Welcome to We Wanted Workers
A new Substack about immigration law and policy
‘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 staying but the temporary nature of their visas meant they had few rights and access to citizenship was barred.
It is a familiar tale but one with local variation. Parallels can be drawn with the US-Mexican Bracero Program operating between the 1940s and 1960s, for example.
Closer to home, an echo can also cautiously be found in the United Kingdom’s reliance on workers from the Commonwealth in the 1950s and 1960s. Employers and to some extent the government welcomed the influx of workers, but were then alarmed when it turned out they wanted equal treatment — they actually were British nationals, after all — and wanted to bring their own families with them.
There aren’t that many well known aphorisms in immigration law and policy and even this one will be unfamiliar to many. But Frisch’s quip sums up two of the central dilemmas of immigration policy. Firstly, what you want or intend is not necessarily what you get. Secondly, migrants are people. They have their own hopes, fears, needs, families and more.
Immigration policy makers regularly forget both of these truths. Or choose to ignore them.
Why am I starting a Substack about immigration policy?
With all the interest about the net migration figures due out next week on 25 May, I thought it was time to get going with this project. I’m not quite ready with email headers and the like and will add those later.
I’m a barrister specialising in immigration law. Back in 2007, I started a blog about immigration law. I decided to call it ‘Free Movement’ after the European Union ideal of free movement of people within the region and my own belief that British immigration law should be less punitive than it then was. My intention was to keep myself up to date and have some fun with the then-newish medium of internet self-publishing. I hoped also that writing about immigration law would help me work out what I really thought about what has always been a politically charged issue.
I wrote the blog anonymously for several years, eventually attaching my name to it in about 2012. I added a membership and training element to it a couple of years later and it now provides my main income. It has grown. A lot. I now pay three, soon to be four, people to manage it all as well as a team of expert contributors. For the last few years, this has enabled me to practice only part-time as a barrister doing exclusively pro bono bail applications and legal aid appeal work.
Free Movement focuses on immigration law updates and analysis. While we’ve published a few ‘think pieces’ over the years, that is not its main focus. It is more ‘website’ than ‘blog’ these days and has kind of outgrown my occasional rants.
I’ve been on Twitter since 2012, and I remember holding out for some time before joining. I’ve gotten a lot out of Twitter over the years but I am increasingly fed up with it. Essentially, a lot of people spend a lot of time complaining about stuff. With good reason, given there is a lot to complain about. But I’m not interested in reading gripes and take downs. I scroll and scroll but there’s rarely much of interest to read. I’ll stay on Twitter and will try and chip in with explainers and analysis where I think it might be useful. But I’ve already found myself disengaging from it in recent months.
I wrote a whole actual book about recent United Kingdom immigration law history and tried to include some proposals for how to do things differently. I think the book, Welcome to Britain, works well as description — if you want to understand the contemporary immigration and asylum system in this country there’s no better place to start — but was less successful as prescription.
I’m not going to start another website or write another book and Twitter is too short form. Substack seems interesting and it offers an opportunity to do something a bit different. Sam Freedman, who I think does Substack really well, tells me there are ‘network effects’ from the platform. I have to say I doubt that is true in the tiny world of immigration policy. But, at their best, ‘Substacks’ provide rapid response, long-form, free-form analysis of interesting subjects with a personal twist. A kind of cross between academic and magazine articles. But with, er, less subediting.
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
What will you get as a subscriber?
First of all, I’m planning to keep this Substack free, although that’s not a promise. I totally understand the need for many Substack writers to charge for their work. Good writing needs to be paid for, usually. But I’m in a slightly different position. I’m writing about a subject in which most people aren’t currently interested but in which I want them to be interested.
My plan is to use this Substack to provide fairly long-form, free-form analysis of immigration policy with a personal twist. There will be overlap with Free Movement, and my writing will probably find itself published in both places, albeit at different times and perhaps in slightly different forms.
Essentially, I’m proposing a series of short essays. I’ll publish two a week for a short time and then scale back to about one per week.
Who is this Substack for?
My intended audience is policy makers who are (or should be…) interested in immigration policy and the law that shapes it.
I have been thinking about this project for a while and have planned out a few subjects I’d like to cover. I’ve even written drafts on some of them already. So, please subscribe and share if you or anyone you know might be interested in topics like:
Does immigration policy even matter? (publishing on Tuesday next week ahead of the net migration figures on Thursday)
How can we judge success and failure in immigration policy?
What do I personally think about immigration?
What can we learn from the major recent Australian review of their immigration policy?
Can immigration policy ever be progressive?
Us and them: where do we draw the line between insiders and outsiders?
Is British nationality law fit for purpose?
How might immigration policy harm citizens?
What is the purpose of family immigration policy?
Can it ever be reasonable to separate families?
Do immigration laws really make any difference on the ground?
Who are unauthorised migrants and how did they come to be unauthorised?
Have human rights undermined migrants’ rights?
How far has race influenced British immigration laws?
And I’ll almost certainly write something on those net migration figures when they are published. Usually I do this on Twitter but I’ll try doing it on Substack instead.
An important caveat. I am not promising to cover all of these topics, in this order, with exactly these titles. I probably will change things around as I go. But my intention is to address these questions or these sorts of questions, with a view to informing a better and more clear-sighted future approach to immigration policy. Or, failing that, at least helping me to think things through.
I have already written fairly extensively about asylum policy over on Free Movement and I plan to update and re-use some of that material here, as well as some of my earlier thinking on immigration policy. I’m open to suggestion on other issues to address or topics to tackle.
I’m also very open to publishing guest contributions on these and other issues in immigration policy. Get in touch with me if there's something you’d like to have a go at. Any do please use the comments facility.
I do not pretend to have all the answers. Or even any of them. I’m more of a magpie than an original thinker. But I would like to see a better and more informed debate around immigration policy and immigration law. This is my attempt to contribute.
***
Finally, an acknowledgement and a reading recommendation, wrapped into one. When I was writing Welcome to Britain, Diego Acosta at the University of Bristol recommended that I take a look at a book by Hiroshi Motomura called Immigration Outside the Law. Motomura is a US legal academic who, as it turns out, writes beautifully and thoughtfully about some of the big questions in immigration law and policy. I then immediately bought and read his previous book, Americans In Waiting. I highly recommend both. Parallels with United States immigration policy and context can definitely be overdone but Motomura is careful to use the American experience as an example rather than a paradigm.
I was fortunate enough to meet Motomura very recently and he is currently working on a book about the ethics of immigration policy. I was already working on this idea of this Substack but what will follow here owes a lot to his previous work and overlaps to some extent with his current project.
*“Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kommen Menschen”. Translations vary. Frisch wrote this in an essay entitled “Überfremdung” (“excessive immigration”) in 1965 serving as the introduction to a book about the arrival of southern Italian guest workers to Switzerland. You can read more about it here.