Azernews.Az

The British government seeks to tighten visa requirements to curb the number of workers arriving through legal routes, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer attempts to address dissatisfaction over immigration that has led to growing support for the populist Reform UK party, Azernews reports.

The measures — outlined in the Immigration White Paper that will be released Monday — propose new graduate level requirements for skilled visa applicants and limits on lower-skilled visas. Changes to deportation and removal rules will also be announced Monday to make it easier to remove foreign criminals committing crimes in the UK.

Starmer has pledged to reduce migration to Britain in response to concerns over the pressure on public services. The issue prompted protests shortly after Labour took office last summer, which descended into right-wing violence, and it’s widely seen as having contributed to wins by Nigel Farage’s Reform party in local elections held recently.

A group will be assigned to identify where industries rely too much on foreign labor, according to a Home Office announcement Sunday. One of the measures will be to grant lower-skilled time-limited visas only on the basis of strong evidence of worker shortages and where employers can commit to increasing domestic skills and recruitment.

What the government doing is “a fundamental shift in the approach to say that the immigration system should be properly linked to skills and training here in the UK,” Home Secretary Yvette Copper told the BBC on Sunday. “Those changes will come in the course of this year and those changes together will lead to, we expect, a reduction of up to 50,000 fewer lower skilled visas over the course of the next year.”