Choices Ahead: Approaches to Lower Skilled Labour Migration after Brexit

The UK’s departure from the European Union (EU) implies the end of free movement rights for European Economic Area (EEA) and Swiss nationals to the UK. This is likely to have substantial impacts on the supply of EEA nationals to the UK labour market, including immigration to lower-skilled jobs. Around 220,000 EEA nationals enter the UK each year, of whom the majority work in lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs, which do not meet the skills or salary thresholds for admission under Tier 2 of the UK’s points-based system. Key questions therefore arise as to how a post-Brexit immigration system will affect the supply of workers into lower-skilled jobs in the UK; and what kinds of programmes should be put in place to regulate such flows.

Policy debates thus far indicate that low-skilled immigration might be regulated through sectoral and temporary programmes. This would be in contrast to current provisions on free movement, which offer a generous and flexible framework, allowing EEA immigrants access to extensive rights, including family reunion and pathways to settlement. They also allow immigrants in low-paid and insecure jobs to supplement their income through tax credits and welfare benefits, to switch and combine part-time or short-term jobs, and to freely move between places of origin and destination.

Replacing the free movement framework with more restrictive provisions could therefore have wide-ranging consequences for the mobility and settlement of migrants. The aim of this paper is to (1) explore the options for regulating immigration to lower-skilled jobs after Brexit, drawing on examples from other industrialised countries; and (2) to assess how successful different types of programmes would be in attracting and retaining (especially EEA) immigrants.