This is a restriction on low skilled (presumably mostly low paid) non-European immigrants to the UK that will also bleed into the high skill pool.
Why, why, why must economists of all people romanticize the "high skill immigrant"? Are immigration restrictions not worth talking about when they're for low-skill people? Are restrictions on high skill immigrants so heinous that when a low skill immigrant restriction begins to impact them our strategy has to be to treat it like an attack on high skill immigrants?
I think it's mostly that politically-speaking, high-skilled immigration sounds good while low-skilled immigration does not. When I speak with people about immigration, they see engineers, scientists, etc as a source of pride and job creation. They see low-skilled immigrants as unfair competition to good lower-class or lower-middle-class Americans.
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