New immigration proposals are a gangmasters’ paradise

Readers react to Priti Patel's new points-based immigration system proposals.

My Hungarian mate Ferenc sees a bright future for gangmasters under our new ugly immigration laws.

So you can stay in the UK for six months but you're not allowed to work. That's really going to stop low-paid illegal work in the unregulated economy!

Arrive in March/April, stay until the end of the harvest/peak tourism period/best time of year for construction work, or until whoever is profiting from your labour allows you to go. They might as well call it the Gangmasters' Charter.

Rex Nesbit

Just imagine for one minute all the British who moved to France, Spain, Germany, China, India etc being refused residency because they couldn't speak the language. If they all closed the doors with the same rule, what would this world be like?

Tony Howarth, London SW3

"We'll attract the best and brightest," Boris Johnson and his subservient cabinet have vowed, "and our points-based system for visas will keep low-skilled workers out."

This segregation may sound good to a number of Brexiters here, but what impression will it create among our supposed "friends and partners" in continental Europe and Ireland, as it replaces free movement?

To them, it will feel like legalised poaching of talented people that they spent billions of euros bringing up, educating and training, and who could have been rightfully expected to enrich their own nations if we had not made it our policy to entice them to come here instead.

And it will feel like slamming the door in the faces of supposedly less 'worthy' men and women who were ready to work their socks off for us.

Rebecca Brown

Priti Patel's new immigration scheme will hit hotels, restaurants, hospitals, care homes, farms and other sectors of the economy that rely on unskilled workers from abroad. The government could of course resort to cajoling British pensioners to return to work as advocated several years ago by a previous Tory secretary of state for the environment.

This was his solution to the labour shortages that would have occurred from his proposal to abolish the Agriculture Workers Scheme that allowed Eastern European workers to come to Britain to do unpopular hard work such as picking crops from our fields. In recognition that they might be a bit slower in doing the work, he suggested they could be exempted from the minimum wage laws so that farmers wouldn't lose out.

Roger Hinds, Surrey

Priti Patel hasn't owned up to the fact that, as far as I know, we didn't need to leave the EU to have a blue passport. Croatia, an EU member, has a blue one and a number of other countries around the world have various shades of blue passport.

It was our own government that chose to get rid of the old style British hardcover passport, not the EU. The new one is being manufactured by a French company in Poland!

Bob Hale, Portishead

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