Why the Conservative Party is the party of high net migration

Having immigration laws is not the same as having an immigration policy

Source: Migration Observatory. We can see that family immigration is a small percentage of the total. Around 90,000 people claimed asylum in the last year, which also represents a small percentage of overall net migration.

On one level, immigration policy and immigration law are both usually pretty niche interests. On another, irregular entry by means of small boats is of very wide political interest. There’s normally a strange paradox at work. A relatively small subset of immigration policy is actually considered more significant than the whole. One of the parts is greater than the sum.

But this week will one of the rare times that immigration policy as a whole briefly comes under the spotlight.

Eagle-eyed pedants may note some loose use of the words ‘law’ and ‘policy’ in this post. Bear with me, there’s a reason for that. It will get worse before it gets better, though.

The coming net migration figures

The release of the net migration figures on Thursday will attract a great deal of public, media and political attention. The figures are reported to be very high; net migration is predicted in some quarters to be as high as 700,000. Given that

net migration = inward migration - outward migration

this probably means inward immigration of well over one million.

If so, no-one will be happy. There is definitely such a thing as an anti immigration campaigner, and that tranche of opinion will certainly be unhappy. But I’ve never really come across a pro immigration campaigner.

There are migrants rights campaigners, me included. But we’re generally more focussed on how the people who come here are treated rather than how many people come. We’ll celebrate the success of the Ukraine and Hong Kong sanctuary schemes, which are one of the reasons net migration is currently so high. But a lot of us are unhappy that so many foreign workers are being recruited under exploitative visa conditions to work in care homes and farmers’ fields, for example.

There are also a lot of people, also me included, who accept that in the short term, high levels of migration are necessary. We accept this because the alternative would be disastrous. Simply stopping overnight the lawful entry of care home workers, agricultural workers, skilled workers, international students, family members and others would cause multiple essential parts of British society and the British economy to implode.

Note my use of lawful entry. If visas were not available, some migrants would probably come or stay unlawfully. It is harder to do that in the United Kingdom, which is literally surrounded by a moat, than many other countries. But it is still possible. No country can be hermetically sealed. Migrants can enter in lorries and evade the authorities. False documents can be used. Visitors and EU citizens can overstay. Students can work more than their 20 hours per week. Many employers would turn a blind eye in order to survive.

Immigration can sometimes best seen as a matter of demand, not supply. And immigration law only really affects supply, by allowing or forbidding lawful entry.

That is the message of this post: net migration isn’t really controlled by immigration law. If the government wants to influence net migration, it needs to look well beyond visa types and tweaks, shortage occupation lists, NVQ skill levels and even the hostile environment. You won’t often hear me expressing sympathy for Suella Braverman, the most clueless but thankfully also most powerless Home Secretary in political history; Robert Jenrick is widely considered the de facto head of the department. The Home Office and its nominal head get the blame for net migration figures. But they actually control few of the levers that really affect immigration.

Why immigration policy doesn’t normally seem to matter

Firstly, there is a lot going on at the moment. The cost of living crisis, the state of the NHS, schools, universities, railways and basically every other public service, the culture war, a full-on actual war in Ukraine, the rise of China, the fragility of democracy and more.

In comparison, the truth is that immigration policy doesn’t really seem to matter that much. It’s just not a big deal as far as most people are concerned. They have far, far bigger problems.

This is one reason migrants rights activists like me get so aggravated. The subject so important to us barely registers for a lot of people. Politicians pay it little regard and say stuff that is not necessarily well-informed or well-thought-through. This itself is a reflection of the lack of importance and thought other people attach to it.

As a case in point, earlier this month an admittedly obscure House of Lords committee — had you honestly ever heard of the Horticulture Committee before reading these words right here right now? — heard truly damning evidence about widespread exploitation of migrant workers on British farms. So-called ‘enforcement’ bodies are doing basically nothing. There was no media coverage. Literally four days later the Home Secretary gave a major speech and talked specifically about farm workers, but without mentioning exploitation. A day after that the Prime Minister confirmed the farm worker scheme was being expanded, again without mentioning exploitation.

Nobody cares. It’s infuriating. But that’s how it is. We wrote about it on Free Movement, if you want to go into it in more detail.

Secondly, it is not all that clear that immigration law has the real world effects the government likes to claim. Everyone likes to pretend that it does but I’m not sure they really believe it, deep down. It does not follow that a law will have the impact that its originators expect or intend. Or, at least that they say they expect or intend. The subject of policy purposes is one to which I will return in an upcoming post.

Politicians might claim that small boats will be stopped, for example. Or that net migration can magically and painlessly be reduced. If we really think about it, we can see that both are impossible. Immigration is driven by forces beyond the control of a single government acting alone. The desires of individual human beings, whole sectors of the economy and indeed the entire economic model might well have more of an impact on the ground than any particular visa tweak or type.

This is why David Cameron’s net migration target was impossible to meet and it is what is driving high net migration today. It just isn’t something that government can easily control.

Thirdly, but closely related to that last point, immigration policy often isn’t about visas. It’s not really about immigration law, even.

It’s about education policy, skills policy, industrial policy, social policy, economic policy, foreign policy, your ideological view of the role of the state and so on.

These policy areas have an indirect but important relationship with immigration.

If you don’t train doctors and nurses, you need to recruit them from overseas. Nearly a third of hospital doctors and nearly a quarter of nurses come from overseas.

If you don’t fully fund universities, they will rely on international students. Around a quarter of university funding is now from international students.

If you don’t fund local authorities properly, you need to keep care home costs down somehow. About two thirds of all council expenditure is now on social care.

If wars break out and human rights abuses go unchecked, refugees will come. Over three quarters of asylum seekers are ultimately recognised as refugees.

And so on.

If you want a small state and you want low taxes, you arguably need immigration. The Conservative government says it wants to reduce net migration. But not enough to find other ways to fund what remains of the British state. This is why successive supposedly small-state governments have presided over a significant increase in net migration.

Ideologically, the Conservative Party is now a party of high net migration. They just don’t seem to realise it yet.

Why immigration policy really does matter

Immigration policy, properly understood, is actually about how we organise, run and pay for our country’s needs. Immigration law is about what visas we issue, how many and, to some extent, how we treat migrants once they get here. The two only overlap to a limited extent.

It is not that our economy or society is incapable of accommodating migrants. Compared to the population as a whole, the numbers entering are relatively few. The fact the vast majority go into work as soon as they are able just shows how quickly they can integrate. I certainly don’t subscribe to Jenrick’s racistxenophobic line that they come from a different raceculture and all that.

But the fact we need high immigration tells us something about the whole of the society and economy in which we live.

Personally, I’m not sure I like what it tells us. I’m not comfortable with the way we exploit cheap migrant labour to subsidise our food prices, care homes and low tax rates. I’m not comfortable about international students being regarded as cash cows.

I’m certainly not comfortable about how we treat the migrants we currently need and rely on. If we are going to rely on immigration as part of our economic and social model, the least we can do is treat them properly and help them integrate. Far too often, our immigration laws do exactly the opposite.

Immigration law might not influence arrivals very much but it does influence how migrants are treated once they get here. In turn, that has important consequences for us, the established residents and citizens.

Impact on “them”

Immigration law obviously affects immigrants themselves.

Migration can be a life-changing experience, particularly for a person from a relatively poor country. Earnings, life expectancy and the life chances of your children can all be profoundly improved.

But it can also be a very difficult experience. Migrants often end up in jobs below their skill levels and experience status and race discrimination in their new homes. Some, particularly in low paid sectors of the economy, end up being nastily exploited.

Immigration law can affect all of this. Our laws can hold back the potential of migrants by imposing short, renewable periods of stay, high fees, poor quality decisions and punishingly high financial costs. Immigration law can also increase the chances of low pay and exploitation through tied visas that prevent migrants moving to alternative employment.

There are all sorts of quite easy, simple reforms we could make to immigration law which would have zero impact on the numbers entering but which would have a considerable positive impact on the lives of those who do enter. I’ll be taking a look at some ideas for change in coming posts.

Impact on “us”

This leads us to another area of impact for immigration law: on “us”, the existing citizens and residents.

Status and race discrimination against migrants is likely to filter through to discrimination against citizens. The hostile environment system of private immigration checks affects not just those unlawfully resident but also black and ethnic minority citizens, lawfully resident foreign nationals and people who sound or seem perhaps to be foreign nationals.

As Nye Bevan once wrote of NHS charges on migrants:

“Are British citizens to carry means of identification everywhere? For if the sheep are to be separated from the goats both must be classified. What began as an attempt to keep the Health Service for ourselves would end by being a nuisance to everybody.”

He didn’t add that some would feel the effect more than others. Black and ethnic minority British citizens are more likely to be asked for proof of their right to live in the country than white British citizens.

The various deterrent policies put in place by successive governments in the form of immigration laws do little if anything to dissuade people from coming to the UK. But they do penalise those who come.

The creation of an exploitable racial, social and economic underclass is not likely to lead to social harmony and may well worsen existing social problems. Rubbing salt in the wound, it is often then the migrants themselves who then get blamed for living in poor housing stock or suffering the other effects of relative poverty. Racism is self perpetuating in this way.

***

To my mind, the present government does not actually have an immigration policy. They have plenty of immigration laws. Look how far that has got them. They also have wishes and preferences, which Sunak, Jenrick and Braverman air all too frequently. But they don’t have anything resembling an actual immigration policy.

If net migration is to fall, as they say they want, then how will that be achieved? How will demand for immigration be met, or otherwise how will that demand be diverted and dealt with? Which categories of immigration will be reduced and how? The government simply has no answers to these questions.

The Johnson government went through a fairly prolonged charade of repeatedly telling some of the sectors of the economy reliant on migrant labour that there would be No. More. Visas. Little or nothing was done to assist or encourage employers, though. Time and time again, more visas were forthcoming. Inflation then rocketed and the suggestion that businesses pay and invest more — and therefore pass on those costs to the customer — was abandoned.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the government does have an answer: laissez faire.