The British government wants to reshape immigration after Brexit

ONE PHRASE has cropped up again and again in Britain’s migration debate since 2005. That was the year Tony Blair, running for his third term as prime minister, promised an Australian-style points-based immigration system. As down under, marks could be awarded for, say, qualifications, linguistic ability or relative youthfulness. The idea is popular on the right, too: Nigel Farage, one of the architects of Brexit, often talks about it.

Britain’s membership of the European Union meant such a scheme could never be applied to all arrivals. Its rules allowed any citizen of another member state to move to Britain, regardless of their characteristics. In some years, the bloc supplied most of Britain’s newcomers. But Brexit changes the calculus. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has promised to end freedom of movement and reshape immigration. His home secretary, Priti Patel, tasked the Migration Advisory Committee, an official panel of wonks, to look to Australia.

Yet the committee’s report, published on January 28th, is unenthusiastic. It emphasises that other countries with points, like New Zealand and Canada, only use them in parts of their immigration system. The authors argue that the current system for recruiting long-term workers from abroad—under which non-European migrants must have a job offer—already provides workers with the right skills, so there is no need for additional filtering. Nor do points-based systems guarantee the desired type of migrant. The report explains that when Britain used a similar approach to recruit talented migrants from outside the EU between 2002 and 2006, it awarded high scores to those with a PHD, an MBA or for GPs. But only 2.8% of successful applicants had a PHD, 2.3% an MBA, and 0.5% were GPs.

The committee essentially proposes that all applicants should be processed under the current system for migrants from outside the EU, with a few tweaks, including allowing them to take up jobs that require the equivalent of A-level qualifications, not only degrees. Most potential migrants would need a job offer with a prospective salary above the bottom quartile of the range for that role and above a threshold for all eligible jobs, which would fall by 15% to £25,600 ($33,300), to reflect the broader range of eligible jobs. There would be some exceptions to the threshold, such as health-care workers. A points system could be used to rank applicants without a job for a separate visa for “exceptionally talented” people, which currently admits several hundred migrants a year.

The committee acknowledges that tighter restrictions on European immigrants would dent economic growth and employment levels. Firms starved of cheap labour would have to generate more from existing resources, though the committee expects only slight increases in productivity. But the lower salary threshold would at least make it easier to recruit non-European workers, says Ian Robinson of Fragomen, a law firm. “It will mean less contorting what a person is paid to fit the system.”

The government can choose to ignore the report. Within hours of its publication, it reaffirmed its commitment to introduce a points-based system. But there is not much time for big changes. A complex new system would mean retraining Home Office staff and tweaking IT systems by the time the transition period—during which Britain and the EU apply the same rules—ends in December. The government is more likely to accept most of the committee’s recommendations but nevertheless call it a points-based system. As Alan Manning, the committee’s chair, writes, such branding “is, forgive the pun, pointless”. ■