Finding a Balance? Labour's Immigration Dilemmas under Starmer and Burnham

SUMMARY

• Immigration was one of the most contentious policy and political issues for Starmer’s government.
• By reappointing Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Burnham signaled policy continuity rather than a sharp break.
• Labour’s challenge is to find a distinct voice which has a proper plan to control immigration fairly, including limits on the scale and pace of change, while defending its contribution to British society.
• It may need to answer a question the Starmer government ducked: what does it consider a sustainable level of immigration, and why?

Labour’s heavy defeats in the 2026 elections across England, Scotland and Wales led most Labour MPs to believe that a change of leadership was necessary to prevent Labour’s electoral coalition collapsing from competing directions at the same time. Despite the fact that immigration was such a central but contested issue, the rapid and uncontested leadership transition from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham saw little scope for public debate about how far new leadership should shift the government’s politics and policies on immigration. 

Arguments about how tough to sound on immigration can divide Labour MPs depending whether their constituency faces populist or progressive political challengers. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that many Labour voters are ‘balancers’ on immigration – seeing both pressures and gains of migration, while wanting to fuse control and compassion in protecting refugees.

Labour’s immigration choices – in opposition and in office

Immigration became one of the Sunak government’s biggest political headaches, with record levels of net migration and a visible failure to deliver its pledge to ‘stop the boats’. Immigration was the most cited issue by voters ditching the Conservatives for Reform. The Sunak government was felt to have failed on control, compassion or competence across voters with contrasting views.

Labour’s instinct was to avoid immigration in its 2024 campaign, since it was targeting swing voters in seats which had pro-Brexit majorities in 2016. The party did pledge to reduce net migration from record levels and to take on smuggling gangs. The manifesto was silent on most immigration policy questions, including settlement and citizenship.

Labour did, in government, scrap the Rwanda plan and restart processing asylum claims, presenting these liberal decisions primarily as pragmatic choices. The 2025 white paper, ‘Restoring Control of the Immigration System’ illustrated the centrality of the concept of control to the government’s narrative. However, with immigration falling, its new restrictionist measures were modest. In the end, controversy about political language overshadowed the publication, with the Prime Minister later regretting using the phrase “island of strangers” in his accompanying speech.

After the September 2025 reshuffle, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood toughened the government’s agenda, proposing that most people who had arrived on work visas would wait 15 years to be permanent. A large backbench rebellion focused on the unfairness of applying such long timelines for care workers already in the UK leading to a policy stand-off.

The government did not set out what it thought a sustainable level of net migration might be, though net migration numbers fell much further and faster than anticipated, from 800,000 in the twelve months before Labour took power to 171,000 for 2025. It is now set to fall below 100,000 for the first time this century in 2026, with net emigration a distinct possibility in 2027. These dramatic reductions did not shift government rhetoric about the need to reduce numbers, and Starmer’s claim that his government had restored trust on immigration was not reflected in public perceptions.

How far did immigration contribute to May 2026?

Labour lost about half of its vote share in the 2026 elections. The party will face a more complex electoral challenge in 2029 than it has in 2024. However, the role that immigration played is contested, given other sources of dissatisfaction with the government and nuanced patterns of views about immigration.

Positive, neutral or negative views of economic and cultural impacts were each held by one-third of voters by 2026 – though the salience of immigration had become more polarised by party mid-2020s than in 2016. While immigration was much the top priority of Reform voters, those voting Green cited racism and the rise of the far right as their priority issue.

Labour’s immigration strategy had intended to reassure sceptical voters while retaining those with somewhat more liberal views. Yet those defecting to Reform, or progressive rival parties, each felt that Labour was moving in the opposite direction.

Labour’s initial strategy had sought to engage with immigration primarily to neutralise, contain and reduce its salience. Yet in its second year in office, Labour began to actively increased the profile of less salient issues, such as settlement, in a tone of voice which risked splitting the Labour electoral coalition. 

Public attitudes to the settlement reforms are uncertain, but the reforms are of intense interest to those directly affected, as several hundred thousand responses to the parliamentary petitions demonstrated. Most are migrants from Commonwealth countries who have UK voting rights before they have permanent status. The long-standing intuition of the general public is that five years is a fair norm for settlement. Voters are open to considering five and ten year timelines, but only a niche support settlement timelines of fifteen years or more. Both the Labour government and the Conservatives proposing longer timelines may shift attitudes over time.

Overall, most Labour voters are “balancers”. This means that the median Labour voter tends to see the gains of immigration as at least matching its pressures. Going forward, the party will need a cross-class, intergeneration and multi-ethnic coalition of support which bridges cities and towns across nations and regions.

Can Burnham find the balance? 

95% of Labour MPs nominated Andy Burnham for leader. But a broad agreement on the need to rebuild a viable Labour electoral coalition in principle may not extend to agreeing how to do so in practice.

Burnham’s first signal for continuity, not change, on immigration policy, was his reappointment of Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary. Yet backbench critics proposed that a change of approach, which could sharpen focus on controlling immigration fairly using a combination of control, contribution and compassion might have more chance of bridging Labour’s ‘balancer’ electoral coalition instead of splitting it.

Burnham’s government must respond to the shifting realities of immigration outcomes, as well as trying to get future electoral politics right. It may need to answer a question that the Starmer government ducked: what does it consider a sustainable level of immigration, and why?

A multi-year immigration plan with a high-profile annual “Immigration Budget” in the House of Commons would provide a workable solution, with both a ceiling and floor target, such as aiming to manage net migration within an envelope of 100,000 to 250,000 through to 2029. Such a plan could set the annual scale for a controlled route for refugees to come to the UK. A more ambitious ‘routes for returns’ deal offers much the most plausible real world route to reducing unauthorised small boat arrivals.

The Burnham government should aim to defuse the salience of the issue of asylum, not to ramp it up. It should place a high priority on closing asylum hotels at much greater speed, aiming to do so in 3-6 months rather than three years. It will be judged primarily on 2029 outcomes rather than its media communications.

It also has a strong strategic interest in expanding the politics of immigration to include visas for work and study. That may require a recalibration that moves away from an ad hoc onslaught of eye-catching initiatives on asylum to a coherent plan to control all forms of immigration fairly. After the consultation over settlement reforms, a compromise may be emerging. Echoing Starmer, Burnham has talked about the need to get the balance right so that controls are applied fairly.

But managing immigration fairly takes nuance and compromise. A mooted exemption from extended settlement timetables for health and social care workers could see chefs, lab technicians and data scientists lose their legal status if not given similar protections. Another option under consideration may involve offering migrants already in the UK permanent status at five years, with some restrictions on benefits for a further five years.

The challenge of immigration politics and policy is to find a distinct Labour voice which has a proper plan to control immigration fairly, including limits on the scale and pace of change, while defending its contribution to British society. That would enable a much clearer social democratic contrast to the politics of remigration that stokes resentment and racism.

Digested read of the journal article prepared by the author with assistance from Anya Pearson.