How not to announce changes to the Immigration Rules

On 4 December, the Home Secretary unveiled a new package of measures to reduce immigration – a matter of great interest to faith communities, given that some of them depend fairly heavily on clergy and lay-workers from overseas to sustain their pastoral ministries. One of the elements in his statement to the Commons was a decision to ‘increase the skilled worker earnings threshold by a third to £38,700 from next spring, in line with the median full-time wage for those kinds of jobs’ and to raise the minimum income for family visas ‘to the same threshold as the minimum salary threshold for skilled workers, which is £38,700’.1