incapable of serving Scotland’s needs.

As the current Prime Minister’s reign fizzles out in the midst of a constitutional crisis, she is frantically clinging to the wreckage in an effort to outstay Gordon Brown’s reign, staying till the last possible minute as she desperately searches for something other than the Brexit shambles to be her legacy. She should not fear: help is at hand from the SNP. As my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North said, one policy that can undoubtedly be laid firmly at the door of the current Prime Minister is the hostile environment and the ludicrous net migration targets on which she has insisted throughout her time as Home Secretary and Prime Minister, despite the fact that they have never been met.

It is not a legacy of which the Prime Minister can be proud. When she stood on the doorstep of No. 10 at the outset of her premiership, she promised to fight against the burning injustices in our society. Not only has she failed to do that; instead she will be remembered as the architect and driving force behind a policy that has not only failed but created a whole new set of burning injustices, typified by the scandalous treatment of the members of the Windrush generation.

As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I was involved in a case study of two of the Windrush cases in some detail. We were able to see the way in which those acting on behalf of the Home Office repeatedly ignored extensive documentary evidence that these people had every right to be here. They detained them and were on the verge of deporting them from this country. Given that treatment and the denied-my-vote scandal that took place on 23 May, it is perfectly understandable that EU nationals living in the United Kingdom are afraid about the protection of their rights after we leave the European Union should they find themselves in a position similar to that of the Windrush citizens—where they have every right to be here but do not have the right paperwork. In that respect, I pay great tribute to the work of the 3 million group and also of the New Europeans, who have done a lot in relation to the denied-my-vote scandal.

The Windrush scandal illustrated with a human face the severe unintended consequences of the hostile environment policies. Perhaps even worse, they were not unintended at all, and it was the price that the Prime Minister felt was worth paying to achieve her unobtainable targets. There is no doubt about it, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) said, that there is a racist element to these policies. The long-term lawful residents of the United Kingdom who lost their jobs, their homes and their health as a result of the Windrush scandal were black and ethnic minority people. The only known middle-aged, middle class white person to have lost their job as a result of the Windrush scandal is the right hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), who had to resign as Home Secretary, but make no mistake about it, the rap for the Windrush disaster rests at the door of the outgoing Prime Minister.

[Carol Monaghan]

My hon. and learned Friend mentions the outgoing Prime Minister. When I first wrote to her about my constituent who was caught up in the Windrush scandal, she was in fact the Home Secretary. She knew what was happening years before it was brought to the attention of the House by the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy)—I think. She knew about it years before, yet denied knowledge when it all blew up.

[Joanna Cherry]

The Prime Minister left others to take the rap for her. It is important that today’s debate notes that the hostile environment is the legacy of the outgoing Prime Minister. Of late, there has been a rush in certain Tory quarters to disown the policy. Much as they like to try to lay the whole Brexit fiasco at the door of the current Prime Minister, such chameleon-like figures as the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) and Ruth Davidson—both populists who have more in common than either would care to admit—have tried to distance themselves from the hostile environment without ever taking a principled stand against it.

The current Home Secretary likes to talk about how hard his father worked after arriving in the United Kingdom from Pakistan with just £1 in his pocket. In Scotland, we have a very significant community of Asian Scots, many of whose parents came to the United Kingdom with just £1 in their pocket like the Home Secretary’s father. The reality is that the current policies of the Government, of whom the Home Secretary is part, are designed to discourage people from following in their footsteps. Even worse, as we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie) and others this afternoon, the visit visa system is designed to prevent the families of our Asian brothers and sisters and others from visiting, except in all but the most exceptional circumstances.

At the start of this debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) made a forensic speech. In a measured way, as we would expect from him, he went through in forensic detail the various problems with the system. In particular, he dissected the White Paper and outlined what is wrong with it—what is wrong with replacing freedom of movement with an expansion of the already failing tier 2 visa system. He also pointed to the demographic time bomb for Scotland, which appears to be conveniently ignored by Members on the Government Benches. He also pointed out that the Scottish Government have proposed constructive alternatives to the White Paper.

The shadow Minister, who knows I am very fond of him, suggested that a differential system would be an impossibility for Scotland but, as I said to him in my intervention, there are many examples across the world of differentiated systems working effectively. Canada is the example of which I am most aware, having been there to study the system, but there are other examples. I gently suggest that the Labour party has a go at looking at those examples. If it wants to get back any of the votes it has lost in Scotland, it needs to get on board—this might be a bit of a tall order—with the understanding that the position in Scotland is different.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens), who has had to leave his place, made a very powerful point about the threatened mass eviction of asylum seekers in Glasgow by Serco, and he has an Adjournment debate on the subject tomorrow. This is another spin-off from the hostile environment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith, who is my constituency neighbour, spoke about the impact of visa refusals on the Edinburgh festivals and on conferences in Edinburgh, as the capital city of Scotland is so important to our economy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) made a powerful contribution about the impact of the Government’s immigration policies on education and skills development in Scotland. She is an expert in the field of photonics, about which she spoke, but the points she makes apply across the science, technology, engineering and maths sector and into other sectors such as language teaching. We are discouraging early career researchers and technicians from working in Scotland by expanding the tier 2 system.

Other Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), spoke about the problem with religious visas. I first became aware of this problem in relation to the Thai temple in my constituency, but the issue is clearly affecting all sorts of religious denominations.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) said that she could have filled the rest of the debate with constituency cases and indicated that they account for a very high percentage of her workload. She is right, of course; that is the position of most of us. That is why I was so puzzled by the speech of the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr). Given that so many Scottish MPs have a high caseload of immigration cases, I am surprised that he is not in a similar situation. Stirling must be a little spot that the Government’s hostile environment has not reached.

What I really want to say to the Scottish Tories is that there is no doubt that, in this respect, SNP Members speak for their constituents. We speak for the high number of immigration cases we have to deal with, but we also speak for the fact that most of our constituents voted to remain in the European Union, and opinion polls show that even more people want to remain in the European Union than did three years ago.

I have to say that I feel a little bit sorry for the Minister as she has to both lead and sum up the debate today. It seems a bit unfair, particularly on her birthday; you’d think they would give her a wee bit of a break, especially as I am not aware of any shortage of Ministers in the Home Office. The Minister seemed keen to point to the evidence of the Migration Advisory Committee. Later, we heard from the hon. Member for Stirling that he is pretty unhappy with the MAC report, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East indicated in his forensic dissection of it.

Of course, the MAC report is not the only source of evidence on which the Minister could draw. She could also look to the report of the Expert Advisory Group on Migration and Population, which estimates the damage that ending free movement will inflict on Scotland. The group comprises a panel of experts with real expertise in the effects of migration and population on the economy and demography of Scotland, who said that proposals in the White Paper

“are projected to reduce net migration to Scotland by between 30% and 50% over the coming two decades”,

despite the fact that that migration is essential to growing the Scottish economy and to keeping our population up at the level that it is required to be. There are a number of other interesting things in the report by the Expert Advisory Group on Migration and Population and I commend the Minister to read it. It would be incorrect to leave the Chamber with any impression that business in Scotland is completely happy with what is proposed in the White Paper.