These include many carers who came to the UK to fill vacancies after the Covid pandemic, and were told they could apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it is fundamentally unfair to change the rules when people came to this country with one set of expectations,\u201d Nowak said. \u201cI hope we can think again on that.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cThere are 111,000 staff vacancies in social care at the moment. I want us to train up as many Brits as possible to do those jobs. But I suspect in a growing economy with an ageing population, we are still going to need people to come and live and work in the UK and work in sectors like social care.\u201d<\/p>\n
As well as criticising the backward-looking changes, Nowak also condemned the idea of applying a 10- or 15-year wait to many new arrivals, as the Home Office has proposed.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth my granddads came to this country after the second world war \u2013 one came from Hong Kong, one came from Poland. Both raised their families here. The idea that you could be here for the next 10, 15 years and you\u2019d still have no legal right to remain in the country \u2026 how the hell do you plan? Can you buy a house? What does that mean for your employment? Do you have kids? Do you send them to school? I mean, it cuts across any effort to integrate at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Labour politicians supportive of the changes see them partly as a way of assuaging public concerns about migration, and neutralising the appeal of populist parties, including Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform UK.<\/p>\n
But Nowak suggested that by significantly lengthening the time before people can consider themselves settled in the UK, the approach could ultimately fuel far-right sentiment.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tell you where you end up: you end up with Reform claiming that a woman who was born in Somalia and has lived here for most of her life and worked hard and contributed to our society, somehow isn\u2019t fit to hold elected office in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reform UK\u2019s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, was recently accused of \u201cstraightforward racism\u201d<\/a> by Labour after he suggested the party\u2019s frontrunner to replace Keir Starmer in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, former child refugee Sagal Abdi-Wali, was not British.<\/p>\n Sagal Abdi-Wali (centre) at an anti-Brexit march. Photograph: Martin Plaut<\/p>\n Nowak acknowledged that many TUC members will have backed Reform in recent local elections, but suggested the party\u2019s appeal may be waning.<\/p>\n \u201cOur members are a broad cross section of the British public. Of course, large numbers of them voted Reform, like other people did. But certainly the evidence that we\u2019re getting fed back from unions is that just like the British public, the more they see of Nigel Farage, the less keen they are.\u201d<\/p>\n
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