LONDON -- To a chorus of complaints from employers, Britain said Wednesday that it would shut the door on low-skilled workers as it moved to cut overall immigration by keeping migrants from Europe and elsewhere out of sectors such as catering, construction, elder care and hospitality.
Under the post-Brexit rules starting next January, migrants will have to meet a number of criteria to qualify for work visas, including specific skills and an ability to speak English.
Each applicant also will be required to have a job offer with a minimum salary threshold of about $33,300. Salary requirements are lower for certain job categories with critical shortages, such as nursing.
That was lower than the $39,000 figure that some employers feared. But it could nonetheless have a chilling effect on recruitment for jobs that Britons are more likely to avoid, and it comes at a time when many economists say the country is effectively at full employment.
The new rules mark a big change for Britain, which in 2004 voluntarily opened its labor markets to citizens of former communist nations that had joined the European Union -- even while those workers remained barred for years from jobs in countries such as Germany and France.
Immigration was one of the driving forces behind the 2016 referendum that led to the U.K.'s departure from the EU. And after that vote, immigration from within continental Europe dropped. But with more migrants now arriving in Britain from outside the EU, the Conservative Party government has failed to make good on its promises to cut net immigration levels.
On Wednesday, the government said that it would prioritize people with skills and that employers would have to wean themselves off a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor.
The message from Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government was blunt: "Employers will need to adjust."
Home Secretary Priti Patel called the immigration policy "a historic moment for the whole country," as the government pledged to transform the British economy by starving its businesses of low-wage workers from Europe and forcing companies to adopt technology and automation instead.
She said the new system would "attract the brightest and the best from around the globe, boosting the economy and our communities, and unleash this country's full potential."
Britain suffers from poor productivity growth, and some economists believe that a ready supply of cheap foreign labor has discouraged companies from investing in technology. In response, the government is trying to alter the composition of the migrant workforce, tilting it toward people with greater skills.
Immigration opponents contend that the current system also has helped suppress wages for manual workers, whose earnings have stagnated. And they note that because Britain's welfare system is easy to access, even if it's not particularly generous by European standards, government payments may have subsidized the lower earnings for non-Britons to the benefit of their employers.
The more than 3 million immigrants from the EU who are now in Britain will be allowed to stay, while a visa program for fruit pickers and other farmworkers will be expanded in time for the 2020 harvest, from 2,500 to 10,000 spots.
But with the British economy close to full employment, many companies are less concerned with attracting the best and brightest than with filling vacant positions.
Employers have long argued that they cannot recruit local people to fill vacancies. In 2017, the fast-casual food chain Pret a Manger said that only 1 in 50 applicants for jobs in its restaurants was British.
The British government's own estimate is that 70% of the more than 1 million EU citizens who have moved to the U.K. since 2004 would not have qualified for visas under the new rules.
Many migrants from eastern Europe have jobs picking Britain's fruits and vegetables and working in food-processing factories.
Toby Williams, chairman of the National Farmers' Union in southern England's Kent county, said British workers don't want those tough, relatively low-paid jobs. He said Britain's fruit, vegetable and flower farms need about 70,000 seasonal workers, while the government is proposing to give visas to only 10,000 a year.
"In some sectors, firms will be left wondering how they will recruit the people needed to run their businesses," Carolyn Fairbairn, the director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, the country's main business lobby group, said in a statement. "With already low unemployment, firms in care, construction, hospitality, food and drink could be most affected."
The government's argument that companies should invest in training Britons was no answer to the challenges for sectors reliant on low-skilled labor, Fairbairn said.
"Firms know that hiring from overseas and investing in the skills of their workforce and new technologies is not an 'either or' choice," she said. "Both are needed to drive the economy forward."
While the government announced its migration plans, it also claimed credit for the health of the jobs market. The employment rate is at a record high of 76.5%, while youth unemployment has been cut almost in half since 2010, dropping from 939,000 to 481,000, the Treasury said.
But as much as putting more Britons to work, the government has been intent on driving down the number of immigrants.
As for the needs of employers, Patel said there were more than 8.45 million people ages 16 to 64 who were classified as economically inactive in Britain. She said the government wanted "businesses to invest in them, invest in skilling them up."
That could be easier said than done. More than 6 million of those people say they are students, have a long-term illness or are looking after families or homes. According to Britain's Office for National Statistics, 6.6 million say they do not want a paid job, as opposed to nearly 1.9 million who say they would like to work.
Scotland's first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said it was "impossible to overstate how devastating" the policy would be to Scotland because of the country's need to attract workers from abroad.
Information for this article was contributed by Stephen Castle of The New York Times; by William Booth and Karla Adam of The Washington Post; and by Jill Lawless of The Associated Press.
A Section on 02/20/2020