Has the immigration U-turn already begun? When Home Secretary James Cleverly announced his overhaul of the legal migration system at the start of the month, it included a big crackdown on the family visa route into the UK. The Minimum Income Requirement (MIR) for a British citizen wanting to bring their foreign spouse to the UK was set to rise from £18,200 to £38,700 – a threshold thousands of pounds above the median salary in the UK.

But in the small print of the ‘legal migration statement’ released last night by the Home Office, we learn that the MIR has been watered down significantly. Instead of more than doubling the salary threshold, the new earnings requirement will be £29,000 as ‘part of a staged implementation’ – an amount below median earnings. There are no details in the document about when the MIR might rise to the full £38,700, though Rishi Sunak has suggested today the higher threshold could be implemented in early 2025 – but that’s a decision that will presumably be made in the next parliament. Either way, the higher MIR will only apply to new applications (those already on a family visa can renew it under the old threshold). According to the Home Office’s assessment, this increased (but lower) figure will still allow the majority of the UK’s working population to bring their spouse to the UK on their earnings alone.

A policy deliberately designed to keep more families apart did not feel conservative by nature

What explains the government’s change of heart? While the document doesn’t say, it does reference the possibility of a legal ‘breach of Article 8 ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights)’ were a worker to ‘meet an exceptional circumstances test’. It has been well publicised that campaign groups, including Reunite Families, were preparing to test the government’s new immigration policies in court. The decision to lower the threshold may have been part of a strategy to avoid (more) defeats around government immigration policy in the courts, as the document mentions multiple times that ‘some applicants may still be granted permission’ to come to the UK even if the criteria isn’t met.

Still, the change in policy has all the characteristics of a U-turn. Announced quietly in the days before Christmas, when the Commons isn’t even sitting, this seems to be the first climbdown from the government in its bid to implement much harsher visa requirements. It didn’t take long.

The substantial hike to the family visa requirements was thought to be the most controversial part of the government’s legal migration crackdown when it was announced. The right of the Tory party may not be impressed with the most recent changes: former immigration minister Robert Jenrick told Politico that the full scale of the measures need ‘to be implemented now, not long-grassed to the spring or watered down’, while Miriam Cates MP (co-chair of the New Conservatives group), has told the the Times that the change ‘does not bode well’.

But a policy deliberately designed to keep more families apart did not feel conservative by nature. So it’s not surprising that this was the first policy to be changed. But it raises questions about what comes next. As I noted when the changes were announced, the government seems trapped in a vicious cycle where it cracks down on legal migration for political reasons – mainly to be able to say it’s reducing the ‘headline figure’ – only then to unwind the restrictions when it becomes obvious the myriad of problems such blunt restrictions are causing.

This U-turn on the family visa is a prime example, and, eventually, there are likely to be more. The latest changes bizarrely target the rights of foreign health and social care workers coming to the UK, and also reduce the number of eligible taxpayers who can work in the UK, by raising the threshold to procure a work visa from ​​£26,200 to £38,700. It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario, with the NHS England waiting list hovering around 7.7 million, when ministers (in this government or another) reassess and decide they need to incentivise foreign health staff to come to the UK, rather than make it more difficult.

Wider economic factors may force the government’s hand, too. This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics shows the UK economy contracted slightly between July and September. Having previously thought the economy had flatlined in that period, the ONS figures now show that GDP appears to have dipped by 0.1 per cent, making the prospect of a technical recession more likely – and creating even more hurdles for Rishi Sunak to make good on his pledge to get the economy growing by the end of the year.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that a government that made economic growth one of its major pledges has also implemented a severe immigration crackdown at a time when the UK still has over 900,000 job vacancies and immigration is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to keep GDP figures afloat. It would be politically impossible now for Sunak to unwind his own immigration changes, set out just under a month ago. But it’s not hard to imagine at some point down the line a different calculation is made: one that puts the economy and prosperity at the heart of decision-making, rather than the ugly politics of bluntly reducing migration figures.