A short history of the net migration target
What was it, where did it come from and how did it come to dominate immigration discourse?
On a rather uncomfortable looking cocktail chair in a TV studio in January 2010, David Cameron unknowingly sealed his own fate. It was on this chair, during an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, that the then Leader of the Opposition re-iterated a three year old Conservative Party policy to cap immigration. Cameron said he aspired to reduce net migration from ‘hundreds of thousands’ to ‘tens of thousands’.
This interview somehow morphed into universally received wisdom that a solid, solemn pledge had been made to reduce net migration to below 100,000, known as ‘the net migration target’. This net migration target became unofficial government policy. It was hugely influential, driving the adoption of a range of harsh immigration policies intended to reduce arrivals and increase departures. It infected all aspects of immigration policy and decision making.
Its legacy continues today. Remarkably, everyone remains focussed on net migration rather than immigration. The two are not the same. Focussing on overall net migration confuses and blends together emigration with different forms of immigration, such as returning British citizens, skilled workers, shortage occupations, students, families and refugees.
The fact that David Cameron never intended to set a net migration target of 100,000 was irrelevant, both within government and outside it. This was an example of woolly words being hardened by headline writers into a solid pledge.
What is net migration?
Net migration is a measure of inward migration minus outward emigration. To put it another way, net migration is the overall change in population due to inward and outward migration over a given period.
In the United Kingdom the given period is one year, because the definition of ‘migrant’ used in compiling the statistics is a person who moves to another country for a period of at least one year. This is the internationally recognised standard. The figures include British citizens returning from abroad or leaving for other countries.
It also includes international students. All the controversy about counting students towards net migration kind of overlooks two things. Firstly, it is totally normal to consider students arriving for more than one year as ‘migrants’. Secondly, when they leave they reduce net migration in their year of departure anyway, so they are ‘self neutralising’ in that respect. It is only if international students continuously rise that they will seem to affect net migration. Or if there is an interruption to studies like the pandemic, when they all left at once and no new students arrived for a time. Those arriving now are therefore not being counterbalanced by corresponding departures of students who were already here.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, net migration was negative, meaning more people were emigrating from the UK than were migrating to the UK. From the mid 1990s, net migration has been consistently positive, with more people arriving than leaving. In the 1990s the figure was in the order of ‘tens of thousands’ but from 1998 the figure started to rise, increasing to consistently over 250,000 per year immediately after the expansion of the EU in the mid 2000s and then falling below 200,000 for three years from 2012 before rising sharply again.
Advantages of net migration measure
The attraction to a politician of focussing on net migration rather than solely on inward immigration was that the policy could be presented as one of overall population management rather than one of keeping out foreigners, with the connotations of racism and xenophobia that might be implied.
The net migration figures are also by their nature lower than the immigration figures because the figure is calculated by deducting emigration from immigration. It might be thought that lower numbers might be seen as less alarmist to members of the general public, although this perhaps naively assumes that if a person was alarmed by immigration figures of, say, 200,000 per year that person would not be alarmed by net migration figures of, say, 100,000 per year. This is all a matter of political positioning, which can seem to be of paramount importance in the short term.
As events were to prove, the net migration target was a tactician’s gambit for winning an election rather than a strategist’s plan for governing effectively and retaining power.
Disadvantages of net migration measure
The disadvantages of setting a net migration target are legion.
To start with, net migration is a terrible way of measuring changes to population or what most members of the public understand immigration to be. Net migration takes no account of population change through births and deaths so it is hard to see that it is really about what amounts to a ‘sustainable’ population.
Because the equation includes British citizens returning from abroad, the final figure does not really say much about actual migrants either. If two British citizens return from a gap year and one Chilean student leaves then net migration would be +1, but most members of the public would consider that to be -1 because a foreign national departed. As Bridget Anderson has pointed out, if the definition of ‘migrant’ is adjusted from a person moving for a period of four years rather than one year, net migration was negative for many years.
The statistics on which the net migration figures are based are not as reliable as a politician betting his entire reputation on them might have hoped. The basis for calculating net migration is not, as a rational person might expect, counting them in and counting them out.
Counting them out is impossible as there are no formal exit checks for those leaving the UK, despite repeated promises to re-introduce them.
Instead, the numbers were until recently based on the International Passenger Survey. This sounds awfully formal but in reality it involves a handful of people hanging around at specific airports and ferry terminals on certain days (not nights) in tabards with badges. They randomly ask a few passengers willing to talk to them why they are leaving the UK and when they plan to return. The percentage of travellers questioned is 0.34% of the over 240 million passengers who pass through UK ports each year and the survey identifies between 3,000 to 4,000 long term migrants who say they are moving homes - emigrating to Australia or returning home to Sri Lanka, for example. This small sample is then extrapolated, meaning that it is multiplied up on the assumption that those sampled are representative of the whole.
I was once accosted at Gatwick airport by a former colleague brandishing a clipboard as I attempted to depart on holiday with my wife and two very young children on one of the busiest days of the summer holidays. The timing was hardly ideal but it was too late to duck away by the time I realised what was happening: he was working for the International Passenger Survey.
It is not hard to imagine that there might be problems with a system relying on a small sample size taken from only certain airports (not including Leeds or Luton, infamously), a degree of self-selection by passengers (the busy or shy ones just refuse to be interviewed) and accurate self-reporting (some people might lie).
To put it mildly, it is not an accurate way of measuring total population movement. Indeed, the net migration figures come with a ‘large margin of error’, as the Oxford-based Migration Observatory team of researchers put it, and the figures have twice been retrospectively amended because later and better information suggested the figures were wrong.
In 2019, the Office for National Statistics downgraded the net migration statistics from ‘National Statistics’ to ‘Experimental Statistics’ because they were not considered sufficiently reliable. A new methodology was used for preparing the most recent statistics.
To make matters worse, from a savvy politician’s perspective, the statistics on net migration are published quarterly. The issue therefore recurs in the media at least every three months. It is rather hard to defuse and entomb an issue when it has to be wheeled out in public every quarter.
For all these very good reasons, there had never been an overarching immigration policy of aiming for a certain level of immigration. Now that there was a specific numeric limit and it had turbocharged political importance, ministers and civil servants had to try and find ways to meet it. Arrivals needed to be discouraged and departures encouraged.
Controlling net migration
There were broadly three components to net migration: emigration, EU migration and non-EU migration. The first two were impossible to control. The third is surprisingly difficult. Quotas might sounds like a good idea but a moment’s thought quickly tells you that they really, really aren’t.
There is almost nothing that a government can do to control outward emigration, short of crashing the economy and thus sending citizens abroad to search for work. That said, the comparative weakness of the UK’s post-Brexit economy might end up increasing emigration by skilled British citizens who can earn more abroad. According to a net migration target, this would be a good thing.
There is also little if anything that a government of a European Union country can do about inward EU migration. After joining what was then the European Economic Community in 1973, imposing a quota on European migration would have been illegal. It is primarily the economy that governs EU migration, as the vast majority of EU citizens moving across borders do so to find work. If, while Britain was still a member of the EU, our economy were to outperform the economies of other EU countries, citizens of those EU countries might well be incentivised to move to Britain in search of work. This is exactly what was to happen from around 2012 onwards, as Britain recovered from the global economic crash faster than some other EU countries.
Other types of inward migration from outside the EU might in theory be controlled, but the social and economic consequences of doing so need to be carefully considered.
The cross-party mainstream political consensus from 1962 onwards was that immigration needed to be limited if good race relations were to be maintained. But there had never before been a policy of aiming to limit immigration to a particular level.
Policy makers and civil servants with particularly long memories might have recalled the total failure of informal controls to limit Commonwealth immigration in the immediate post war period.
To really restrict immigration quotas or caps would needed. While caps had previously been used, their history was not an auspicious one. A voucher system was introduced by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 but the numbers were slashed in 1965 from 40,000 to just 8,500.
After the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 shut the doors on the East African Asians, the notorious special voucher scheme was introduced to allow a small number in every year before it was finally abolished and replaced with citizenship rights by David Blunkett as Home Secretary in 2002.
Imposing quotas on skilled economic migration is perfectly possible but is unpopular with the business community as well as economically self-harming.
Preventing unskilled workers arriving may be more attractive to a policy maker, but in 2010 there was no route by which non-EU unskilled workers could actually arrive anyway.
Because foreign students pay far, far higher tuition fees than domestic students, preventing such students from coming to the UK would cut off a crucial source of funding for higher education and there is no public pressure to do so.
Quotas are very problematic for family immigration; they might be a fair way of deciding who gets Glastonbury tickets but is it really fair and reasonable to prevent entry of a spouse, child or parent only because others had applied first?
Setting a quota for refugees is likely to be portrayed as heartless and it would require the radical step of actual or effective withdrawal from the Refugee Convention.
The accidental target
So, net migration is inherently very difficult to manage at all without doing so indirectly through a politically suicidal economic policy, even the elements of the migration equation that can be directly affected by domestic immigration rules involve some very serious trade-offs and the net migration statistics are published every three months.
David Cameron could certainly be criticised for his short term thinking but he was no fool; this is why he probably never intended to set a net migration target.
Returning to Andrew Marr’s cocktail chair, at the time of Cameron’s interview the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, had recently attached his name to a report calling for immigration to be reduced and opined that the population of the UK was growing too quickly. Given the media coverage attracted by the report and Carey’s remarks, it was unsurprising that Cameron was asked by Andrew Marr whether he agreed.
In response, Cameron starts to talk about pressure on public services but is then pressed by Marr on whether the previously announced ‘cap on the numbers coming into this country’ would involve a specific number. Cameron responds that he would like to see net migration in the ‘tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands’.
Marr follows up again and asked whether there would be a ‘specific figure, a real cap that you will announce and stick to?’ Cameron says there should be ‘a clear annual figure that people should see’ which would be announced each year. No specific number was given there and then.
You can watch for yourself:
By omitting to qualify Marr’s question about an overall cap on immigration and by moving the discussion on to net migration, Cameron had accidentally implied a new policy of setting an overall cap on net migration. According to Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, it was not intended to be a deliberate, hard-edged net migration target at the time.
Nevertheless, the interview was covered in the Daily Telegraph the next day with a headline reading ‘David Cameron: net immigration will be capped at tens of thousands.’ The article was more nuanced but the write up still suggested a commitment that under a Conservative Government ‘net immigration would be kept in the “tens of thousands,” rather than the current rate of “hundreds of thousands.”’
That Telegraph headline ended up driving a fundamental transformation of British immigration policy.
The evolution of the net migration target
There was quite some history to the Conservative Party policy of a cap on immigration, as Andrew Marr will have known very well when he decided to press Cameron on the point during the interview.
The concept of an unspecified ‘overall annual limit on the numbers coming to Britain’ had featured in the Conservative Party manifesto for the 2005 election along with a related pledge to withdraw from the Refugee Convention.
It was perhaps a response to David Blunkett’s politically unwise statement in 2003 that he saw ‘no obvious limit’ to the number of skilled migrants who might enter the country, nor did he believe there was a maximum population which could be accommodated.
The Conservative Party commitment in 2005 was a hard cap applying to EU, economic, family and humanitarian immigration. No actual number for the proposed cap was announced but the policy attracted accusations of racism and xenophobia.
When David Cameron took over as Conservative Party leader after that election, he set about re-positioning his party as more modern and liberal. He attempted to move on from the crude absolute limit on all immigration.
In 2007 he gave a speech on the subject of population growth where he suggested it was not immigration as such but high net migration that was the problem, because this was pushing up the total population to ‘unsustainable’ levels. As a solution he proposed ‘explicit annual limits on non-EU economic migration, set at a level substantially lower than the current rate.' No specific numbers were proposed. The policy was more refined and more realistic than the previous party position, it did not require withdrawal from the Refugee Convention and it did not suggest that EU migration could or should be limited.
It transpired Cameron had been too successful in moving the discussion from immigration to net migration. In solving a short-term problem of political positioning, Cameron had created a new long-term problem of governing.
The headache that was to haunt Cameron and his Home Secretary Theresa May, who would be responsible for implementing the impossible pledge, was that if the problem was net migration then a limit on non-EU migration could never be the solution. Such a limit would have no impact on EU migration nor on emigration, which were to prove to be significant contributors to overall net migration in the coming years. As the economy improved, more EU citizens arrived and less UK residents departed; net migration rose.
The hamstrung approach set out by Cameron in 2007 of aspiring to reduce net migration by means of setting an immigration cap on non EU-migration featured in the Conservative Party manifesto for the 2010 election:
‘We will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s - tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.'
The means of achieving this policy remained the same as that proposed in 2007:
'setting an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work.’
There was no clear, unambiguous net migration target of 100,000 here, only a commitment to ‘take steps’ to reduce net migration to ‘tens of thousands.’
Cameron returned to the immigration issue in another major speech in 2011. He rather unwisely used the words ‘promise’ and, even more unambiguously, ‘No ifs. No buts.’
By late 2011 the BBC was reporting that the government ‘has pledged to cut net migration to tens of thousands by 2015’ and that the promise was being spectacularly missed. ‘Tens of thousands’ proved to be too vague for journalists and headline writers, though, and the figure began to be written up as 100,000. By early 2014, the figure of 100,000 seems to have emerged as received wisdom.
A further hardening of words found its way into the Conservative Party manifesto in 2015, which declared
'We will keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.’
This was arguably the strongest, clearest expression of the net migration target. There was nothing really to be lost by this point. Everyone thought that there was such a target, no matter whether one had actually been set or not.
Nevertheless, in 2017 the manifesto reverted to the more ambiguous previous language used and the hamstrung approach of mentioning net migration but suggesting it could be achieved with a limit on non EU immigration:
‘It is our objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the last two decades. We will, therefore, continue to bear down on immigration from outside the European Union.’
The accidental net migration target became central to Theresa May’s identity as Home Secretary then Prime Minister. The actual policy of limiting non-EU migration was basically forgotten from 2010 onwards, no matter what the manifestos said. A cap on skilled workers was imposed but no similar caps were imposed on family or humanitarian immigration. David Cameron even agreed, under huge pressure, to a refugee resettlement scheme that increased the numbers of refugees arriving in the UK by 20,000 over a five year period. Had the government been serious about meeting the net migration target, this increase humanitarian migration would need to have been balanced out with a reduced quota for other types of migration.
This was never seriously on the cards. The accidental net migration target could only ever be met through chance if at all because the government, for very good reasons, was not willing to impose a strict quota on families, students, refugees or other categories of migrant. Rather than resile from the impossible policy, May and Cameron felt it was better to at least look like they were trying.
They failed, obviously. Yet net migration continues to dominate discussion of immigration policy even today.
This newsletter was adapted from the chapter on net migration in my book Welcome to Britain.