How can immigration reform campaigners best engage with the Labour government?

Protest, engage or both? And what sort of protest or engagement might have an impact?

Photo by Jackie Hope on Unsplash

Many of us working in the immigration and asylum sector have high hopes for a Labour government. I’ve read countless demands over the last few years to, for example, end the hostile environment, abolish immigration fees and scrap the minimum income threshold for spouses, amongst other things. The government “needs” to do x or “must” do y. Inevitably, then, a lot of us are going to be disappointed. None of that stuff is going to happen.

In-country immigration or identity checks of some kind are here to stay, permanently. I think the current system is appalling and should be reformed. But I’m not going to waste my limited time and energy calling for simple abolition. It doesn't shift the Overton Window or whatever. Ironically, calling for simple abolition is ultimately just performative.

Immigration fees too are here to stay. The income from fees funds around 40% of the massive Home Office budget. There is simply no way the government is going to find that money from somewhere else instead when there are so many other spending priorities. It doesn’t mean that all the current fees need to stay as they are, that rebalancing of who pays what is impossible or that there aren’t other ways to make the route to settlement cheaper for migrants.

There has been a minimum income threshold from at least 1988 even for British citizens and, for settled migrants, since 1973. I’m sorry, but I think there is no way it is going to be scrapped now. It might be changed or reformed but some kind of income test will be with us for the foreseeable future.

Should we all just give up, then? Are our high hopes to be discussed only in the past tense? No, I don’t think so.

Is anyone listening?

Well, not to me they’re not. What follows is entirely speculative. I’ve got no inside track and have had zero contact with anyone in government since the election. I actually had more contact with the last lot, although that was close to zero. So perhaps you should stop reading right now…

A thread on Bluesky by Minnie Rahman, the chief executive of charity Praxis said pretty much the same around the time of the Labour conference, which is what started me thinking about this properly.

It is early days. Or it was then, anyway. But there’s an awful lot we’d like the new government to do and there may only be four and a half years in which to do it. A ten year term seems far more plausible. But who knows?

What might government engagement look like?

I am interested here in the type of engagement that might actually yield some near-term real world results.

I can tell you what meaningful or effective government engagement doesn’t look like: stakeholder groups, consultation responses and public condemnation.

I went to plenty of stakeholder meetings under the previous Labour government. They were a total waste of time. Window dressing for decisions that had already been made. Civil servants might have convened them in good faith (maybe) but the reality was that they had zero impact on government policy in the field of immigration and asylum. So I’m done with government stakeholder groups.

And I’ve written plenty of consultation responses. I took a decision some time ago to stop wasting time on those as well. The only one I’ve submitted for a long time was to the Wendy Williams Windrush review. I only made an exception for that because I felt (a) it was genuinely important and someone might actually listen and (b) I thought I might have something useful to contribute. Unusually, I had some positive private feedback on it, so I felt I hadn’t wasted my time.

I’ve done more than my fair share of publicly condemning government policy, too. Has that ever done any good? I think it’s complicated: yes and no. Yes in the sense that it can help to cultivate and build a body of opinion. No in the sense that this has zero impact on short term government policy.

Apart from anything, it’s too late. The best condemning a policy can do is secure its reversal. That can be important with really bad policies from which the government might conceivably back down. But it doesn’t help constructively shape anything. It probably has zero impact on long term government policy too.

As a naive amateur at all this, this looks to me like all three of the easy levers I can pull. All three involve concrete, achievable, quantifiable outputs that are within my unilateral grasp. If I was a charity, I could proudly report these outputs to my trustees and supporters.

If turning up to invited meetings, making invited submissions and throwing my rattle out of the pram don’t work, what else can I do?

We can probably learn a lot from “Tufton Street”. This apparently innocuous road near Parliament is the epicentre of the right-wing think-tank world. Countless outfits like Policy Exchange are based there. And they had huge influence over the last Conservative government, at least in its latter days.

It was in my view a baleful and incredibly damaging influence which only brought on those very latter days. But they were certainly good at getting their ideas heard.

How did they do it?

Politics is about people

Policy seems to be generated by a combination of civil servants, formal government special political advisers (SPADs) and external actors. The SPADs seem to act as a conduit for ideas from outside to inside government.

As an outside observer it is hard to know what really goes on in the policy world. But I’m starting to get the impression that policy is produced not so much in the corridors of power as the over the canapés of think tanks. I’ve had a little bit of contact with SPADs over the last few years and they, despite reports to the contrary, human. They act like humans. Piss them off and they are pissed off with you. Tell them something interesting they didn’t know and they are interested. Get them excited about something and they might take it further.

They are also political. It’s literally in the job title.

So, one thing to do is seek and create opportunities for contact. Producing interesting reports and holding receptions might be one thing. Constructive relationship building through stakeholder groups might be another. The stakeholder meeting might be a write-off as a direct means of changing anything but it could be an opening, perhaps. Or go the whole hog and set up a think tank. There’s bugger all funding available for us, sadly, but perhaps it doesn’t take a lot. Perhaps using existing funding to re-style as a think tank might be more realistic. One thing about think tanks, though, is that they do need to do some thinking.

Another thing to try is not pissing people off, alienating them and presenting yourself as an unreliable and politically toxic partner.

A range of NGOs and charities recently wrote an open letter to the Home Secretary. This was in response to a contract tender by the Home Office for organisations to assist failed asylum seekers and others who have been removed from the UK with help getting back on their feet after removal. The contracts sound like they were not about removing people or helping remove them but about helping people after they’ve been removed. From the opening paragraph of the letter:

We, the undersigned civil society organisations, stand united against this attempt to make us complicit in the department’s harmful and divisive anti-migrant agenda.

There’s more in the letter, as well as some obvious hyperbole about “millions” being affected by immigration legal aid shortages.

The signatories didn’t need to write a public letter. In fact, they didn’t need to even write a private letter. All they needed to do was not bid for the contracts. I don’t know what they were hoping to achieve but I’m pretty sure they’ll have pissed off the intended recipients with that, if they actually saw it. It’s pretty much the opposite of making friends and influencing people.

Produce positive ideas

Scrap this and scrap that is not a message a government generally wants to hear. Reform this or reform that is more like it. But what reforms? What could be done differently and how?

If I look around the immigration and asylum sector, I see very few positive proposals for reforms that go beyond scrapping stuff. Increasingly, I think that’s a real problem.

I can absolutely understand that people are upset with all sorts of changes that were wrought by the last government. I am too. But the fact is that the new government isn’t going to scrap the hostile environment, scrap immigration fees or scrap the minimum income threshold, for example.

I can also understand that charities and campaign groups operate under constraints. These might be in effect legal or at least official constraints: pursuing charitable objects, for example, or pursuing objectives decided at an organisation level. They might be structural constraints, such as not alienating donors or supporters. They might be cultural constraints on the part of staff themselves, who want to act according to their beliefs.

But in a tiny sector dominated by only a handful of organisations, it feels like there’s barely anyone working on granular but meaningful improvements to the asylum and immigration system.

There are some notable exceptions.

A recent report by Citizens UK on pathways to citizenship looks to me like a good example of some realistic and useful reforms. It’s a bit vague and some of the changes appear pretty minor. But they could conceivably all be implemented, along with other similar or parallel changes. And what seem minor to a person who wants to abolish the entire hostile environment can still be life-changing for those actually affected. Shortening routes to settlement, for example, would obviously be very considerably better for migrants and their families and it would also have social and economic benefits for all of us.

The Red Cross ran a good campaign a few years back on extending the move-on period for refugees to 28 days after their asylum claims succeed. This hardly seemed revolutionary. But it was intended to avoid some refugee homelessness and help local authorities. And look at that, the government has actually adopted it, at least on a pilot basis. It will make a real difference to a lot of refugees.

There was a great campaign on limiting the detention period to 28 days maximum. This ultimately failed but it seemed so close to success at one point. I’m old enough to remember earlier debates in the sector concluding that 28 days was too long a limit and that it might lead to increased detention for short periods as no one would be released before the 28 days period were it to be introduced. The campaign was great because it had a pretty wide the sector and reached across the political spectrum - something the instigators worked very hard and persistently to achieve. Perhaps it might have had more chance of success had it emphasised cost savings but probably not, really.

There was a well-intentioned campaign on allowing asylum seekers to work a while back, although it was arguably hamstrung by being presented as a pro-refugee measure and using the language of rights. There are a LOT of ways to argue for asylum seekers to be allowed to work, some of which might actually get a hearing from government, at least outside the institutionalised Home Office. It would save a fortune in the short-term (asylum accommodation) and the medium-term (by reducing refugee homelessness when status is granted), it’s pro-growth (a bit at least) and it’s pro-integration.

But how about reforms to the hostile environment system? IPPR have done some work on this but I’ve seen nothing from anyone else.

How about tied visas and worker exploitation? The Work Rights Centre has been doing great awareness-raising, there’s also FLEX and Emiliano Mellino and his team have done some amazing investigations and reporting in this area. None are ‘traditional’ immigration or migrants-rights campaign groups or charities. They do a great job highlighting the underlying problem of tied visas. But it is beyond their narrow remit to advocate on the benefits to business and Labour’s economic and workers’ rights agendas to fundamental reform of the existing sponsorship system.

How about reforms to the way that immigration fees are structured and balanced? Is it right that employers can and do impose “claw-back” clauses, or that migrant workers are on the hook for visa fees? Is the upfront cost of the Immigration Health Surcharge the only way to structure that cost? The Home Office seems to be implementing and considering some changes itself but, as far as I know, without any input from outside.

How about the spouse income threshold? A membership organisation like Families Reunite is kind-of tied to campaigning for abolition, otherwise some members will feel they’ve been sold out. But if abolition is not realistic, what other possibilities are being advocated? There is a consultation on this now but I’ve no idea what organisations are planning to respond or what they might say. Personally I think the whole narrative of “net contribution” is the wrong one for family migration and debating the “right” level isn’t a matter for economists at all. It’s a question of social policy and fairness, and that’s why I think linking it to the minimum wage is the right answer. But I feel like I’m shouting that into the void.

So what can we do?

I feel pretty despairing of the status quo but I’ve got no concrete suggestions on how we can do things differently. I wrote previously about how there is no such thing as “immigration law” and this is a related problem.

I don’t trust civil servants at the Home Office to come up with the full range of possible responses and reforms. They have been trained to think in certain ways. And they usually think yet more bureaucracy is the answer.

Ministers, special advisers and civil servants need practical, deliverable, politically-feasible ideas from us. But our tiny sector just isn’t structured to deliver those ideas in a convincing way.

Maybe we need something new. An organisation to work on migration law and policy as a whole, capable of advocating the full spectrum of available arguments. It would need research and policy development capability. That’s expensive, though, and funding is already incredibly thin on the ground.

Otherwise, though, I guess we just have to leave it to the wide and diverse range of organisations each working in their little silo. Or to civil servants at the Home Office. Or to Policy Exchange and their like.