How can we judge success and failure in immigration policy?
Defining and measuring success would be a good start
Duh, it depends what you’re trying to achieve. And this is one of the fundamental problems with immigration policy in the United Kingdom.
Either policy makers do not really know what they hope to achieve.
Or their private intentions are different to their public pronouncements.
Or they use the wrong tool to try to achieve their purpose.
Or, arguably worst of all, they make public pronouncements that they know are unachievable.
Or some combination of some or all of these. Let’s take a look at each.
Don’t know
Politicians sometimes don’t really know what they are doing. I know this will shock absolutely no-one, but it is particularly true in immigration policy at the moment. It hasn’t always been true. If we look back at the past we can see distinct periods of changes in overall immigration policy. I think these policies were conscious and deliberate rather than accidental and default.
Imperial era
In the years between the arrival of the Windrush in 1948 and the imposition of formal immigration controls on British subjects for the first time in 1962, immigration policy was basically open, at least for British subjects. Aliens, including European nationals, were subject to rigorous controls. If there was demand for workers from abroad, the government was willing to led that demand be satisfied by importing labour from the Commonwealth. ‘The government’ was not then and is not today a monolithic enterprise with a singular intent, though.
At times, parts of the government even encouraged employers to recruit from the Commonwealth. Enoch Powell as minister for health famously encouraged recruitment from the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, other parts of the government were uneasy about the entry of ‘coloured people’, as they put it back then. Attlee’s government briefly considered diverting the Windrush. Churchill’s government commissioned reports seeking evidence of integration problems with a view to justifying legislation.
As historian Randall Hansen has shown, both these perspectives overlapped with another view, which was that white immigration from the Commonwealth and from Ireland should be allowed to continue. They were ‘kith and kin’, as the contemporary terminology had it. Finding a way to permit white immigration but prevent ‘coloured’ immigration was difficult to achieve without an explicit colour bar, which was considered unacceptable.
Eventually racism won out and the result was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962.
Zero immigration
From 1962 to about 2000, successive governments pursued what has been called a ‘zero immigration’ policy. Only the entry of family members was really permitted, and then increasingly grudgingly. A small number of work permits were issued, limited migration from the EU occurred and asylum claims were relatively few in number, although they started to rise from the mid 1980s onwards.
Net migration was negative because British citizens often voted with their feet and emigrated. Few foreign nationals were all that interested in reciprocating, and there were few legal routes to do so. The import of cheap labour was permitted to a limited extend through schemes such as the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme, au pair visas and working holiday maker visas. These were all temporary and aimed at young, European or white Commonwealth migrants who were perceived as non-threatening and it was expected would return home at the end of their visa.
Economic migration
In around 2000, something changed. The government started to see migration as a tool for economic growth and started to promote certain forms of economic migration. All of the rhetoric we still hear today of the ‘brightest and best’ and skilled workers really dates from early in this period; it has proven remarkably durable.
The criteria for work permits were liberalised. New visas like the Innovator visa and the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme were invented. The Sector Based Scheme was launched for difficult, low paid jobs in food processing and some other industries.
In 2004, the government fatefully decided not to impose controls on workers from newly acceded EU countries. It was a complex issue. Entry could not be prevented but it was possible in EU law to bar access to the labour market once a person had entered. In a country with no ID cards, that would have been impossible to enforce. The accession also regularised a lot of Eastern Europeans already living in the UK unlawfully and the decision to permit lawful access to the labour market enabled them to work.
Entry might not have been preventable but allowing lawful access to the labour market probably encouraged more to come than would otherwise have been the case. Which led the pendulum to swing the other way.
Net migration
The net migration target accidentally set by David Cameron (I’ve written a whole chapter on this in Welcome to Britain if you want the gory details) framed immigration as a matter of population policy. This was insane, because the other elements of population policy are births and deaths; reducing births and increasing deaths are also ways to ‘control’ population. And even if you confine policy making to migration, the government cannot really control emigration.
It moved the debate on from immigration, but in so doing trapped the government into an unachievable target and regular statistical updates on how the target was being missed.
Oops.
The government tried, though. A cross-governmental ‘Hostile Environment Working Group was set up. A new era of third party, deputised immigration controls was introduced, even though there was no evidence then or now that they deter arrivals or encourage anyone to leave. Family migration was tightened, even though it made a negligible contribution to net migration. It was one of the bits of policy the government could readily control, even if the cost was to be more single parent families. International student numbers were cut. Cameron and Theresa May sought ways to break the link between migration and settlement, for example making it harder for workers to settle after five years. Yet a refugee resettlement scheme was also launched, bringing 5,000 extra refugees per year to the United Kingdom from Syria.
It was all a dismal failure, according to the success criteria the government had set itself.
Present day
Official policy at the moment is to reduce immigration. Johnson pledged to bring overall numbers down and so has Sunak. Yet the Home Office has handing out record numbers of work and student visas. There are very good reasons to do this, but it belies the publicly stated policy.
The real policy seems to be to permit immigration to fill vital workforce shortages. This has been combined with a policy of doing nothing to address those shortages by means of training domestic labour.
The default policy is one of increased levels of immigration, as discussed in my last newsletter. This doesn’t seem to be intentional, although at least some members of the government must surely understand the consequences of their (in)actions.
We saw another example of this over the weekend, with the announcement of a policy of seeking to recruit school teachers from abroad using a £10,000 bonus payment. This, at a time when the government claims to be trying to reduce immigration.
Neither the media nor the public like a hypocrite. The current Janus-faced position looks politically unsustainable. The reality seems to be that the government says it wants one thing but is doing something different. The Home Secretary wants to reduce immigration but the Department for Education wants to increase immigration. If we were being kind we’d say that policy is incoherent. But when Rishi Sunak, as Prime Minister and the leader of the government, allows his government to adopt policies increasing immigration yet also says he wants to reduce immigration, it is actually just dishonest.
Dishonest intent
Again, it will shock precisely no-one if I suggest that sometimes politicians lie. This has certainly happened in immigration policy.
The most stark example that comes to my mind was Rab Butler. He was the Conservative Party Home Secretary in the run up to the landmark Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962. This was the legislation that first imposed immigration controls on British subjects from other Commonwealth countries. There was no explicit reference to race or colour on the face of the legislation and the government claimed that it was not about race but about numbers.
But in private Butler was clear. He wrote in an official memorandum during the planning for the Act that the “great merit” of the proposed approach to control was that it could be presented as non-discriminatory whereas in reality
“its restrictive effect is intended to, and would in fact, operate on coloured people almost exclusively”.
We would be unlikely to see any modern politician committing such a statement to a preservable written record. But if we look at the obsession some politicians have with migration from certain countries, it certainly looks racist to me.
Robert Jenick, the de facto Home Secretary, claims that asylum numbers must be reduced because of allegedly “different lifestyles and values”. This is a readily decipherable code for race.
When one National Conservative conference speaker tells the audience that more babies are needed and the next that less migrants are needed, it is hard to maintain the pretence this is a matter of population policy.
More trivially — sometimes it’s the really small things that really irritate me — the replacement of the old entrepreneur visa with shiny new Start-Up and Innovator visa in 2019 was supposedly about ‘expanding’ previous success in attracting entrepreneurs to the UK.
A total of 14 applications were made in the first six months compared to nearly 1,000 in the same period the previous year.
To be fair, numbers have picked up a bit since then and various reforms and new visas introduced. But business immigration lawyers have repeatedly pointed out that the requirements for and terms of these visas are very unattractive to international business people.
Was this dishonesty or incompetence? Personally, I imagine it is a bit of both. Civil servants quietly admitted that the purpose of the change was to reduce numbers yet improve quality even while ministers trumpeted that Global Britain was Open For Business and so on. It did reduce numbers. There’s no evidence it improved quality. Indeed, there was no known attempt to set criteria for evaluating quality or gather data to conduct the evaluation.
Defective tools
We can be shorter with this one. Politicians often try to achieve policy objectives by adopting tools which cannot possibly serve their avowed purpose.
Just like a screwdriver is no use for hammering in nails, policies that make life miserable for migrants after they arrive are pretty useless at deterring then from coming in the first place. It doesn’t take a genius policy wonk to identify that a problem therefore arises. All of the measures to make life miserable for asylum seekers and migrants haven’t stopped anyone from coming. But they have penalised those who came anyway. This hinders rather than helps subsequent integration.
It’s not possible to reduce net migration by preventing Masters students and their families coming to the UK if they don’t actually show up in net migration figures because their courses are less than one year. It might reduce immigration, at least of a certain sort, but not net migration as measured by the ONS. And they generally leave anyway, meaning that net migration would be correspondingly lower in the year they depart.
As we’ve already discussed, if policy is really to encourage innovators and start-up founders to come to the UK, the various iterations of the entrepreneur, start-up and innovator visa have been a total failure. The terms of the visas have been made less attractive rather than more attractive on the assumption that this will somehow encourage even more innovative and starty-upy people to come here. It’s a defective tool.
And, going back to my previous post about immigration policy, it’s kind of beyond a tweak to a visa type to achieve the underlying objective. Tighter visa rules aren’t going to magic up venture capitalists, a relaxed regulatory environment, a pool of skilled workers or a culture of risk taking. It’s pretty pathetic, really, when you think of it. No wonder civil servants and ministers were disappointed that the “entrepreneurs” attracted here have actually been investing in care homes. Apart from anything, its a growth industry.
This is the point I was trying to make last week. It is a fallacy to think that net migration can easily be controlled with visas. Net migration is about demand for workers of a certain kind. If the government really wants to reduce net migration, it needs to deal with demand or, otherwise, accept that ceasing to issue visas will cause parts of the economy and even parts of society to implode.
Unachievable slogans
The most obvious example is ‘Stop the boats!’ Frankly, I don’t know whether to classify this as incoherence, dishonesty or incompetence. It’s all of the above. The government must by now know that it cannot just stop the boats. Pretending that it can be done is at best disingenuous. The Illegal Migration Bill may, if implemented, somewhat reduce the numbers crossing the Channel in small boats. But some will come and will evade detection and others will come by other means, for example by reverting to the use of lorries.
There are other comparable slogans. ‘Brightest and best’, for example. I don’t think anyone really knows what it really means. And it is impossible to attract the world’s most innovative entrepreneurs to the UK simply by means of making a visa available, even if it was made available on generous terms. The general regulatory and business environment is probably far more important, which is why Fintech companies all seem to be planning to leave. Turns out that calling ourselves the ‘Unicorn Kingdom’ doesn’t really cut it.
Or ‘reduce net migration’. Simple to say but, for reasons I explored previously, hard to do.
‘Safe and legal routes’ is another, at least in part, as is all the rhetoric around supposed ‘queues’ for refugees to come to the UK. Ministers like to pretend that a person can apply to come to the UK on a safe and legal route but the reality is that they simply cannot, unless they are Ukrainian or Afghan. If ministers were being honest they would say something like
‘We’ve accepted 300,000 refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong in just a year and we took 20,000 from Afghanistan the year before that. We think that is pretty good, but it does mean we’re not accepting applications from anywhere else.’
That’s not the line, though. They feel compelled to suggest there is a queue to join when there just isn’t.
What is government immigration policy and is it succeeding or failing?
I follow immigration law and policy pretty closely. I really don’t know what the government is trying to achieve at the moment. I’m pretty sure the government doesn’t know what it is trying to achieve. And I’m pretty sure that the Labour Party does not yet have a clear idea either, although it actually seems to be moving closer to a coherent policy than the government.
So, what can a future government do about this?
Set success criteria
One thing is to set some meaningful success criteria. ‘Reduce net migration’ is far, far too general for a useful success criteria because it includes all types of immigration and all types of emigration. It just isn’t a useful measure.
What should policy be on students? To attract a certain number in order to subsidise domestic students? Would it be a good idea to adopt additional criteria on departure or extension of stay in work or other categories? Or, if we imagine that a more-or-less fixed percentage of students stay on unlawfully and lawfully (if visas are available) at the end of their courses and this is considered undesirable, does that mean that overall international student numbers should be reduced?
How about skilled workers? Are they about expanding the economy and tax take or about filling gaps in the labour market? If the latter, are those gaps to be addressed by any other means, such as education and skills policy and funding?
What about low paid workers? Who dictates the numbers who will be allowed to enter and on what terms? Are we content to issue tied visas which increase the incidence of exploitation? Are we OK with relying on a foreign, temporary workforce with no rights and no ties to this country?
How about integration and citizenship? How important is it to promote integration or for long-resident migrants to become citizens? If important, what measures can we identify that harm or promote integration and encourage take-up of citizenship?
These are the sorts of questions I’d like to think politicians and civil servants ask themselves. I very much doubt they do.
Measure success
I’d also like to think that civil servants have devised ways to measure whether these sorts of criteria are being met. I’m even more doubtful that this is the case. There is almost no attempt to gather useful qualitative data and often even the basic quantitive data is missing.
More than a decade after it was introduced, there has still been no real attempt to evaluate whether all of the hostile environment measures actually encourage unauthorised residents to leave, for example.
If policy is to fill gaps in the workforce, how will that actually be measured? Employers will probably always say they need more foreign workers, particularly if permitted to pay them less on tied visas. Or can this be left to the market? Or can government advisers realistically assess this sort of thing with any degree of accuracy?
If policy is to attract a certain type of innovator or business person to the UK to contribute to economic growth, how will that be measured?
If policy is to promote “integration”, how will that be defined and measured?
And so on.
Some other countries have asked themselves these sorts of questions. The Australian government recently published a mammoth review of immigration policy looking at exactly these sorts of issues. The German government has also re-evaluated its approach to immigration and citizenship and is making various changes. I don’t know enough about either exercise to say whether these look like good changes from a progressive perspective.
But at least they’re giving the issues some thought.