A new Migration Watch UK report argues that Britain’s work visa system has become a route to permanent settlement for hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, equivalent to a city “the size of Glasgow”, arguing this will pose serious long-term social and economic problems.
“A country which repeatedly responds to [labour] shortages by recruiting overseas risks avoiding harder decisions about training, wages, productivity and workforce planning at home. In health and social care in particular, reliance on international recruitment has become embedded rather than exceptional.”
The group claims Britain’s work visa system has become a “machine of population growth” and while its account of the sharp rise in visas is supported by official figures, its forecast of future settlement is less certain.
Work visa grants, including those for dependants, peaked at 613,627 in 2023, according to the Home Office. By the year to June 2026, they had fallen to 234,841 following tighter rules and a steep drop in recruitment through the Health and Care Worker route.
Before 2021, EU nationals generally did not need work visas, which complicates comparisons with the pre-Brexit system.
Migration Watch says that, within longer-term worker routes, around 260,000 dependants received visas in 2023, compared with 225,000 main applicants. The unusual growth in family visas was driven substantially by health and care recruitment.
Care workers newly arriving from March 2024 were barred from bringing dependants, and overseas recruitment of care workers ended in July 2025. However, family members of workers already in Britain can still account for some later grants.
Migration Watch forecasts that around 384,000 people will be granted indefinite leave to remain (ILR) between 2025 and 2029 to people from the 2020–24 work visa cohorts, with more potentially following later.
Indefinite leave gives a person already living in Britain the right to stay permanently and to also have access to public funds and healthcare. It means they can ork in any job, change employers, become self-employed, or study freely without needing employer sponsorship, and can also apply for state benefits such as Universal Credit, housing benefit and council housing.
“Every government since 2008 has promised to take back control of the work-visa system,” said Migration Watch chairman Alp Mehmet (pictured above), who is himself from an immigrant family having arrived in the UK from Cyprus in 1956 as an eight-year-old child.
Mr Mehmet called for tighter rules and a firm annual cap on work visas, arguing that employers should not determine the scale of recruitment and accompanying family migration.
There is evidence for concern about future settlement numbers. Home Office figures show 80,409 people whose most recent visa was for work gained settlement in the year to June 2026, up 36% on the previous year. The department has separately forecast a substantial rise in settlement across all routes. Yet eligibility after five years does not mean everyone applies or qualifies: its study of people who began a work visa journey in 2020 found that 30% had obtained indefinite leave after five years, while another 28% still held temporary permission.
Migration Watch’s proposed cap would also have consequences for employers. Despite a fall in the vacancy rate, Skills for Care says there were around 96,000 vacancies in England’s adult social care sector in 2025/26.
The British Chambers of Commerce argues for domestic training alongside access to overseas staff where genuine shortages persist, warning that restrictions introduced before skills gaps are addressed could slow growth.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and the union UNISON have raised a different objection to making settlement harder: families and care workers who moved under existing rules could face years of added uncertainty. IPPR warns particularly about children, while UNISON says a longer wait could make care workers more vulnerable to exploitation.
What stands up to scrutiny?
The visa surge and the rise in dependants do. Migration Watch identifies a real change, and the Home Office confirms these figures. Its case that settlement will rise also has support in current Home Office data.
The group’s future projections for ILR, however, seem less reliable. Migration Watch asserts that “The pipeline created by the 2020 – 2023 surge [of work visas]” will guarantee “record high ILR numbers for at least five years”.
It also estimates that the total number of people permanently settling in the UK as a result of the total ILR grants to people entering the UK between 2020 and 2024 will “exceed 600,000, equivalent to adding a city the size of Glasgow”.
Yet assuming future retention and settlement rates will be the same as past visa grants is highly misleading, especially when so many of the variables have already changed.
The restriction of visas for dependents may well prompt many foreign workers to decide to return home, while the government’s future settlement rules around ILR and citizenship may also result in more migrants leaving the UK.
One thing that is for sure: the debate around migrant workers, their impact – both good and bad – on the UK’s domestic labour market, economy and society, along with the rules around allowing them and their dependents to permanently settle in the UK is set to continue for the foreseeable future.
Main image, top, stock image of a multi-generational South Asian family in the UK, Nov. 2025. Photo © Johnny Greig / iStock
