Today, at the height of the Tory conference, one headline rules the papers.

Firms Must List Foreign Workers

Where do you even start with this?

The Government, via the Home Secretary, has proposed that every business in the UK must list the amount of foreign workers that work for them. The idea is that, every business that employs foreign workers will be SHAMED in to hiring domestic workers. I assume a fun side effect is that the firms may also fire foreigners who are already employed.

As a foreign worker in the UK, I’m angry that the Government has allowed the Home Secretary to even moot an idea that’s, at its best, could be interpreted as businesses being forced to display lists of names on store fronts and websites.

This could be dismissed as convention propaganda that will never see the light of day but, the fact that it has been mentioned in public is problem enough.

First, the UK has some pretty stringent immigration laws already. Seriously, checkout the immigration pages from UK BORDER FORCE. and see if you think it is easy to get long-term access to the UK.

Once there were once five immigration entry points.

• Tier One aka Entrepreneurs and Rich People
• Tier Two aka Workers
• Tier Three aka Low-Skilled Workers
• Tier Four aka Students
• Tier Five aka Working Holiday Makers (Australians, Kiwis, etc…)

There are others for people from Turkey,Macedonia, refugees and people with UK ancestry but, for now, let’s stick with these five tiers.

By 2010 the Conservative-Liberal Coalition closed Tier Three, effectively closed Tier One, and severely restrained Tiers Two and Four.

This means that the UK is incredibly hard to get into.

Outside of EU citizenship there are NO easy routes to living in the UK.

For example, Tier One visas applicants have three options, one longer exists, one requires the person to have between £50,000 and £200,000 startup capital plus £3,100 of personal funds in the bank and the final one requires applicants to be a leader or emerging leader in the fields: science, engineering, humanities, medicine, digital technology or the arts. So basically, unless you happen to be Neil deGrasse Tyson, Steven Spielberg or Sheldon Cooper you're not getting a visa to live here via Tier One.

With that in mind, why on Earth does the UK Government need to force businesses to list the foreigners that work for them? Just imagine the foreign lists of shame from the City or the NHS?

There’s one other very important point here. The Government already knows the information.

Every business that wants to employ foreign workers has to get permission from the Home Office. Those firms are listed on the aptly named, Register of Interests.

Further to that, the Government also knows all of the vital information of every person who applies to for a work permit, forces every business to prove that they attempted to find a local worker to do the job and demand that the applicant pay thousands of pounds in fees and testing.

Finally, every person who applies to work in the UK from overseas can only work for a maximum of six years and only apply to settle in the country if they only earn £35,000 or more per year.

So why does the Government need to “name and shame” businesses? What’s the point?

Is this attempt at far-right jingoism supposed to prove the hard line of the Conservative Government. Is this really a Conservative Government that works for everyone? What do they hope to accomplish with this? Are they hoping that people around Britain form a mass boycott of businesses that employ foreign workers?

Are they hoping that foreign workers are denied employment because of where they were born?

The UK is apparently going to base this program off of an American model but, the US has something the UK does not, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which makes it illegal to deny employment based on a person’s national origin. Also, I've never seen a list of foreigners displayed for any business.

I've searched but I cannot find a similar protection here in the UK.

Therefore, this Government has again come out with a poorly thought out plan to make headlines that could cause huge ripples throughout this society. After the Brexit vote racist attacks in the UK skyrocketed. How is naming and shaming immigrants supposed to reduce the perceived persecution of immigrants?