LIVERPOOL, England — “Solidarity forever!” chanted hundreds of immigrant workers and their supporters at a protest called by public sector workers’ union Unison. They were protesting against the Labour government’s deepening attacks on immigrants. Overwhelmingly care workers, they came from across the U.K. to demonstrate outside the Labour Party’s annual conference here Sept. 28.

Unison is demanding a halt to government moves to extend from five to up to 15 years the time it takes before immigrants on employee-sponsored visas can apply for the right to remain indefinitely in the U.K.

The previous Conservative government had passed laws allowing immigrants to come to the U.K. to labor as care workers for the sick, elderly and vulnerable if they’re sponsored by an employer. Hundreds of thousands have done so, especially from Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe, as well as Bangladesh and India. After five continuous years of employment, they could apply for the indefinite right to remain.

Bosses are using the harsher restrictions that immigrants on these visas face to impose worse wages and poorer conditions, care worker Israel Ayegba told the Militant.

“If sponsored employment is ended, immigrants must find a new sponsor within 60 days or face deportation,” he said. That also applies to any immigrant employed by a company that loses its government license to be a sponsor.

“Had we known it would be 15 years, we may have taken a different decision as to whether to come,” Ayegba said. “I was a pastor and my wife a nurse in Nigeria. We had two houses which we sold to raise the sums needed to get to the U.K. as a sponsored worker. My wife is sponsored, working in the health service. We have a son. My status is that of a dependent, too. If she loses her sponsorship, the whole family faces deportation.”

Ayegba pointed to a woman on the demonstration who’d had five different sponsors, having lost or changed jobs. “There are cases of employers charging the potential workers to become sponsored,” he said.

In her address to the rally, Unison General Secretary Andrea Egan said, “Immigrants are being scapegoated for years of underinvestment in social services.”

Vallentyne Mazorotze came to the U.K. from Zimbabwe. “I’ve been in sponsored employment as a care worker for four and a half years,” he told the Militant. “I didn’t come for handouts, but to work. I want to remain a union member, part of the working class here. Now, what’s going to happen in six months’ time?”

Employers have “used their power over visas to deceive, overwork, underpay, and threaten migrants who complained with deportation,” wrote Dora-Olivia Vicol of the Work Rights Centre, in an article posted by the BBC.

Dozens of rail workers joined the protest. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers General Secretary Eddie Dempsey spoke alongside Egan at the rally. Some RMT members are also facing deportation under parallel visa restrictions, Dempsey said.

The government has struck 180 job categories from the list of skilled workers who have visa eligibility, including rail travel assistants. Salary thresholds for getting visas were also raised by successive governments, so if your pay is lower than the new level, you’re no longer eligible and can be deported.

Joining the protest was Jonathan Silberman, Communist League candidate in the Holborn and St. Pancras parliamentary by-election in London. Silberman was enthusiastically welcomed by protesters when he showed them his election flyer that is being mailed to 66,000 households in the constituency. “Immigrant rights: key union issue to unify the working class. Stop deportations. Work & Residency rights for all in U.K.” the leaflet says.

“The government’s anti-immigrant rules and demagogy are a blow to immigrant workers and to workers born here,” Silberman said in discussion with participants. “Wages and conditions are determined from the bottom up. If there are workers who are cajoled into working for less, all workers face cuts to their wages.

“We need to forge a united movement of millions of working people to defend our interests — a movement of all nationalities, workers born here and born abroad,” he said.

The RMT members joining the protest had earlier in the day staged their own demonstration against “outsourcing” — splitting off rail services to subcontractors. “It’s another way of dividing us, leading to worse pay and conditions for all,” former rail worker Andrew Macdonald told the Militant.

Rail workers employed by subcontractors Bidvest Noonan and Rail Gourmet were staging a one-day strike “against low pay and in-work poverty,” the RMT said.