Restricting EU labour migration to Britain to the 70% who already have a job lined up is the strongest option in the government’s search for a way to cut immigration while keeping the freedom of movement needed to stay within Europe’s single market.

Both of the Conservative leadership frontrunners, Boris Johnson and Theresa May, have backed the idea that the EU’s free-movement principle should be interpreted as meaning the freedom to move to a specific job rather than the freedom to cross borders to look for work or claim benefits.

This approach is likely to be uppermost in the minds of the two key contenders for the Tory leadership contest as they prepare for Brexit negotiations that could close the door on unskilled labour from Europe without Britain’s loss of access to the single market.

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Only the 70% coming to work in a specific job would get a national insurance number. And they would get only temporary worker status – as in the Australian immigration system – without full rights to settle in the UK and no right to bring in immediate family, below a certain income threshold.

An outright ban on the remaining 30% of EU migrants who come looking for work might breach the EU treaties on free movement. But a system in which labour migrants who arrive without a job have to register on a Home Office database, perhaps be issued with an identity card and be obliged to go home if unable to find a job within a few months, might fall within the kind of reform of the EU’s free-movement rules that Britain could put on the table in the Brexit negotiations.

The home secretary, who called for further reform of EU free-movement rules during the EU referendum campaign, proposed a similar approach last August when she called for a rethink of the principle of free movement.

“Reducing net EU migration need not mean undermining the principle of free movement,” she said. “When it was first enshrined, free movement meant the freedom to move to a job, not the freedom to cross borders to look for work or claim benefits. Yet last year, four out of 10 EU migrants, 63,000 people, came here with no definite job offer whatsoever.”

That migrant proportion has since fallen to 30%. While her Sunday Times piece last summer was headlined as calling for “a ban on jobless EU migrants”, May did not actually advocate that. Instead, she had stressed that this “search for a better life” by those going to Britain to seek work had led to some EU countries losing thousands of people to the growing economies of northern Europe at great social and economic cost.

A third of Portugal’s qualified nurses had migrated, 20% of Czech medical graduates were leaving once qualified, and nearly 500 doctors were leaving Bulgaria every year.

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Johnson and Michael Gove made a similar explicit commitment to ending “the automatic right of all EU citizens to come to live and work in the UK” in a joint statement on immigration policy.



They spelled out what this might mean, saying: “To gain the right to work economic migrants will have to be suitable for the job in question. For relevant jobs, we will be able to ensure that all those who come have the ability to speak good English.”



Such an approach might also explain why Johnson believed he could promise in his Telegraph column on Monday that Brexit would not mean closing EU labour markets to British citizens. “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU, to live, to travel, to study, to buy homes and settle down. As the German equivalent of the CBI – the BDI – has very sensibly reminded us, there will continue to be free trade and access to the single market,” he said.

One danger of adopting an Australian-style, points-based, immigration system is that if a work visa regime is imposed on EU countries they are likely to retaliate and impose their own visa regime on Britons wanting to live and work on the continent. So it would be important to allow British employers to bring in as many EU migrants as they are prepared to offer jobs, to avoid the European labour market being closed to British citizens.

The new system could be controlled by only issuing national insurance numbers, certificates or “visas” to those who have a job offer. It would be similar to the Australian immigration system, which allows employers to recruit overseas staff on temporary visas. More than 400,000 arrived in Australia last year on temporary work visas, compared with the 40,000 under its skilled “points-based” programme.

But there is a downside to this approach. The Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in a street in Birstall on 16 June, had written in an article in the Yorkshire Post: “The whole purpose of the Aussie system is to give businesses more control over who they bring into the country – which tends to be the cheapest workers – forcing down wages and doing absolutely nothing to address concerns about insecure employment.”