Kemi Badenoch’s Hawkish Immigration Policies Are Courting the Far-Right

Recently, by way of a video, Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, proposed a sweeping salvo of plans to clamp down on immigration. In the video, wearing a burgundy suit and framed against the British flag, she taps the timeless iconography of nationalist politics. “Britain is our home, it’s not a hotel,” she begins. “It’s time to tell the truth about immigration and propose real plans to do something about it.” “I want to reduce immigration and make living here actually mean something,” she ventures. 

The melee of proposed changes includes, amongst others, immigrants having to live in the UK for 10 years as opposed to five, before being able to apply for indefinite leave to remain; only net contributors can apply and criminals are banned; social benefit claimants are not eligible; 5 years not 12 months after being granted indefinite leave to remain before one can apply for a British passport; and not least, illegal immigrants are automatically banned from ever getting leave to remain or a passport. 

These proposals are the latest in a long line of hawkish initiatives and rhetoric she has touted since she assumed leadership of the Conservative Party. Her hardline disposition towards immigration seems to derive from her desire to position the Tory party, under her leadership, in a different light to its previous 14-year reign, which began with David Cameron and ended with Rishi Sunak, who was expelled emphatically by Labor MP Keir Starmer last year. 

The fourteen-year stretch of Tory’s reign kicked off in 2010 against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis. Cameron had campaigned on the mandate to bolster the economy and bring down immigration. His tumultuous tenure however saw him struggle to achieve his campaign promises. In 2016, in an attempt to rally the nation in support of a common cause, he called the Brexit referendum, expecting citizens to vote to remain. They instead voted to exit the European Union, prompting his resignation. 

Successive Conservative administrations were similarly mired in economic troubles, high net migration levels (cresting at 728,000 in June of 2024 under Rishi Sunak, up from around 160,000 in 2019), pervasive allegations of ineptitude and a slew of scandals—Boris Johnson’s Covid parties being the foremost example. In Badenoch’s catalog of her predecessors’ woe, their failure to temper the nation’s steep spiral into economic and infrastructural collapse, their struggles to tame the beast of surging immigration, and their feeble attempts at burnishing their respective public images at once represent different manifestations of the same deficiency and constitute their gravest transgressions. 

Badenoch’s exactitude towards immigration is hardly an isolated incident. Since the mid-2010s, strong nationalist sentiments have increasingly fanned over the Western world. Lega per Salvini Premier, led by Matteo Salvini, as well as other right-wing parties—including Brothers of Italy, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—have increasingly gained traction in Italy. Over in France, the right-wing nationalist party National Rally has enacted a virulent campaign to suffuse the national consciousness with far-right populist rhetoric.  Donald Trump and his roving MAGA coalition is however the prime exemplar and the embodiment of this strain of nationalist politics. 

These politicians—Trump, Meloni and now Badenoch—contend that high immigration is a scourge that is both gnawing at the economy of their respective countries and the soul of these nations. Trump, while addressing the issue of illegal migration, has been known to use language like “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country.” These immigrants waltz into their countries, bringing with them crime and taking jobs away from locals. Although the particulars of their rhetoric differ, a commonality between the economic perspectives of these nationalist politicians is that they present a simple argument: immigrants cause the supply of labor to outpace demand, reducing wages in effect. 

Tucked within their anxieties around the economic strains attendant with migration, is the even bigger worry that the influx of immigrants, each with the culture and traditions of their native communities, would dilute the culture of their host countries. To drive home this anxiety, far-right nationalist pages on X like RadioGenoa typically deploy videos of squalid communities in places like Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern suburb in Paris, with a high percentage of immigrants. Certain parts of the suburb are steeped in squalor, mirroring a third-world nation. Inebriated destitutes can be seen dawdling on the curb, lilting under the influence of intoxicants. Droves of homeless people can be seen camping on the side of the streets, a sprawl of tents dappling the curb. Ambling down certain streets in the suburb, one can also glimpse decrepit street markets that look as though they were excised from a developing nation and casually plopped there. 

Politicians as temperamentally and ideologically disparate as Trump and Badenoch have properly diagnosed the problems their nations are faced with but they have hastily and perhaps maliciously ascribed them to a familiar target—immigrants. They fail to mention that the consensus in frontier economic research is that immigration is overwhelmingly beneficial to host countries. According to research by Micheal Clemens, a professor of Economics at George Mason University and a winner of the Royal Economic Society Prize, removing all barriers to the free migration of people would cause the global economy to increase by 50 to 150 percent. For comparison, removing all barriers to free trade would cause the global economy to grow by 4%. 

According to Clemens’ research, which hews according to the consensus of leading economic theory, immigration is overwhelmingly a net-positive economic activity. That is to say, all parties involved are better off for it. The benefits for the immigrants are clear: they get access to better-paying jobs and an improved quality of life. Their home countries also benefit through remittances, which form a key component of revenue for emerging economies. Skills transfer, which occurs when immigrants return to their home countries, is another way these countries benefit. 

Host countries, research shows, are however the biggest beneficiaries of this shuffling of populations. According to Giovanni Peri, a professor of Economics at the University of California, low-skilled migrants typically do not compete with citizens for jobs. Instead, they work complementary jobs, jobs citizens tend to shirk, such as farming, cleaning, or service jobs. The effects of this include more complementary jobs for citizens, lower costs owing to relatively cheaper labor costs, and the extra disposable income attendant with consumers purchasing products for cheaper opens up the opportunity for them to spend on other goods and services; this feedback loop propels an economy upwards. Skilled workers have a much more positive impact on the economy because they tend to drive innovation. In America for example, immigrants or their children have founded 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google, and Levi Strauss. Elon Musk, who has played the role of Trump’s dark horse in his second term, is himself an immigrant. 

Badenoch has styled herself as a hardy opposition leader who is poised to remedy fourteen years of Tory ineptitude and deliver Britain from the economic mire it’s currently trapped in. But how is her draconian strategy going to improve the problem? Britain’s lumbering economy has forced many of its skilled professionals, especially healthcare workers, to leave in search of better opportunities. The UK depends on a steady stream of migrants to fill the positions created by these exits. If Badenoch, in an attempt to pander to an increasingly disaffected populace, brands the UK as hostile or unwelcoming to migrants, especially skilled ones, its economy will only descend further into disrepair. 

These sweeping and stultifying constellations of proposed policies and implicit finger-wagging are an iteration of a sentiment that has echoed across history. Anytime economic uncertainty coincides with significant shifts in the social configuration of a region, the result has always been a flurry of farcical discriminatory ideologies. In Laura Kipnis’ seminal essay for Liberties, Gender: A Melee, she carefully contends with thought leaders like George Gilder who blamed feminism for upending the social order and claimed that the movement would spell “the collapse of Western civilization and probably the social order itself.” 

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that Western civilization has not collapsed, at least not yet. Kipnis argues, with preternatural clarity, that Gilder had it all wrong. It was the reshuffling of the social order, brought about by capitalism, that precipitated feminism, not the other way around. Sinking wages made the concept of the archetypal home with a male breadwinner and a domesticated wife unfeasible. Also, the new class of jobs heralded by industrialization did not require the brute strength that men had an advantage at. These factors contributed to the rise of working-class women, who, having been empowered by upward social mobility, were able to advocate for feminism.  

It’s the same thing with the rise of immigration in the UK. Immigrants are not the source of the economic hardships the country is faced with, it’s instead the country’s doddering economy that has necessitated an increasing stream of migrants. Badenoch claims to be incontrovertibly in service to the British people but if anything, her actions show that she’s simply deploying a familiar script: providing an embodied culprit for the discontent of the people. In the 1920s, when Germany was reeling from the economic woes of having waged a failed war—World War 1—Hitler rose through the ranks with a potent and simple albeit prejudicial solution; serving up a culprit: the Jews. They were responsible for controlling the banks and taking jobs from the locals and so exterminating them would provide a reprieve from the country’s long-drawn economic woes. 

The rhetoric peddled by today’s far-right politicians—Trump and Badenoch, amongst others—is clearly of a more subtle iteration, albeit belonging to the same tack. While Hitler sought to purge they seek to expel. There are clearly problems with the UK’s immigration system, but serving migrants—most of which form the core of some of the UK’s most vital industries (healthcare and tech)—as sacrificial lambs to appease an irate population, will be detrimental to the UK in the long run.