MigrantNet - Network of Migrants

In our pursuit of the luxury trades, many essential but less glamorous jobs have been overlooked or forgotten

Blood tests must be among the easiest procedures in a hospital, so routine that you can just turn up at the blood clinic, take a ticket from the dispenser and wait for your number to flash red on the screen. Absolutely no appointment necessary, and the wait isn't long, even though the crowd fills two or three rows of seats. My consultant's notes refer to the tests simply as "bloods", which sounds nicely cavalier ("Huzzah, sir, pick up your rapier!") compared to phlebotomy, which is this area of medicine's official name. Just out of sight, the phlebotomists are at work behind the curtains with their needles: pricking veins and turning tubes incarnadine. Your turn. "This arm please … just relax … a little scratch now … press with your finger on the cotton wool for a moment." And within a few minutes, you're rolling down your sleeve and saying thanks and goodbye to the person with the needle – grateful, though these details are never spoken, for their skill and their part, however small, in what you hope is the remedial process.

Sometimes you try to make a little human contact. Recently I asked my blood-taker where she was from. India, I guessed, but the answer was Ethiopia. Through the curtain I could hear an elderly lady ask the same thing of another blood-taker. "Are you from Nigeria?" "No, ma'am, Sierra Leone." Perhaps only an older generation asks questions about origin these days – my children's behaviour implies so – because it's come to be considered ignorant and possibly racist; asked mainly of people who aren't white by white people who have yet to adjust to the facts of the nation's demography. But my experience of the phlebotomy department in this London teaching hospital suggests Hackney or Wembley will be less frequent answers than Addis, Dhaka and Manila. Most of the staff here have migrated long distances to work.

What qualities and skills do a good phlebotomist need? From the patient's point of view, the list looks likely to include a clear head and a calm temperament, a working knowledge of antisepsis and the vascular system, a reasonably sympathetic manner and a steady hand. In a hospital, none of these would be unique to phlebotomists – all would be developed together with much more sophisticated knowledge in the long and expensive educations of junior doctors, for example. But do you want a junior doctor to draw your blood or insert a cannula? On balance, probably not. Sometimes junior doctors get sent on this prentice errand to the wards. Sometimes they fail to find a productive vein in either arm and withdraw in apology and confusion. You are better off with someone who draws blood for a living, day in, day out, for whom veins have lost all of their mystery.

The Royal College of Nursing lists blood-drawing as one of the "sample competences" of a healthcare assistant, which in the medical world may be a similar ranking to the vocational qualifications that the government announced this week would lose their equivalence with GCSEs and be omitted from the calculations of school league tables. Of course, blood-drawing is far more responsible work than fish husbandry, horse care and fingernail technology; done carelessly, it can damage, even end, a human life. But like many other skills that depend on touch as well as thought – fingernail technology, possibly – the more you work with the physical material, the better you become. Finding a full vein in living flesh can't be successfully substituted by anatomical studies in the classroom. That shouldn't lessen its value as an occupation, and yet our addiction to the idea that the only worthwhile jobs are those that can be somehow professionalised – with years of fulltime learning and degrees – probably means it does.

Despite cuts in educational budgets, increased student fees and the general implosion of the social fabric, the addiction persists. Every week a local Scottish newspaper is delivered to our house, and the day after my blood test I saw it included a photograph of a young man in an academic cap and gown, holding a scroll in his hand. It is a nice local newspaper tradition that dates from the Victorian age – to honour the youth who has gone up to the city and returned with a degree and a broader future. This particular youth had graduated with a BA (Hons) in sports journalism after a four-year course at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS), whose website promises a programme that will provide students with "the professional abilities and practical skills" for this "exciting and growing field … "

There are degrees in sports journalism in the rest of the UK, too, and hundreds of academic courses in non-specialised journalism, churning out graduates for the shrinking labour market of newspapers and other media. They aren't pointless; apart from any craft they may teach, they can also offer connections and contacts – a "way in" – which is the modern essential of anyone trying to start a career. As UWS points out, all students can expect to meet national sports writers and broadcasters, and to take up work placements in news organisations, where their abilities may be noted and remembered for a later date. But how complicated, unnecessary and expensive it all sounds compared to the old method of being sent to report a minor league football match, reading the dispatches of senior reporters and learning week-by-week how it was done.

The success of the academic route has yet to be discovered, but it will be lucky to produce writers as good as the Guardian's Richard Williams, who joined the Nottingham Evening Post aged 18, or Hugh McIlvanney, often acknowledged as the finest sportswriter of his generation, who left Kilmarnock Academy for the Kilmarnock Standard when he was even younger. Perhaps nobody can do that now – leave school for a job on the local paper; intervention by a university is thought necessary to the meanest of trades. But it would be hard to detect any improvements in local newspapers that could be attributed to the massive expansion of tertiary education.

In a broader and far more serious way, something dysfunctional seems to have happened. Unemployment in the UK now stands at 2.69 million, with more than a million people aged between 16 and 24 looking for work – a rate of 22.3%, and a new record. But several British institutions continue to favour foreign workforces, or be favoured by them. At the sandwich chain Pret A Manger, only 19% of the staff are British, while, according to the Daily Mail, a third of the people who sell the Big Issue, the paper founded to help the homeless, are Romanian. I have no figures for foreign-born phlebotomists, but in London I would guess a majority. Good for them, and me too. But in our pursuit of the luxury trades – graduates in sports journalism, for example – many essential but less glamorous jobs were overlooked or forgotten. To paraphrase the railway apology for disruptions by snow, has Britain created the wrong sort of unemployed?

The truth is that politicians worry about immigration more than the rest of the population do, not less

Politicians think about immigration differently from the rest of the population. For some people that difference will be easily explained – something along the lines of politicians preferring to ignore immigration, but the rest of us having to live with it. Actually, the reverse is the case. The truth is that politicians worry about immigration more than the rest of the population do, not less. That's because politicians take polls seriously, and the polls say that immigration is the second most important issue "facing the country". Tracker polls by YouGov regularly show this: the latest has the top three issues as the economy (82%), immigration (47%) and health (25%).

Ask voters for the most important issues "facing you and your family", on the other hand, and immigration drops well down the scale. On this more personal yardstick, closer to people's actual lived experience, the economy (69%) is still way out in front, but pensions (36%) is now second, with health (31%) third. Immigration only comes in joint seventh, behind tax, family life and education, and level pegging with crime. None of this means that immigration is not actually important, especially in some regions and to some voters. But the difference in the two scales may explain why politicians, always more conscious of national policy – and of the national press – than the more locally focused voters, give immigration such high priority. It may also suggest the "Blue Labour" assumption that strong communities and immigration are incompatible is not true in many cases.

The coalition government certainly treats immigration as a priority. Like Labour before, ministers are reacting to increasingly difficult political times by sharpening the focus on immigration. The immigration minister, Damian Green, made a well-trailed speech yesterday, setting out a policy based on allowing "the right numbers" and "the right people" into the UK. And it will not be long before the home secretary, Theresa May, confirms that ministers have decided to redesignate the majority of economic migrants in this country as "guest workers", along German lines, as well as putting tighter curbs on residents bringing in spouses from abroad to live here. As Mr Green again made clear yesterday, the main criterion for both groups will be based on income. Only migrants who earn at least £31,000 a year (and possibly as much as £49,000) will be able to settle here after their five years are up, and only those on around £26,000 will be able to marry someone from abroad.

There are several problems with this strategy. The overarching one is that it is an old-fashioned approach, based too much on broad brush numerical targets and insufficiently adaptive to modern migration practice – which is increasingly based on temporary stays not permanent settlement – as well as inadequately responsive to the effects of recession. Mr Green says, reasonably, that the immigration debate should move on from the single issue of numbers. Yet that is more easily said than done, since the government's headline goal has always been to bring net migration – UK immigration minus UK emigration – down to the "tens of thousands" by 2015. That is getting harder, because immigration has until recently remained at broadly the same level while emigration has dropped off. As a result, the gap widened to 252,000 in 2010. To meet the target, therefore, immigration will have to fall sharply or emigration surge, or both.

All this creates pressure to make deep cuts in some categories, above all among overseas students and economic migrants from outside the EU, to whom the UK has fewer obligations. The upshot is the means-testing about which Mr Green spoke. Means testing is certainly a legitimate tool in immigration policy, but the thresholds at which migrants will lose their right to settle are well above median income (£26,000) at a time when incomes are falling. As so often, immigration policy risks ruining lives and breaking up families in pursuit of a numbers target which, wherever it is set, will never satisfy some parts of public opinion.

Our trafficking policies are letting down the most vulnerable in society. We need a new approach

We live under the comforting delusion that slavery is a thing of the past. And yet the International Labour Organisation estimates that there are a minimum of 12.3 million people in forced labour in the world today. This problem afflicts every part of the world – including the UK.

The plight of vulnerable foreign workers trafficked to the UK for forced labour and sexual exploitation is relatively well known. Less well known, until a BBC investigation this week, is the plight of vulnerable British workers who have been trafficked to other parts of mainland Europe for forced labour.

Regular readers of the Guardian may have seen fine work by Felicity Lawrence, Pete Pattisson and Mark Townsend that has highlighted some of the problem across the world, such as the trafficking of vulnerable migrants for domestic servitude in the Middle East, or forced agricultural labour in Spain. Yet in spite of the diversity of this forced labour there is an underlying constellation of factors including poverty, social exclusion and government inaction that results in vulnerable people becoming enslaved.

The issue remains at the margins of political and developmental concerns: there was, for example, no UN Millennium Development Goal on eradication or reduction of slavery. And any progress towards the current Millennium Development Goals could be achieved without affecting the life of a single slave, who are too often excluded from anti-poverty measures such as schools, water, and even famine relief, because of prejudices and divisions that often exist in poor communities.

Neither is slavery and human trafficking adequately treated in domestic policy and practice in the UK. In 2009 the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group declared British anti-trafficking policy not fit for purpose and – in crucial areas – at odds with the most basic tenets of the rule of law.

For example, in the aftermath of police raids on cannabis factories up and down the country, many of the "gardeners" found in the factories, including children, have been prosecuted and later deported – in spite of evidence that they were in fact enslaved to do the work. They have been doubly victimised: first by those who trafficked them and then by those who had the responsibility to protect them. The recent report, Landing in Dover, by the Children's Commissioner for England, highlights the cases of seven Vietnamese children, trafficked into Britain to work as "gardeners" in cannabis factories in 2010, who were sent back to France when they were discovered. Social services said they were told nothing about it.

The report also found that as early as 1995, trafficked children arriving alone at Dover were sent back to France under a bilateral "gentleman's agreement" between the UK and France, if they did not claim asylum within 24 hours. It was found that this agreement was in force at all Channel ports. These children were often hungry, ill, exhausted and distressed with no access to social services or child protection staff.

This agreement in respect of children came to an end as late as November 2011, when the practice became apparent to the children's commissioner. However, adults who come to UK through channel ports and show signs of trafficking, but who don't claim asylum within 24 hours, could still be returned to France without undergoing any sort of risk assessment.

The British government has also mooted removing the right of domestic workers to change employers, trusting their protection from abuse to the dysfunctional anti-trafficking system. The implications of this proposal, if enacted, would mean that if domestic workers were to leave abusive employers they could be deported. Such a change in regulation would have the effect of the government facilitating trafficking for forced domestic work.

While there are indications that the police and Gangmasters Licensing Authority have begun to investigate the sort of abuses uncovered by the BBC, the government response suggests it is unable to compute the implications.

The basic assumption of this policy is that trafficking relates only to foreigners transgressing immigration law. Yet the flaws in this approach have been exposed by the BBC investigation showing vulnerable Britons being trafficked to mainland Europe.

The government's inability to formulate a coherent and effective anti-trafficking strategy means we need an independent anti-trafficking monitoring body accountable to parliament. This would provide evidence-based advice to government on effective anti-trafficking measures across government and to prevent policy from being hijacked by a narrow and unhelpful anti-immigration agenda.

Immigration minister Damian Green says immigrants to the UK should be able to speak English and have enough money to support themselves