Skilled for Whom? Immigration Policy, Racial Capitalism, and the Reproduction of Inequality in Britain.

Abstract

This paper examines the UK's 2025 Immigration White Paper as a critical site for understanding how immigration policy functions as an instrument of racial capitalism. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the theory of social reproduction, and intersectionality, it interrogates how the state's construction of the 'skilled migrant' operates as a racially coded category that privileges whiteness, anglocentric credentials, and neoliberal norms of value. Rather than treating the White Paper as a discrete policy episode, the analysis situates it within a longer genealogy of immigration governance that reproduces structural inequalities across higher education and graduate employment. By tracing how migrant 'worthiness' is encoded through racialised and classed proxies-such as language fluency, academic credentials, and salary thresholds-the paper contributes to wider sociological debates on bordering, credentialism, and state racial formation. It demonstrates that the British state's discourse of 'merit' and 'skill' is inseparable from exclusionary practices that undermine the promise of equal opportunity for racialised citizens and migrants alike. The paper concludes by advancing a forward-looking framework for understanding policy as both a site of intervention and a generator of symbolic and material hierarchies.