“We are deflated, we are sad.We feel the government is trying to pull the rug from under our feet,” says David.“It is like we are being criticised for working in a sector which the government called for us to come help with.”David – not his real name – is a care worker for adults with learning disabilities.He came to the east of England from Nigeria in 2022 with his wife as the Conservative government turned to migration to tackle the social care recruitment crisis.

Since then, while working long shifts on less than £13 an hour, he says, “we have built relationships, we have put down roots – we have built a network”.Under Labour’s immigration plans, David is one of more than 300,000 people who work in social care and in some other low-income roles who could now face a 15-year wait to be allowed to make a permanent life in the UK.Throughout the application process, he was told that, after five years, he could qualify for indefinite leave to remain (ILR), freeing him from the employer that sponsored his visa.He had achieved the necessary level in English, and passed the requisite Life in the UK test after swotting up on Henry VIII’s wives.But Labour now wants to tear up that promise.

This is the first and most obvious problem with these reforms, which David is campaigning against, as an activist for Unison,Making retrospective changes that affect people’s lives so detrimentally is manifestly unfair; Angela Rayner was right to call it “un-British”,The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has estimated that as many as 1,3 million people already in the UK could see their wait for ILR increased, many to 10 years,A second powerful objection, which has been highlighted by the IPPR and the labour market economist Jonathan Portes, is that the government’s sums just don’t add up.

The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has claimed that the changes would save £10bn.That figure is based on the idea that once immigrants have leave to remain, they are entitled to claim benefits, and the lower-income groups targeted by her policies are more likely to be eligible for these.The government has not shown its workings for the £10bn claim, however, and Portes extracted data from the Migration Advisory Committee that showed the gain could be as little as £600m.And while workers wait for settlement, they would remain tied to a single employer: a situation in which they have little bargaining power, and are vulnerable to exploitation.That points to a third objection to the proposals.

This extended limbo period – which would be 15 years for social care workers such as David, and 10 for most other migrants – is unlikely to be good for social integration, or for these workers’ ability to make a positive economic contribution.After surging from 2022-24, recruitment into low-paid social care jobs from overseas has now been closed down by changes in visa rules.Net migration across the economy has plunged.But the Home Office’s plan is that for most future arrivals, across the economy, the baseline qualification period for ILR should be a decade.That means a full 10 years paying taxes, visa fees and an annual levy to use the NHS, with little or no opportunity to move between employers and progress.

For migrant care workers who answered the UK’s call, the Home Office plans mean an extended period of uncertainty at best.And it seems a particular irony that this group – social care staff – is one Labour has made some progress in trying to support.A new Fair Pay Agreement is promised, with the government overseeing pioneering sector-wide negotiations aimed at improving the lot of these undervalued workers.The deal is intended to come into force from April 2028.Yet by singling out this group for the longest wait before they belong in the UK – with high-paid workers on a faster track – the Home Office seems to be validating the deprecation of this essential work that helps explain why it’s under-rewarded in the first place.

The hope is that improved terms and conditions will tempt UK-born workers to take up some of the 7% of jobs in the sector that are still unfilled (mercifully down from 10% a few years ago).But surely there is a profound contradiction in implementing progressive proposals for collective bargaining in social care while making hundreds of thousands of the sector’s existing workers more economically and socially insecure, at the stroke of a pen.Ultimately, the presence of so many migrant care workers in the UK is the result of successive governments’ failure to build a properly funded social care sector.Labour, too, has shamefully ducked it thus far, though Louise Casey is currently retreading this well-worn ground.Meanwhile, individuals such as David are ripping up their life plans because of Labour’s proposals.

He and his wife are reconsidering the possibility of starting afresh in Canada, which they had previously rejected.“No one wants to stay somewhere social care workers are not valued by the government,” he says.“They’re punishing us for the low wages that they themselves have set.”