What would Britain look like without migrants?

Both Labour and Reform UK are scapegoating immigrants

Nigel Farage dreams of a Britain without migrants. He imagines a uniformly pale-skinned country where everyone knows their place and rallies behind the Union Jack flag.

His move from endless talk of ­stopping small boats to last week’s claim that he’d tackle the “problem” of legal migration reveals his real ambition. He wants to drive out all migrants.

Farage’s Reform UK party said it wants to abolish the indefinite leave to remain (ILR) status, a pathway to ­citizenship for many migrants. It says the move could force nearly four ­million people out of the country.

And it went further, insisting all recent migrants will be banned from claiming welfare benefits.

Farage declared his move will save £230 billion in public spending. That, he claimed, is because more than half of those eligible for ILR in the next few years “are not working, have not worked and in all probability will never, ever work”.

But that’s a lie.

Economist Jonathan Portes has destroyed Reform UK’s figures using data from government tax receipts. He said that most of the people Farage is targeting for deportation are working.

He added, rather than being an ­economic burden, migrants are expected to pay a surplus of £125 billion into the system over the next few years.

Facts notwithstanding, Farage will now push for more removals.

His real aim is to rid Britain not only of first generation migrants, but their offspring too. And to realise it, he’ll happily rip ­families apart and smash up communities.

Almost 11 million people in Britain, some 16 percent of the population, were born abroad. Many have lived and worked here for decades.

Some have children and ­grandchildren here, and their lives are intertwined with friends and family who are British-born.

They are a core part of the British working class.

Socialist Worker looks at how ­politicians’ obsession with immigration is already dividing workers, hampering public services and wrecking industries.

And it asks, what would Britain look like if the far right’s mass deportation dreams came true?

The NHS is run by migrants

The health service simply could not function without migrant workers. The NHS employs around 1.5 million people in England alone, with roughly 25 percent of them born abroad.

They include doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, cleaners and porters. In short, migrants are essential to every part of the service.

More than a quarter of nurses and almost 40 percent of doctors in England trained overseas. If they were to vanish, the whole system would collapse.

Janet, a nurse in central London, says that roughly 80 percent of her ward team were born overseas.

“Everyone here knows that if there were no migrant nurses and nursing assistants, management would have to shut this cancer ward,” she says.

“The many Filipino nurses, for example, arrive with extremely high skill levels and are very confident.

“Farage says that he’d replace them all with British-trained nurses. Well that’s a sick joke.

“Student nurses here have to pay to do a

three-year degree and are not paid while they are working on the wards.

“What with the NHS crisis, staff demoralisation and low pay—it’s already the case that the NHS can’t train enough nurses. Who’d want to work here after 80 percent of the staff have been deported?”

Janet says Reform UK’s plans would be devastating for the NHS, but that there’s a wider problem of racism.

“Most patients are appreciative of the care they get from nurses, wherever they were born. But there’s a public perception that most migrants are not ‘essential’ like health workers. Instead, they are stereotyped as ‘scroungers’.

“This anti-migrant stuff is about trying to divide us into the deserving and undeserving. They want to turn us against each other. That’s what we’re up against.”

A quarter of care workers are born overseas

Without migrants, Britain’s aging population would have to fend for themselves when they get sick or infirm. That’s because around a quarter of all social care workers were born overseas, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The sector is already in deep crisis, with thousands of people in desperate need going without help because there are not enough carers.

The House of Commons Library says there are now 130,000 unfilled vacancies. That catastrophe is only going to get worse.

People over 70 years old will make up 20 percent of the population in England in 2065—up from 14 percent in 2020. And the number of people aged 80 and over is set to more than double within the next 40 years.

If Farage banishes all the migrants, who does he think will look after them? The answer is, he doesn’t care. The rich will always be able to pay more than the rest of us to buy in help.

Immigration laws wrecking hospitality

Labour’s immigration laws are already laying waste to the hospitality industry and threatening the 3.5 million people who work in it.

The government this year removed chefs, restaurant managers and bar and kitchen staff from the list of occupations eligible for skilled worker visas.

Farage’s plans would make matters far worse.

“Immigration controls are already absolutely killing us,” says Simon, who works as a chef at a north London pub.

“The brewery has been advertising for a qualified kitchen manager for the past two and a half years but hasn’t had a single response. That means all the rest of us have to do that job.”

Simon says everyone has to work harder and longer hours because of unfilled posts.

“Some of the bigger pubs in this chain are offering up to £52,000 a year to do that job but are still getting no takers because there are so few experienced people around,” he says.

“Most of the people here are migrants and have indefinite leave to remain. If Farage sent them all away, there’d be just six of us with citizenship—running a restaurant with up to 70 diners a sitting. It’s just not possible.

“This pub would collapse. The whole industry would collapse.”

Simon adds that bosses have recently promoted cleaners without any catering training to work in the kitchen. “That comes with a lot of potential hazards, to both the workers and customers.

“And now the pub can’t find anyone to clean the place either.”

Farage’s deportation plan would mean many pubs, bars, cafes and nightclubs would close down.

Migrants are the solution to housing crisis, not the cause

Rather than being the cause of the housing crisis, more migration is the only way to stop it.

Britain is desperately short of affordable accommodation and the only way to solve the problem is to build millions of council houses.

Even if there was a government with the political will to do this, skills shortages would make it impossible without workers born overseas.

Around one in ten construction workers in Britain is a migrant, with the average migrant worker having been here for just under 12 years. Many have ILR and would be sent away under Farage’s plans.

Bosses say they would need to train more than 250,000 new construction workers by 2027 just to meet current demand. A government that wanted to solve the housing crisis would need far more than that.

But right now Britain trains fewer than 20,000 apprentices a year.

It takes around three years of training to qualify in construction and a further two years of site experience to be competent.

Farage claims he would ramp up training in all sectors affected by deportations. But he knows that there are not enough young, British-born people to take up the slack.

Instead, sites would grind to a halt. Building suppliers would go bankrupt and hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs.

And the housing crisis would remain. No need for Farage to worry though—in addition to the house he doesn’t own in his Clacton constituency, he does own another four properties.

Who will provide our food?

Farage’s scheme will likely lead to massive food price inflation and shortages.

Draconian immigration rules already mean that, in Britain, food regularly rots because there too few workers to pick fruit and vegetables.

And the shortage of butchers, production operatives and HGV drivers is only getting worse, says the government’s Food Standards Agency.

Five in six dairy farmers say they have received “zero or very few” applications from qualified people for their job vacancies.

Industry roles are notoriously badly paid, and thousands of migrant workers are doing them at the moment. When Reform UK orders those people to leave, who will provide us with food?

Don’t buy their wage myths

Farage says that getting rid of migrants will mean a pay rise for British-born workers. He is lying.

Instead of skills shortages meaning higher wages, there would be a massive slump in demand, and many industries would face collapse.

And bosses would attempt to get around any short-term increase in wages by investing more in technology that kills jobs.

Where they find that impossible, firms will simply try to pass on extra costs in the form of higher prices.

Unions that might have acted as a way to fight back against such moves will be in a much weaker position. That’s because racism has a cancerous effect on workers’ confidence and organisation.

And Reform UK’s plans to slash public spending and cut services, including the NHS, would also add hundreds of thousands to the dole queues.

As unemployment skyrockets, employers will try to drive down wages.

Many people are rightly furious that their pay has stagnated or fallen while rents, bills and prices have shot up.

Workers’ disposable incomes are falling, and lots of us use credit cards to make it to the end of the month.

That’s not because of migration but because bosses got away with attacks while our unions appeared too weak to resist them.

The only way for workers to turn the tables on stingy firms is to be more militant and more unified. Farage’s plan is a deliberate ploy to make that job harder.

No going back to the 1970s

What would happen to the worlds of music, sport and culture if Farage drove out migrants?

Pete from the QPR fan group, Love the Rs, Hate Racism, knows what it would mean for football.

“Reform UK wants to drive us back to the 1970s. That was a time of heavy racism on and off the pitch—and when you could easily name the few black players in the First Division,” he said.

“We had to struggle to change the game and to push out the fascists.

“Since then, much has changed for the better and many players with migrant heritage are now our baller heroes. At QPR, its Richard Kone from Côte d’Ivoire (below).

“Can you imagine Liverpool without Mo Salah?

“Can you imagine Arsenal without Bukayo Saka?

“Farage wants to drive them out. We can’t let him.”