We know legal immigration is at an all-time high, but why? There has to be a reason.
Well, the first one is education. In order to keep the University fee gravy train running, the Universities have to import more people. The downturn in the economy of late has put a dent into the University intake, plus kids have realised they can just go straight into retail jobs without the hassle of another 2 or three years at school and end up with a huge debt.
So the Universities turn their attention to the wider world, importing scholars from abroad. Not only that, but for some stupid reason the UK allows the dependents of students to come over with them. So it's not just the student, it could also be their mum and/or dad coming with them.
That's the first reason for the bump in immigration.
The second is global corporations not wanting to spend on training. Instead of actually paying for trainees, they would rather the kids stump up the cash and get into debt in University. Then they'll cherry-pick the people they want after they have been trained. Sadly, the UK Universities don't always supply the sort of talent the global corporations crave (in other words that degree in Fashion Psychology isn't work shit) and instead trawl the world for decent graduates that have been educated in an old-school non-woke environment.
So the UK workforce ends up working in a retail environment, whatever their education status, while global corporations import talent from the rest of the world.
The Conservatives plan to stem this didn't work. Increasing the amount of earnings the person was required to earn before they could come to the UK only disadvantaged those coming over as Wives and Girlfriends of UK citizens.
The people being imported by Global Corporations are earning the sort of sums way above the arbitrary government limit because they are worth it to those corporations. The sort of non-woke, unindoctrinated people that are actually worth the salary our own students were promised, but never achieve thanks to the failure of the University system in the UK.
Lots needs to be done. The Universities need to be put on notice to stop spewing out unemployable people. Farage has it right when he says that he'd waive fees on S.T.E.M. subjects. We need to start concentrating on getting back to the Universities providing employable people and not Political activists.
Finally as an incentive, I'd be "fining" the global corporations with extra N.I. for anyone imported from abroad. I'd be tripling or more the employer's N.I. for that person as a way of disincentivising the employer and clawing back some money for the loss to the economy. If it could be that with additional tax costs elsewhere the cost to the corporation was equal to training a person up in the UK, that would be a worthwhile solution because then you could argue the reliance on imported labour would be short-term until we have a tranche of employable people in the UK paid for by the corporations. That would pay for the STEM-subject UK student to get their skills for free.
Of course the Brick-Wall treatment of getting Non-Doms and global corporations to pay all of their tax in the UK and not abroad would be the ideal solution, but I doubt the rich political donors would want the party they paid for to do anything against their interests.