Answering Reform on immigration

Q Reform did well in the 7 May elections. Doesn’t this show that people are upset at soaring immigration and want something done about it?

A. Reform did well at capturing the “fed up” vote. But more so in areas with fewer migrants, where migrants can be portrayed as a remote but powerful danger, a scapegoat for all ills, than in areas where migrants are real people, neighbours and workmates. Immigration does not pose a threat to British workers. London, with lots of immigrants, is not a worse place to live than Clacton, with hardly any! On the contrary. Reform’s platform is one that spreads lies and hatred about migrants, using them as scapegoats to evade the real issues.

Q. But housing is a real issue. Immigrants take too much of it away from British people who need it. Reform plans to prioritise British citizens for social housing.

A. 90% of social-renters were born in the UK or Ireland. Immigrants make up a small number of those in social housing across the UK. Anyway, everybody deserves housing regardless of where they were born, and we have the capability to provide it for British-born people and immigrants. In the 1950s, with worse technology, fewer resources, and Tory governments, Britain built an average of 147,000 new council homes a year.

The issue with housing in the UK is not that migrants are taking too much of it, it’s that housing is treated as an asset for the creation of profits by landlords instead of a right for all people. In the early 1980s the Thatcher government forced councils to sell off their stock cheap (“right to buy”), and effectively stopped them borrowing to build more. “Right to buy” is still in operation (the Labour government has drafted plans to curb it sharply, but not implemented them), and in quarter 4 of 2025 only 1.7% of new house-building in England was council homes.

The solution isn’t to get rid of migrants. It’s an increase in council home building, banning the selling-off of council houses, nationalising the building industry, and introducing rent controls.

Q. Regardless of where they’re living, immigrants take jobs and wages here that should go to British people first.

A. There isn’t a fixed total of jobs and wages. Immigration generates more jobs and wages, just as more local-born children becoming working-age adults does. Countries of high immigration generally have higher rates of prosperity than more shut-off economies.

Many essential services and industries - the NHS, social care, construction - depend heavily on migrant workers, often highly-skilled. Without the contribution of those migrant workers, large areas of economic and social life would shrivel, and there would be fewer jobs and less wages for all.

The idea that British workers should despair at the idea of immigrants making up a significant part of the UK’s workforce serves only the bosses. Workers, local-born or migrant, can prosper only by uniting to fight the bosses, not by competing with each other for a supposedly fixed amount of spillover from the bosses’ banqueting-tables.

Wages are driven down, jobs are scrapped, and conditions are made worse all the more easily when there is no organised and united working-class action. Only by recognising the common ground we share as workers and by organising with one another, instead of allowing ourselves to be divided by where we were born, or what colour our skins are, can we make our jobs and workplaces better.

Q. But Reform backs British workers. Didn’t Farage pose with that union placard at a steel mill last year?

A. A lie on Farage’s part. He certainly held a union-branded placard while claiming Reform would support UK workers, but their entire program exists to strengthen the position of bosses and landlords, and weaken everyone else.

Reform will repeal the Employment Rights Act 2025, and so increase zero-hour contracts, make fire-and-rehire easier, make union organisation and action harder, and scrap parental leave and statutory sick pay as day one rights for workers. They would also abolish the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, leading to the reintroduction of Section 21, which empowers landlords to evict tenants without providing a reason.

Q. But it’s not just jobs, is it? Migrants also take money from benefits that could go to British people!

A. Make your mind up! Is your complaint against migrants that they take all the jobs, or that they remain unemployed and take benefits?

85% of Universal Credit recipients are British born, not migrants (about the same as the British-born percentage in the population). Asylum-seekers are barred from taking jobs, but also from benefits. Something like four million migrant workers have, by law, “No Recourse to Public Funds”, usually as a condition of their visas.

Far from Britain being flooded with foreign-born pensioners, around 247,000 British citizens aged 65 and over live in other EU countries (excluding Ireland), and only 85,000 people aged 65 and over from those countries live in the UK.

Reform UK pledge only to cut welfare while cutting taxes, policies that benefit the rich and punish the poor, the unemployed, the homeless. Regardless of nationality, all people deserve the support of a generous welfare system to protect against poverty. The currently poor system is not the fault of migrants who “take too much”, but of years of austerity measures, and our solution should be to tax the rich.

Q. But our services are also under immense strain from migrants. The NHS can’t handle this many people.

A. The problems in the NHS aren’t caused by migrants, they’re caused by underfunding and by successive governments that are too afraid, or unwilling, to challenge the rich and their profits. Migrants use the NHS no more, or less, than British-born people. Maybe 1.5 million of them have to pay the Immigration Health Surcharge (£1,035 a year) to use the NHS, yet migrants are around 21% of NHS staff.

The idea that migrants are a strain on the NHS, instead of vital to it, is a barefaced lie. The NHS needs more staff, more equipment, more beds. Taxing the rich to fund public services is the answer, not deportations or bans on entry.

Reform’s plans for the NHS would lead to its destruction and a shift to private healthcare, like in the US.

Q. Reform is the only party with any realistic plan to limit immigration.

A. Reform’s plan to limit immigration revolves around setting up a British copy of the USA’s ICE and opening swathes of detention centres across the UK to hold, manage and deport migrants, at least 600,000 by their own plans. Reform has said it would place these detention centres in Green-controlled local authorities, avoiding areas where Reform is in power. It’s a British version of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies Is that a model to be copied?

Q. Well, maybe that’s what the Greens get for wanting to open our borders!

A. The Green Party wants to liberalise the immigration system, but it doesn’t have an “open borders” policy. You would still see deportations and asylum refusals under a Green government.

But we do want open borders. It’s not a far-fetched idea. Countries like the USA and Argentina had almost-open borders until after World War One, and prospered accordingly.

Immigration curbs allow for employers to exploit migrants more and whip up division between workers, local-born and migrant. Unity amongst all workers is how we take on the bosses and tackle the real issues.