How Labour’s immigration policies erode the foundations of our profession

Labour’s proposed migration model is a profound betrayal. 

It abandons the party’s historic commitment to solidarity and justice. It undermines the intellectual foundations of social work in the UK. More than that, it strikes at the radical movement that shaped the profession, eroding its practice ethos and core values. 

Social work is built on anti‑racist and anti‑oppressive principles, on the defence of sanctuary, and on the pursuit of justice for those forced to the margins. Labour’s new model of exclusion collides directly with this tradition, replacing solidarity with suspicion, and belonging with segregation. It erodes the ethical principles that guide social work and professional identity. In place of inclusion, it institutionalises exclusion. In place of sanctuary, it imposes discrimination. 

Labour has abandoned the moral architecture that once distinguished it from reactionary politics, aligning itself instead with the punitive logics of the far right. In doing so, it undermines not only the political tradition of sanctuary but also the professional ethos of social work.

When prime minister Sir Keir Starmer warned Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers,” he inscribed into public discourse a vision of Britain fractured by migration. Although he later distanced himself from the phrase, its resonance is dangerous: it normalises suspicion, reframes belonging as conditional, and risks legitimising far‑right extremism within mainstream politics. 

For social work, this rhetoric is corrosive. It erodes the values of inclusion and solidarity upon which social work practice, and education have been built, and it signals a broader political project: the transformation of Britain from a country that once prided itself on sanctuary into one that weaponises bureaucracy to perpetuate exclusion.

Anti-discrimination and social work’s ethos

Social work in Britain has long been rooted in traditions of sanctuary, challenging discrimination and safeguarding the fragile promise of inclusion. From the East London settlement houses of 1884, where social workers stood shoulder to shoulder with impoverished refugees and migrant communities, to the advocacy that exposed the injustices of the Windrush scandal, the profession has consistently positioned itself against exclusionary statecraft. 

Migration itself has been a defining thread in Britain’s historical narrative. Across centuries, successive waves of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants have sought refuge on these shores: Huguenots escaping religious persecution, Jewish families fleeing pogroms, Asian Ugandans expelled by Idi Amin in the 1970s, and the Windrush generation who rebuilt post‑war Britain. 

Each arrival brought cultural renewal and economic vitality yet simultaneously exposed the enduring paradox at the nation’s core – the tension between Britain’s professed democratic ideals of openness and its recurrent impulse to retreat into racist policies, suspicion and exclusion.

The case of Asian Ugandans and other Asians expelled from East Africa in the 1970s is particularly revealing. Forced out by Idi Amin and other authoritarian regimes, they arrived in Britain under the rhetoric of humanitarian obligation, rebuilding their lives and contributing profoundly to the nation’s economic and cultural fabric. 

Yet, in a bitter and unsettling irony, some of the children of these immigrants – born and educated in Britain, and later ascending to positions of political power as Asian‑British home secretaries – presided over and legitimised some of the most exclusionary and racist immigration policies of recent decades.

Their trajectory exposes the paradox at the heart of Britain’s migration story: the refugee who once sought sanctuary becomes the architect of hostility, weaponising the very structures of exclusion that social work has historically resisted. 

This inversion of sanctuary into suspicion demonstrates how easily humanitarian traditions can be appropriated, hollowed out, and redeployed to sustain the machinery of racism and exclusion. It is a reminder that Britain’s sanctuary narrative is fragile, vulnerable to being rewritten by those who, having once benefited from refuge, now enforce hostility upon others.

Radical ethos under assault

Since the 1970s, social work has undergone profound transformation. The radical social work movement of that decade demanded that practitioners confront structural inequalities rather than simply manage individual need. 

The community social work initiatives of the 1980s sought to embed practice within collective struggles for justice. The anti‑racist and anti‑oppressive frameworks of the 1990s and early 2000s re‑centred dignity, equality, and solidarity as non‑negotiable professional imperatives in both practice and education. 

These developments forged a profession that understood itself not as neutral service delivery, but as resistance to systemic injustice.

Yet today, that ethos is under direct assault. The political climate has enabled far‑right extremism to seep into the very fabric of social work, with some social care practitioners, including qualified and registered social workers, openly celebrating home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s far‑right Labour migration policies.

This capitulation is not a neutral gesture; it is a profound betrayal of the profession’s anti‑racist and anti‑oppressive heritage. What was once a tradition of sanctuary risks being hollowed out and inverted, transformed into complicity with the politics of suspicion and hostility.

A continuity of hostility

Britain’s immigration history is scarred by exclusionary laws: the 1905 Aliens Act restricting Jewish refugees, the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act targeting Kenyan Asians, and Theresa May’s “hostile environment,” which culminated in the Windrush scandal. 

Labour’s proposed migration policies do not break with this lineage, they extend it. By redefining citizenship as something refugees must wait two decades to access, Labour entrenches exclusion as a structural principle of governance. This is not integration; it is segregation.

Social workers know the consequences of such hostility: destitution, racism, barriers to healthcare, education and housing, and the erosion of trust in institutions. Labour’s plan risks embedding these injustices for a generation, institutionalising limbo as the defining condition of refugee life.

Out of step with Europe

Labour’s proposal is extreme even by European standards. In Germany, refugees can apply for permanent residency after five years, and citizenship soon after. In France, the threshold is ten years. Denmark, often cited by Labour, has pursued one of Europe’s toughest regimes, but even there refugees are not kept in limbo for twenty years before qualifying for citizenship.

What is striking is not only Labour’s divergence from European norms, but its convergence with the politics of Reform UK. In competing with Reform, Labour has abandoned the values of solidarity, justice, and sanctuary that once defined the party. 

Economic folly, social consequences

Britain faces chronic shortages in healthcare, social care, and construction – sectors where refugees and migrants often contribute significantly. To exclude them from citizenship for 20 years is to squander human capital, weaken public services, and undermine competitiveness.

Social workers understand that citizenship fosters trust in institutions, while exclusion breeds alienation. Practitioners will be left to manage fractured communities and escalating need, forced to absorb the consequences of policies that corrode solidarity and legitimise hostility.

Media, extremism, and the shifting centre

The rise of hard‑right rhetoric in broadcast media has shifted the political centre of gravity. Labour’s adoption of policies echoing this discourse is not pragmatism, it is capitulation. By embracing the language of exclusion, Labour legitimises extremist logic and drags the mainstream further to the right.

For social work, the normalisation of hostility poses a direct challenge to the professional values of fairness, solidarity, anti-racism and human rights. The danger is not only that refugees are denied belonging, but that social work itself is reshaped into an instrument of containment rather than a practice of liberation.

Citizenship as belonging

Citizenship carries symbolic as well as material weight. It signals recognition, acceptance, and equality: the right to vote, protection against deportation and affirmation of belonging.Without it, refugees remain trapped in conditionality, perpetually reminded that their presence is tolerated but never embraced.

Social work, grounded in principles of inclusion and empowerment, recognises that citizenship is not a luxury but a necessity for integration. To deny it for 20 years is to deny the very possibility of belonging, and to collude, whether intentionally or not, with far‑right logics of exclusion that threaten to reshape the profession’s moral core.

Britain’s responsibility

The moral bankruptcy of Labour’s policy is compounded by Britain’s geopolitical entanglements. Many of the conflicts driving people to Britain’s shores are the direct consequence of Western interventions. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have all been destabilised by military actions in which Britain played decisive roles. To deny citizenship to those displaced by such interventions is to compound the injustice.

Social workers, who often support refugees traumatised by war, understand the human cost of these entanglements. Labour’s plan not only denies sanctuary but erases Britain’s responsibility for the displacement it has helped create.

A dangerous future

The danger lies not only in the immediate impact on refugees but in the precedent it sets. To institutionalise the idea that refugees must remain outsiders for decades erodes the foundations of liberal democracy. 

For social work, this future is bleak. Practitioners will be forced to operate within a system that deliberately undermines their values, tasked with managing the consequences of exclusion rather than fostering inclusion. 

The collapse of social work values

Labour’s immigration model is not simply a policy misstep; it is a moral collapse. By extending refugee limbo to 20 years before British citizenship can be attained, Labour has positioned itself not only to the right of Germany and France, but in dangerous alignment with Denmark’s hard‑line approach. 

Denmark has become synonymous with Europe’s most exclusionary migration regime, where hostility is embedded into law and practice. By echoing this model, Labour signals capitulation to far‑right agendas rather than resistance. What is presented as pragmatism is, in reality, the institutionalisation of segregation and the denial of belonging.

For social work, the implications are stark. Its commitment to sanctuary and solidarity is now placed under direct assault. Labour’s migration model does not merely challenge technical aspects of welfare provision; it destabilises the ethical architecture of the profession itself. 

Social workers will be compelled to navigate the consequences of exclusionary governance. They will confront heightened trauma in vulnerable children and adults, fragmentation within communities, and the erosion of trust in institutions. What is at stake is not only practice, but the very moral horizon of social work as a radical project of social justice and belonging.

Britain risks being remade into an “island of strangers,” not through the presence of migrants and refugees, but through the deliberate construction of exclusionary regimes by those in power. The threat lies in the state’s choice to normalise far‑right extremism within policy and to embed suspicion into the very architecture of belonging. 

To withhold citizenship is to strip away the conditions of recognition and participation. It is to repudiate Britain’s own historical narrative as a place of refuge. It is to betray the anti‑racist, anti-discriminatory and anti‑oppressive foundations of social work, which insist upon dignity, solidarity, and sanctuary. 

And it is to erode the democratic soul of the nation, replacing inclusion with segregation and justice with hostility.

Dr Charles Mugisha is a qualified social worker with extensive experience in child protection practice and education. He is also a researcher specialising in social work with children and families