The UK government’s immigration white paper “completely pulls the rug from under the feet of businesses and communities in the Highlands”, according to the Scottish National party’s Kate Forbes, one of the area’s most vocal representatives.

The Scottish government warned last Thursday the government’s white paper on immigration would cut the number of workers from Europe eligible to work in Scotland by up to 85%. Forbes identified a “failure of imagination” from politicians who spent so much of their working lives in densely-populated cities that they cannot fathom there are areas of the country where that is not the case.

Her comments came ahead of a debate on depopulation in the Scottish parliament on Wednesday.

“You could push it further, to people who are so far removed from reality that they pooh-pooh the fact that the average wage in this country is in the lower £20,000s,” said Forbes. One of the most controversial aspects of the government’s post-Brexit immigration strategy is the £30,000 salary cap, reported to be strongly favoured by Theresa May.

Forbes, who is considered to be one of the rising stars of the Scottish parliament, is the MSP for the sprawling constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, which includes some of the most rugged and beautiful swathes of the Highlands. The area is facing a demographic timebomb, says Forbes, which Brexit will compound, with latest estimates suggesting it could lose more than a quarter of its population by 2046 if current trends are left unchecked.

“For the UK government to consider limiting immigration flies in the face of the challenges that currently face the Highlands, and that have faced the Highlands for decades, if not centuries,” said Forbes. “If you look at the areas where there is the greatest pressure on recruitment, particularly around the hospitality industry, they are [earning] considerably under the £30k mark. The whole idea of a hierarchy of skills is completely contrary to what businesses tell me they are crying out for: waiters, chefs, labourers.”

The SNP government, in which Forbes is now a junior minister, was calling for the devolution of migration policy long before Brexit concentrated other minds on the issue. “There are no UK-based politicians who are willing to make the positive case for immigration. [The SNP] have been, and nobody really cares,” said Forbes.

“While I don’t accept that Scotland is especially better and more liberal when it comes to immigration, I do think the issue has not been weaponised to the same extent here.”

Forbes won the “one to watch” category at the Scottish politician of the year awards in November, her second year of being nominated after becoming an MSP in May 2016. The former accountant grew up in Dingwall and studied history at Cambridge. She quickly came to notice as an able advocate for her constituents the Brain family, an Australian couple and their son who had settled in the Highlands but faced deportation following a visa dispute.

In June 2018, Forbes was appointed as the minister for public finance and digital economy in a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle in which Nicola Sturgeon promoted a number of fresh faces.

A fluent Gaelic speaker, Forbes delivered a full speech in the language during a Holyrood debate earlier this year, while MSPs listened to a translation on headphones. She has weclomed the recent increase in children enrolling in Gaelic-medium education, despite criticism that mainly middle-class parents in cities were attracted by the pupil-teacher ratios rather than by the language itself.

However, she insisted education alone was not enough to revitalise the language, currently spoken by around 1% of Scots. “It has to be the language of people’s hearts and daily usage in communities. We are still slightly nervous and feel slightly ashamed of using it, and it’s so quickly hijacked by politics. I feel as an SNP MSP it’s harder for me to defend Gaelic because it’s so easily dismissed as a nationalist cause, which is ridiculous.”

Ashamed is a strong word to use, but Forbes said that was tied to the older generation’s sense of Gaelic as “an uneducated language”.