"A failed free market experiment" – that's how the home secretary will describe the approach that's seen vast numbers of people from around the world come to the UK to pour pints in pubs, to cut hair, to care for the most vulnerable, to pick fruit, or to fix our plumbing.
Yvette Cooper is getting ready to unveil the government's overhaul of the rules that determine who can come to the UK with permission, and for how long.
Her White Paper, which will be called "Restoring Control Over the Immigration System" and be 69 pages long, is a big moment for Labour to try to sort a messy system, under which the numbers of people moving here rose way over most people's imagination.
With Reform hard on Labour's heels, capitalising on public concern about immigration, the success or failure of Cooper is vital to the government.
So what has Labour come up with?
It will emerge in full on Monday, but we know a lot about what's on the table.
It's expected that work visas will be strictly time-limited for jobs that don't need graduate-level skills.
Foreign students who have studied for degrees here could lose the right to stay in the UK after they finish at university.
Overseas workers will be expected to have a better understanding of English, but reported suggestions of A-level equivalent are wide off the mark.
And companies who repeatedly can't show efforts to recruit UK-based staff, rather than hunt abroad, might lose their right to sponsor foreign workers to come here at all.
There are also likely to be proposals designed to change how judges apply what's known as Article 8 of the Human Rights Act. It's designed to protect everyone's right to a family life.
But how it's used sometimes by immigration lawyers to stop deportations has long been a concern of politicians – in 2011, I even remember Theresa May claiming an asylum seeker had been allowed to stay in the UK because of their cat.
More than a decade later, recent cases like this one raised at Prime Minister's Questions have led the government to review how the courts have been interpreting everyone's right to a family life. We'll hear more of the details from the home secretary in the studio on Sunday, and likely from the prime minister on Monday.
Some Conservatives and Reform argue the only way of making a material difference is to leave the European Convention on Human Rights altogether, rather than see ministers stick their nose into the courts. Whether the government's proposals here make a difference, we'll have to see.
But the big principle in Cooper's thinking is that the immigration system should be fundamentally linked to the labour market – helping British workers get the skills to fill vacancies, rather than overseas workers being brought in again and again, to plug the gaps.
The Whitehall wiring will be redirected to try to make that happen with a new approach under a 'quad' – where employers, the Department for Work and Pensions, the job centres, skills bodies, and the Migration Advisory Committee, that sets the specific rules, all work together.
The idea, to wean the economy off relying on staff from overseas, by pushing employers to work much harder to find staff from here at home.
That's the theory. Here are the politics: for years, conventional thinking in both main parties was the immigration was broadly good because it helped the economy. Politicians and members of the public who raised concern about the pace and scale of workers coming were sometimes dismissed.
One Cabinet minister says last time Labour was in power, when "people raised concerns, it was too easy to say it's a race question – there's a good understanding now that good, decent people worry about immigration – it's about fairness".
