The Conservatives’ immigration policy damages the economy and tears families apart – and now it's getting worse

Theresa May and Michael Fallon are too afraid to admit to how much it will cost us to cap immigrant numbers. Luckily, I don’t share such a fear

The Conservatives have spent weeks saying that Labour’s policies don’t add up and yet now they won’t show us their own sums. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense; the party admits it hasn’t bothered costing its two key policies – cuts to immigration and the cost of leaving the EU.

I get it. Labour is traditionally the tax and spend party; the Conservatives are meant to do the opposite. But these aren’t normal times. The figures matter, especially when the health of our economy and society is at stake.

No debate around election time is more dehumanising than that over immigration. The arbitrary target of cutting net migration down to less than 100,000 people a year is manipulation tactic. It neatly steers the media into arguing with politicians over numbers, which is where the Tories appear strongest. But this is not about numbers, it’s about people’s lives.

Public debates about the value of immigration, or otherwise, rarely feature an immigrant or anyone who is married to one. We don’t talk about the contribution that immigrants have made to Britain over decades and centuries. When we talk about immigration, people are sidestepped, as if this were a dispassionate argument about the cost of milk. It is not. It is personal.

I know a couple whose lives have been upturned by the arbitrary immigration rules that Theresa May now seeks to toughen further.

The husband is British while his wife is of Mexican and American descent. She holds an American passport. After marriage in the US, the pair came back to the UK to settle down – as should be their right. But my friend’s wife was refused entry at the airport and forced to go back.

It didn’t matter that he could vouch for her, that they had all the legal documentation in place. Because they hadn’t gone through a laborious and expensive (and unnecessary) process of filing for a marriage visa, she had to stay abroad. They didn’t even know such an absurd system was in place. The newly-married couple had to start their life apart for almost a year.

There are thousands of families like this, many in a much worse situation. In some families, children only have a chance to talk to their mother or father through Skype.

In 2012, the coalition government imposed an income target, so that the British partner within a married couple had to earn a minimum of £18,600 a year just to be able to bring their spouse to live with them in Britain. This penalises thousands of low income families; it is a tax on love. It has left thousands of families severed, stuck in limbo because neither partner is able to just pack up and move to the other’s country.

Now the Conservative manifesto promises that that income threshold will be increased, though it fails to set out the salary at which these rule will kick in in future.

When we talk of cutting immigration, we are talking about breaking up families, we are talking about stopping students from studying here and subsidising our education system, we talking about preventing talented people contributing to our economy. And we are talking about making it harder for Britons who have married someone born abroad to settle here.

That is a massive human cost. But there is an economic cost too. Michael Fallon, when asked by BBC’s Newsnight how much it would cost us to get immigration down by two-thirds, said: “Well, we haven’t set out a formulation of how much it’ll reduce by each year, what we’ve set out is our ambition to continue to bear down on immigration.”

In other words, the Tories are too afraid to admit to how much it will, inevitably, cost to introduce such a cap. I don’t share such a fear.

If the Conservatives hit their targets as set out in this week’s election manifesto, it will cost us an extra £6bn a year, according to the Government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). That is roughly equivalent to 240,000 nurses or police officers every single year. And since many immigrants come to the UK already educated and trained and work in our public services, you have to add to that the cost of training additional staff to plug those gaps too.

When the Tories pledge to cut immigration, they’re not just destroying families, they’re gutting our public services too. And they’re pledging to raise our taxes. The question that should be asked of them, as they fight for office, is not how those aims will be achieved but whether it is possible at all. They should be asking how they would fund it. And, fundamentally, how the Prime Minister squares her Christian values with the damage her policies are doing to her country and her people.