Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
What kind of household should immigration policy attract? Four single men in their twenties, all employed full-time, or a family of four, where both parents work, but one only during school hours. They have two pre-school-aged children, who are both due to attend their local state schools.
I think either answer is, to use the preferred word of politicians discussing immigration policy, “legitimate”. Single men at the start of their working lives will contribute far more to the national finances. But they are more likely to commit crime, more likely to play loud music and, for a variety of reasons, less likely ever to feel as integrated into a host society as children who have been here all their lives.
Where the question becomes complicated is that there’s inevitably a gap between the large number of immigrants who wish to come to wealthy countries in search of a better life, and the much smaller number that voters in those countries are willing to accept. States that prioritise the needs of businesses will favour proposals which increase the chances that you live next door to a household of four single men. States that prioritise integration and social cohesion will favour the family of four. But either way, someone who dreams of a better life in the rich world is going to have that dream crushed.
And this is where the market for illegal immigration thrives. People will pay more than the cost of a first-class airfare to get into the rich world, and then pay further larger sums to move around illicitly once they’re there.
Every democracy in the rich world has in effect a “liberal bias” in its immigration system, where policy is more liberal than voters wish. Politicians promise control but preside over policies that, as a matter of deliberate design, produce larger flows of people than their voters will tolerate. And because those flows are more restricted than people outside the rich world, or indeed some within it, would want, illegal or “irregular” immigration happens, further deepening popular distrust.
Alan Manning, in a brilliant new book on immigration to the rich world, Why Immigration Policy Is Hard, And How To Make It Better, describes this as the “infernal circle” of immigration politics. Attempts to evade or avoid controls on immigration lead to voter concern about loss of control; politicians respond with tighter controls; frustrated would-be migrants attempt to avoid or evade immigration controls, which leads to voter concern about loss of control, and so on and so on. It is the dynamic that Tony Blair warned of when he talked of politics becoming a contest between “open vs closed” when it came to globalisation and immigration.
What Keir Starmer’s Labour government is trying to do is a souped-up version of what Blair did: ever-greater restrictions and controls on the movement of people into the UK, in a bid to, in the words of one minister close to the process, “demonstrate control and then win the argument for the people we do want to win”.
But there is a crucial difference between the Starmer approach and Blair’s: the latter made the argument for both control and openness together, whereas for Starmer, the argument is in essence “no dessert until you’ve eaten your greens”. Labour must first show its commitment to ever-harsher border control and only then argue for openness, the thinking goes.
The problem is that Labour’s arguments convince no one, because the people attracted to their rhetoric and their policies on control notice that the UK continues to welcome some immigrants, while those who want a more welcoming position are turned off by the party’s new policies.
To return to our hypothetical households: Labour’s response to concern about illegal immigration is, in effect, to tear apart the family of four and to say that a married man may come to the UK but he will face huge barriers to ever bringing his family with him. Meanwhile, the four individual workers have been reduced to just two. The opponent of immigration still has young men who look and sound different from them in their neighbourhood, while the liberal who abhors breaking up families is repulsed, and the person who distrusts the government sees an administration claiming that immigration is bad while visibly allowing it to keep happening.
What Labour needs to do is to pick a position and argue for it in its entirety: to explain what sort of immigration it wants and why its policies facilitate that, while at the same time arguing for what it wants to restrict. Otherwise, in a world in which politics is about “open vs closed”, it will end up achieving neither.
stephen.bush@ft.com