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

Free movement has been at the heart of the Brexit debate, with the government grappling between satisfying public and business demands for restrictive and liberal approaches to immigration respectively. In response the government have advocated temporary migration as a potential solution, including an expanded UK-EU Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) modelled on the current T5 YMS on the assumption that YMS migrants undertake low-skilled jobs. Little is known about this visa or the labour market activity of YMS migrants. Drawing on policy analysis alongside survey and interview data from Australian YMS migrants, this paper seeks to bridge some of these knowledge gaps, arguing that an expanded EU YMS will not attract significant EU migrants, and is far from a remedy for free movement ending.