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:

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:

And something on some of the immigration inbox issues facing the new Labour government:

Something on how to think about deportations:

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:

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:

On trying to judge success and failure in immigration policy and why immigration policies always seem to fail:

Why being tough on migrants is not the same as being tough on immigration and is often counterproductive, in reality:

A series of three articles on family immigration policy (I’ve planned several more but they take ages to write, sorry!):

A couple of articles on why charging high immigration fees is bad policy and high penalties on employers is counterproductive:

Something on viewing immigration as a contractual affair and the pros and cons of that way of thinking:

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: