Salary threshold for foreign workers to come to UK should be £40k, says Boris Johnson
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The salary threshold for foreign workers to come to Britain should be raised to £40,000 to slash record levels of migration, Boris Johnson has said.
The former prime minister admitted the big increase from the current £26,000 a year would provoke protests from those who had made their wealth from cheap foreign labour, but claimed it would force industries to invest in training domestic workers to plug gaps.
His intervention will pile pressure on his successor, Rishi Sunak, who is working on a package of measures after figures on Thursday showed net migration hit a record high of 745,000 in the year to December 2022 – three times pre-Brexit levels.
Raising the salary threshold is among the proposals being considered by No 10, although it is thought it will do so at more modest levels than those proposed by Mr Johnson and Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, who advocated an increase to £45,000.
Writing in his column for the Daily Mail, Mr Johnson said the net migration figures were “way, way too big”.
“People will not accept demographic change at this kind of pace, even in the most achingly liberal of countries and capital cities,” he said.
“Look at what is happening in Dublin, where that lovely and happy city seems to have been engulfed by race riots. Look at Holland, where a patently Islamophobic candidate, Geert Wilders, has just won 35 seats in the parliament and may yet become prime minister.
“It is time to increase the minimum income you must earn in order to get a UK work visa.”
Mr Johnson said the net migration figures showed the salary threshold had been pitched “way too low” at £26,000 – not much more than the living wage – when it was originally set by the migration advisory committee. This had been masked during the pandemic, when migration was largely suppressed.
“The minimum income for most types of migrant worker coming to the UK should now go right up to £40,000 or more – because it is the right thing for migrant workers, and for the entire British workforce. When we do it, I will tell you what will happen. A lot of very rich people in this country will go crackers,” he said.
“They will protest that they cannot afford to run their businesses if they have to pay their foreign workers that kind of money, and they will complain in the same breath that British people are too idle and feckless to do those types of jobs.
“I say, tough. It is time to call them out. For decades we have seen a failure by corporate Britain to invest: in new plants, in new research and technology, and, above all, a criminal failure to invest in the skills and potential of the domestic workforce.”
Mr Johnson’s proposal goes further than Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, who has proposed increasing the salary threshold to £35,000 a year – the median pay level in the UK – as part of a five-point plan to tackle net migration.
No 10 is also considering restricting the number of dependants that foreign care workers can bring with them to the UK and scrapping the shortage occupation list under which firms pay foreign workers 20 per cent below the going rate for jobs where there are skills shortages.
Mr Sunak conceded net migration levels were “too high,” adding: “They’ve got to come down to more sustainable levels.” On Thursday, Mrs Braverman described the figures as “unsustainable” and a “slap in the face” to the British public .
