Post-Brexit immigration policy will hit women hardest, advocates say

Now that the UK has officially left the EU, the government has decided to overhaul its immigration system, and women are about to become the big losers in the process. In an attempt to lure “high-wage, high-skill” workers, the Home Office announced Wednesday, the new system will concentrate on admitting immigrants who work in highly paid sectors such as tech, leaving in the policy’s wake people who work lower-wage jobs like home and senior care—typically women’s work.

Set to be implemented in January 2021, the new rules use a points-based system that tallies “specific skills, qualifications, salaries, or professions.” Visas are given to people who gain enough points. There will also be a salary minimum required to get a visa—job offers must come with a salary of at least 25,600 pounds (US$33,300). This restriction will hit women hardest, advocates say, because skilled, immigrant women’s work is more likely to be lower paid than men’s.

“The new immigration system roundly fails to understand the lived experience of women, many of whom are prevented from accessing paid work by the weight of unpaid work—caring for children, older people and those with disabilities—that successive governments rely upon them to do,” Sophie Walker, the chief executive of the Young Women’s Trust, a British feminist organization, told The New York Times.

And for those women who do paid work in the care sector, jobs are “undervalued and underpaid,” Mandu Reid, the leader of the UK’s Women’s Equality Party, told the Times. She stressed that the new salary requirement would be “shutting out care workers, piling pressure on women to take on yet more unpaid care, and widening the existing social care gap between need and provision.”

The Home Office argued that the UK has been losing out on high-level workers because its immigration policy hasn’t put Britain first. “For too long, distorted by European free movement rights, the immigration system has been failing to meet the needs of the British people,” the Home Office said. Many have interpreted this sentiment to be part of the xenophobia that led to Brexit in the first place.

“We need to shift the focus of our economy away from a reliance on cheap labor from Europe and instead concentrate on investment in technology and automation,” it said in a statement. “Employers will need to adjust.”

Applicants who work in STEM jobs will be given 10 points more than people who have other PhDs, and that, again, “puts women on a back foot,” Adrienne Yong, a lecturer in law at the City Law School in London, told the Times. “There is a great emphasis on wanting to attract scientists to the UK under the new system, but it is another well-known fact that women are underrepresented in the sciences.”

Still, there is another problem with the new system, advocates say, one the Home Office refuses to acknowledge. Beyond leaving women behind, the policy will lead to a dearth of much-needed workers in sectors like nursing, experts say. The new policy has “triggered immediate warnings from businesses about the impact of anticipated worker shortages,” Bloomberg reported. In January, a government advisory group estimated that 70 percent of EU workers already in the UK wouldn’t have qualified for visas under the new rules.