Iqbal Mohamed

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. Last week I held a meeting with the Nigerian community in my constituency. Around 30 workers were present, many of whom work intolerably long hours performing vital tasks for scandalously low pay in the healthcare and social care sectors. These people are scared: they are scared that the state will arbitrarily deprive them of their security and their ability to plan for the future with any certainty. One of those individuals—her name is Uzoamaka—wrote to me outlining her concerns. Uzoamaka came to our country in 2022, and works in the NHS. She wrote: “I am an immigrant, a taxpayer, a worker, and a human being. But the new immigration white paper strips me and others like me of dignity, stability, and belonging”, She goes on to say that proposals to extend indefinite leave to remain “to make someone live in limbo for ten years, despite working hard and paying taxes, is cruelty in slow motion. Ten years of exclusion, from a future. This is not about integration. It is about humiliation.” How can a Labour Administration who profess to care about social justice participate in such performative barbarity against immigrants—a group already vilified in the media and subject to acute marginalisation in wider society? As Uzoamaka writes: “this entire system treats immigrants as disposable tools. We are good enough to pay into the NHS, but not to benefit from it. We are needed but never welcomed.” Similarly, a proposal that workers could still qualify after five years if they earn over £50,000 is “a gatekeeping tool. Most healthcare assistants, carers, cleaners, and laboratory technicians will never meet this bar. Yet we clap for them, we depend on them, we call them key workers. Now we discard them.”