Mahmood’s moral mission of fear and panic

Blog post by Idreas Khandy, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
 
The British Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, previewed what her ‘moral mission’ would look like when she laid out the broad contours of the measures concerning legal migration to the UK. The proposed measures, if adopted, would be the ‘biggest overhaul of legal migration model in 50 years’. The announcement amounted to the Home Office tipping its hat towards the far-right, whose rhetoric on immigration now openly advocates mass deportation. Crucially, this unfolded at a time when hate crimes against racial and religious minorities are rising in hospitals, schools and public transport.

Given this context, the announcement, coupled with its endorsement by Farage’s Reform, deepened existing concerns among racialised migrants. Within days of the announcement, as The Guardian reported, some immigrants in fear stopped accessing the support they are legally eligible for, despite strict eligibility conditions. Online, the immediate response to the announcement was that of shock, disbelief and confusion. For instance, discussions on a highly active subreddit (r/SkilledWorkerVisaUK, about 23K weekly visitors) focusing on immigration to the UK expressed feelings of betrayal, feeling unwanted, being asked to ‘prove’ one’s ‘worth’ again, and frustration at the vagueness of the proposal and the accompanying consultation.

​A closer reading of the proposed changes and the accompanying consultation suggests that both are rooted in a racial logic, and that a flawed consultation process may be used to legitimise their implementation, with serious consequences for the UK in the coming years.

Making facts to serve racial logic
The racial logic of the proposed measures becomes clear when we look at who is most affected. As Nick Beales of RAMFEL pointed out, the government’s ‘earned settlement’ plans disproportionately disadvantage South Asian, African and Caribbean migrants, revealing ‘the intersection between classism and racism’. Further, data from the Migration Observatory show clear earnings inequalities by nationality: workers from many South Asian and African countries tend to earn significantly less, on average, than workers from the EU, North America or Oceania. Such income disparities mean that any immigration policy measures tied to earnings are more exacting on migrants from the Global South. The fact that the Earned Settlement paper excluded immigrants on the Ukraine route from its analysis altogether further underlines the racial logic, granting exemptions to one predominantly white refugee group while tightening rules for others.

The consultation may be invoked as proof of fairness to undercut accusations of racial logic. However, several issues invite scepticism, suggesting the consultation could be an exercise in making the facts first and consulting later. Firstly, on access and integrity. The survey is not geo-fenced, making it vulnerable to manipulation by bad-faith actors, including bots that have been used to skew online consultations in the recent past. Yet responses also appear to be limited by IP address, which in practice can exclude people living in shared accommodation, whether families or unrelated individuals in HMOs. Secondly, the survey questions, as respondents have noted, were framed in an unclear manner, so much so that Amnesty UK had to issue a response guide to aid the respondents.

The design choices become legible once one takes into account the exclusionary logic latent in the proposal. It leaves one with the impression that the policy changes will become law regardless of opposition, which raises the question of their impact.
 
Hostility and the making of a new underclass
Firstly, the measures stand to make the UK more hostile and less attractive. Signs of this are already visible as net migration fell by 78% in the year ending June 2025. However, a fall in net migration will not necessarily improve conditions since the economy remains structurally dependent on migrant labour, as the ONS shows. In this context, hostile policies towards immigrants could induce a large number of non-UK-born workers to leave. This has already begun in some core sectors such as healthcare. The potential knock-on effect of the crackdown on international students on university towns and the rental housing market linked to the sector is another case in point. At the same time, the Government’s growth-at-all-costs agenda could encourage businesses towards outsourcing and automation, since UK workers cannot be trained overnight. Moreover, UK-born workers may not want to work in sectors that depend on immigrant labour, such as adult social care and agriculture, as they tend to be low-paid and low-status.

The exit of a large number of immigrant workers is an extreme scenario; in practice, only those able to leave will do so. Those most likely to be affected will be the ones who are, for myriad reasons, less able to leave the UK. The impact will not just be around the increased time such individuals will need to settle in the UK. The proposed policy changes can potentially create a new underclass of people forced to live in conditions resembling those of modern slavery. The scandalous exploitation of seasonal workers whose need was created by Brexit in the first place offers a sobering reality check. So, it would be disingenuous to pretend that the proposed changes carry no such danger.

The danger is made plausible by the proposed policy’s linking of economic potential and the right to settle in the UK. Legal residence in the UK will no longer be enough. In other words, in Mahmood’s policy, the market is the site where individuals must prove their worth; the more they are able to exchange their labour for, the worthier they are. This is why the high-earners will have seven years removed from the proposed baseline qualifying period of ten years. Individuals on skilled work visas, despite earning higher than the UK median income (currently £39,039), will be eligible for settlement after 10 years and will be granted settlement only after demonstrating that they satisfy the requirements outlined in the announcement. In effect, applicants must have no criminal record, no state debt, an unbroken record of National Insurance contributions, and no history of claiming benefits while on a visa.

 The Home Office paper’s emphasis on ‘accessing public funds’ echoes and normalises a far-right trope that frames racialised migrants as a fiscal burden. In practice, settlement routes are generally tethered to employment, and redundancy automatically means loss of status for workers and their dependents, unless they find a new sponsor. This is why, of the 8 million people who availed Universal Credit as of July 2025, only 75,471 (less than 1%) had limited leave to remain. While official guidance affords exceptions for those with NRPF conditions, access remains tightly constrained. The rhetoric of targeting foreign ‘benefit-takers’, therefore, only mainstreams far-right rhetoric and reproduces the racial logic that runs through the proposals.

The most consequential proposed changes are the ones concerning dependents. The proposed change is two-pronged. On the one hand, the policy will require adult dependents to qualify for settlement separately from the main visa holders. Whether the main applicant and their adult dependent qualify at the same time will be dictated by earnings, meaning a dependent could, in theory, qualify sooner. However, on the other hand, this flexibility is rendered void because the paper explicitly states, ‘It would, however, remain the position that a person whose basis of stay has been as a dependant will only have a pathway to settlement where the main applicant is able to qualify’. If this change is applied as stated, a high-earning adult on a dependent visa will lose their right to live and work in the UK if the main applicant loses theirs, and, in fact, they cannot apply for settlement until the main applicant qualifies.

The proposed changes are especially worrisome for the dependents of workers who are not fluent in English, cannot find work in their field, have childcare responsibilities, or all of these together. Consequently, such individuals will not be able to satisfy the Home Office’s Contribution pillar unless their earnings are above £12,570. Given these structural barriers, the policy could create strong pressures that push some dependants toward accepting insecure or exploitative work simply to demonstrate economic contribution. To escape this situation, some individuals may feel compelled to rely on volunteering to reduce their qualifying period, as the policy suggests. However, volunteering is not clearly defined in the proposal, and charities have already raised ethical concerns about linking volunteering/unpaid labour to settlement. In a context of prolonged precarity, there is a risk that ambiguous expectations around ‘community contribution’ could allow unpaid or coercive work arrangements to emerge. Such arrangements will place migrants in situations resembling modern slavery and engender a new underclass of exploitable labour.
 
Conclusion
Ultimately, Mahmood’s ‘moral mission’ is less immigration reform and more gatekeeping belonging. Looking past the veneer of consultation, the grammar of this mission makes settlement conditional, market-mediated, and more punitive. The outcome will not simply be lower net migration, but deeper economic uncertainty, increased vulnerability for racialised migrants, and a tightening regime of dependency that risks normalising coercive work. The proposal does not merely echo far-right rhetoric: it operationalises it in everyday life, work and settlement in the UK.

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Image credit: Philafrenzy on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. 

Read further in Identities:

 Vigilant Whiteness: racism, transphobia and the mainstreaming of far-right politics in Britain

Whiteness, populism and the racialisation of the working class in the United Kingdom and the United States

On the proximity of the far right and the misuses of the ‘mainstreaming’ metaphor   OPEN ACCESS