Round up of existing We Wanted Workers articles on immigration policy
The legal levers already available to the Home Secretary (and why they don't always work as expected), inbox issues, youth mobility, deportations, family immigration policy and more.
I thought it might be useful to recent subscribers, of whom there are a fair few, to go through some of the older articles on this Substack. I haven’t included everything, just the stuff that still seems relevant to immigration policy today. I’ll do another round up of asylum policy articles in a few days. Even splitting it up like that, it looks like I’ve somehow blown through the word or content limit for emails, so you might have to click through at the end of the email to see the full list.
You’ll see that a lot of the writing is fairly wordy. That’s basically because I’m trying to think things through and put my own thoughts in order. As I explain in my introduction to what I’m trying to do here:
Welcome to We Wanted Workers
‘We wanted workers, but we got people instead,’ wrote Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch in 1965.* He was musing on the Swiss equivalent of the German ‘Gastarbeiter’, or guest worker, scheme of the 1960s. Many thousands of Turkish workers were invited to Germany to fill vacancies on supposedly temporary visas. Many ended up…
I’ll start with a few articles directly relevant to contemporary immigration policy issues. Firstly, something I wrote on how extensive the legal powers of the Home Secretary really are and the need to look beyond landmark new bills as a solution to policy and political problems:
What can an incoming government quickly accomplish in immigration policy and how?
Immigration law is complex, badly drafted and it is spread out across multiple legal instruments in piecemeal fashion. That said, it collectively gives the government of the day extremely wide-ranging powers to control all aspects of immigration. Almost any legal rule the Home Secretary wants to change can be changed vir…
And something on some of the immigration inbox issues facing the new Labour government:
Labour's inbox: immigration issues
On Monday I took a look at four key asylum issues facing the new government. Today I’m looking at immigration issues. These are less politically immediate problems but they are important nonetheless. The fact they are less immediately urgent doesn't mean they can be ignored. That, after all, was the downfall of the last government.
Something on how to think about deportations:
High and low resistance deportations
I was talking to an academic from the United States recently and he mentioned in passing that the US government funds 400,000 deportations per year. That many do not always take place in a given year but that is the target. And the target has sometimes been met.
And an article about youth mobility, the EU’s fairly recent but also fairly unrealistic proposals and the low uptake of the UK’s current youth mobility scheme:
Is youth mobility between the UK and EU finally on the agenda?
The EU Commission is seeking an internal mandate to begin negotiations with the UK about a reciprocal deal to “facilitate youth mobility”. The basic outline of the proposal is that those aged 18 to 30 would be eligible for a four year general visa which would allow studying, training, working or travelling. Study fees would be home student fees rather t…
And now for some slightly more pensive posts on conceptualising immigration and immigration policy. First, something on why immigration is hard to control and immigration law isn’t really a useful policy lever by itself:
Why the Conservative Party is the party of high net migration
On one level, immigration policy and immigration law are both usually pretty niche interests. On another, irregular entry by means of…
On trying to judge success and failure in immigration policy and why immigration policies always seem to fail:
How can we judge success and failure in immigration policy?
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.
Why being tough on migrants is not the same as being tough on immigration and is often counterproductive, in reality:
Why being tough on migrants actually undermines effective immigration control
There are three basic functions for a government immigration department: Controlling entry; Integrating those who are admitted; and Ensuring the departure of others. Those are not simple things to do in practice. Two of them, aren’t, at any rate. I will say nothing here about what the criteria should be for controlling entry.…
A series of three articles on family immigration policy (I’ve planned several more but they take ages to write, sorry!):
The problem with family immigration policy: real people’s real lives
When I was writing my book Welcome to Britain, I tried to explain the impact of immigration laws and immigration policies on ordinary people’s lives. I used real examples from my own work as well as cases from the law reports. Many of those people were migrants: non-citizens from foreign countries. One of the main themes of the book — and of this Substa…
Re-evaluating family immigration policy: part 1
Back in 1995, US academic Hiroshi Motomura published a slightly tongue-in-cheek guide for policy makers designing a family immigration policy: The Family and Immigration: A Roadmap for the Ruritanian Lawmaker (yes, it’s behind an academic paywall, but there’s nothing I can lawfully do about that, sorry!). As I sa…
Re-evaluating family immigration policy: Part 2
Some six months later, I am very belatedly returning to my planned series on family immigration policy. I’ve found that my capacity to write stuff is not as unlimited as I had previously thought… You can read the first part in the series here and also read the ten questions that I asked at the outset, adapted from a simi…
A couple of articles on why charging high immigration fees is bad policy and high penalties on employers is counterproductive:
Alienation not integration: the massive new immigration fee increases are very bad social policy
The government has today announced massive increases in immigration fees and the immigration health surcharge. This write-up appeared first on Free Movement but it’s definitely an immigration policy issue rather than an immigration law one so I’m cross-posting here.
Tripling illegal worker penalties for employers to £45k per worker is a terrible idea
The government is going to triple the maximum level of fine that can be imposed on employers who fall foul of the regime penalising those who employ illegal workers. Currently the maximum is set at £15,000 per worker for a first offence. It is £20,000 per worker for repeat offences. That’s a lot of money, particularly where multiple illegal workers are …
Something on viewing immigration as a contractual affair and the pros and cons of that way of thinking:
Immigration as contract: care visas and international students
The government’s Migration Advisory Committee has published its annual report for 2023. It’s long but worth at least a skim if you are interested in immigration policy. There’s a pretty detailed look at how net migration works, for example, and then the report goes on to consider some specific policy areas. The two on which I’ll focus here are social ca…
And finally, an article on how we ended up with such bad citizenship deprivation laws, which have accidentally created two classes of British citizenship, and the lessons we might learn from the handling of this issue in the 2000s:
Bad cases making bad law: how the politics of denaturalising bad guys created second class citizens
Stripping a British citizen of their status had become virtually unknown until the turn of the millennium. Since then, following a handful of actual or attempted denaturalisations in the 2000s, the practice has become commonplace. Since 2010 there have been over two hundred cases.