by Colin Yeo;
Theresa May, who as Home Secretary had driven forward the restrictive reforms, had moved on to become Prime Minister. It was May’s successor at the Home Office, Amber Rudd, who was engulfed by the scandal. Rudd was forced to resign after denying that immigration officials had worked to removal targets when, in fact, they did exactly that and had done for years.
On taking up the bloodied reins at the Home Office, Rudd’s successor Sajid Javid rebranded the ‘hostile environment’ as the slightly less threatening ‘compliant environment’. The change of tone was not accompanied by any official change in policy, although some of the measures most likely to affect unintended victims, such as automatic closure of bank accounts, were suspended (see Chapter 3). Although Theresa May was able to survive the Windrush scandal, she could not weather Brexit and formally resigned as Prime Minister on 24 July 2019 to make way for Boris Johnson.
JOHNSON AND BEYOND
In 2018 the government belatedly published a White Paper proposing a new immigration system for post-Brexit Britain. It proposed that the status quo established by Theresa May as Home Secretary would be maintained, except that free movement for EU citizens would be ended and they, along with all other migrants, would be subject to a slightly streamlined version of the existing immigration system. This was perhaps no surprise, as the White Paper was published with Theresa May still at the helm as Prime Minister, although admittedly very much in her latter days. There was no suggestion that the system of citizen-on-citizen immigration checks would be dismantled, the family immigration rules reformed or citizenship policy widened.
May’s replacement by Johnson threw these plans into doubt. One of Boris Johnson’s defining characteristics, and perhaps his greatest strength, is what some might call his moral flexibility – though others might call this lack of principle. At the time of writing it is impossible to discern what immigration policy, if any, Johnson might pursue in office. So far, he seems to offer all things to all factions.
Those in favour of a more liberal approach to immigration issues might take heart from Johnson’s disavowal of the net migration target. Although this means nothing by itself, it would nevertheless be an essential precondition to any change of culture in official attitudes to migrants and migration. He has previously advocated in favour of an amnesty for unauthorised migrants and has often presented himself as social liberal (although so too did David Cameron, it might be noted). To shield himself from detailed questions about his future immigration policy, Johnson has pledged to introduce an ‘Australian-style points-based system’. On inspection, the limited details of a new plan published in February 2020 suggested relatively minor amendments to the existing system I describe in Chapter 7. The salary level for recruiting skilled workers would be dropped a little, the application process would be streamlined and a limited route for unsponsored workers would be re-opened. A capped route for unskilled agricultural labourers was confirmed but no similar routes for other sectors of the economy were proposed. The one concrete change at the time of writing had been to increase and then scrap the cap on the number of exceptional or global talent visas, but seeing as the cap has never even come close to being hit, this is hardly a radical departure from the past.
The image we hold in our minds of Britain as a welcoming country is a comforting mirage. Significant inward migration took place after the Second World War but was never a matter of deliberate policy. The British public were hostile, and politicians of all hues legislated repeatedly in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s to restrict immigration. Similarly, after 2004 immigration from the expanded European Union was essentially an accident, and Brexit was the resulting backlash. This is not to say things cannot get worse, though. Since 2010, the post-war consensus of limiting immigration but also preventing and suppressing race discrimination has been quietly abandoned. The first part of that equation has entirely usurped the second. Because of the net migration target discussed in Chapter 2, and by means of the hostile environment policies discussed in Chapter 3, we have seen the introduction of a raft of policies actively encouraging race discrimination in day-to-day life. Meanwhile, other aspects of immigration policy discussed in this book have deliberately dampened the life outcomes for migrants who settle here, in a vain attempt to deter them from coming in the first place. The twin shocks of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic that was taking hold as this book went to press give us an opportunity to change direction and embrace a more equal, fair and respectful approach to those migrants who make this country their home.
NOTES
1 See Winder, Bloody Foreigners, pp. 279–81 and ‘Nicholas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children from Holocaust, Dies at 106’, New York Times, 1 July 2015.
2 See for example Randell Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Goodfellow, Hostile Environment.
3 See Will Somerville, Immigration under New Labour (Bristol: Policy Press, 2007), p. 14 and Winder, Bloody Foreigners, pp. 330–31.
4 ‘Papers released under 30-year rule reveal full force of Thatcher’s fury’, The Guardian, 30 December 2009.
5 Winder, Bloody Foreigners.
6 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, pp. 57, 59.
7 Ibid.
8 Gary Freeman, writing in Cornelius, Tsuda, Martin and Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
9 See for example ‘Dutch woman with two British children told to leave UK after 24 years’, The Guardian, 28 December 2016.
CHAPTER 2
NET MIGRATION: THE ACCIDENTAL TARGET
Conventional wisdom tells us that the origins of the hostile environment – and arguably also one of the major contributors to Brexit – lie on a rather uncomfortable-looking cocktail chair in a TV studio in January 2010. It was on this chair, during an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, that then Leader of the Opposition David Cameron reiterated a three-year-old Conservative Party policy to cap immigration and said he aspired to reduce net migration from ‘hundreds of thousands’ to ‘tens of thousands’. This interview somehow morphed into a universally received understanding that a solid, solemn pledge had been made to reduce net migration to below 100,000, known as ‘the net migration target’. This net migration target became unofficial government policy and was to be hugely influential, driving the adoption of a range of harsh immigration policies that were intended to reduce arrivals and increase departures. It infected all aspects of immigration policy and decision-making.
In reality, David Cameron never intended to set a firm net migration target. The whole episode, which came to define Cameron’s government, determined immigration policy for the next decade and contributed significantly to Brexit. It was an example of woolly words being hardened by headline writers into a solid pledge.
WHAT WAS THE NET MIGRATION TARGET?
Net migration is a measure of inward migration minus outward emigration. To put it another way, net migration is the overall change in population due to inward and outward migration over a given period. In the United Kingdom, the given period is one year, because the definition of ‘migrant’ that is used in compiling the statistics is a person who moves to another country for a period of at least one year. The figures also include British citizens returning from abroad or leaving for other countries. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, net migration was negative, meaning more people were emigrating from the UK than were migrating in. From the mid-1990s, net migration has been consistently positive, with more people arriving than leaving each year. In the 1990s the figure was in the order of ‘tens of thousands’ but from 1997 onwards it started to rise, increasing to a number continually over 250,000 per year, coinciding with the period immediately after the expansion of the EU in the mid-2000s. This then fell below 200,000 for three years from 2012 before rising sharply again, as can be seen in the chart below.
Source: Migration Observatory.
To a politician, the attract
ion of focusing on net migration, rather than solely on inward immigration, is that the policy can be presented as one of overall population management, rather than one of keeping foreigners out – with the connotations of racism and xenophobia that might be implied. The net migration figures are also by their nature lower than those for immigration, because the number is calculated by deducting emigration from immigration. It might be thought that lower numbers would be seen as less alarmist to members of the general public. But this perhaps naively assumes that if a person was worried by immigration figures of, say, 200,000 per year, that person would not also be worried by net migration figures of, say, 100,000 per year. This is all a matter of political positioning, which may seem to be of paramount importance in the short term. Eventually, though, as events were to prove, the net migration target was a tactician’s gambit for winning an election rather than a strategist’s plan for governing effectively and retaining power.
The disadvantages of setting a net migration target are legion. To start with, net migration is a terrible way of measuring changes to population or what most members of the public understand immigration to be. It takes no account, for example, of population change through births and deaths, so it is hard to see that it is really about what amounts to a ‘sustainable’ population. Because the equation includes British citizens returning from abroad, the final figure also does not really say much about actual migrants either. If two British citizens return from a gap year and one Chilean student leaves then net migration would be plus one, but most members of the public would consider that to count as minus one because a foreign national departed. As migration expert Professor Bridget Anderson has pointed out, if the definition of ‘migrant’ is adjusted from a person moving for a period of four years rather than just one year, net migration has been negative for many years.1
The statistics on which the net migration figures are based are not as reliable as a politician who bets his entire reputation on them might hope. The basis for calculating net migration is not, as a rational person might expect, simply counting them in and counting them out. For starters, counting them out is impossible as formal exit checks for those leaving the UK were scrapped in 1998 and have never been fully reintroduced. Instead, the numbers are based on the International Passenger Survey. This sounds awfully formal but really it just involves a handful of people hanging around at airports and ferry terminals on certain days (not nights) in tabards with badges. They randomly ask a few passengers willing to talk to them why they are leaving the UK and when they plan to return. The percentage of travellers questioned is 0.34 per cent of the over 240 million who pass through UK ports each year, and the survey identifies between 3,000 to 4,000 long-term migrants who say they are moving residences – emigrating to Australia or returning home to Sri Lanka, for example. This small sample is then extrapolated, meaning that it is multiplied up on the assumption that those sampled are representative of the whole.2
I was once accosted at Gatwick Airport by a former colleague brandishing a clipboard as I attempted to depart on holiday with my wife and two very young children on one of the busiest days of the summer holidays. The timing was hardly ideal, but it was too late to duck away by the time I realised what was happening: he was now working for the International Passenger Survey. It is not hard to imagine that there might be problems with a system that relies on such a small sample size: a degree of self-selection by passengers (the busy or shy ones just refuse to be interviewed) and accurate self-reporting (some people might lie) being just a couple. To put it mildly, it is not an accurate way of measuring total population movement. Indeed, the net migration figures come with a ‘large margin of error’, as the Oxford-based Migration Observatory team of researchers put it, and the figures have twice been retrospectively amended because better information subsequently suggested that the original figures were wrong.3 Indeed, in 2019, the Office for National Statistics downgraded the classification of net migration statistics from ‘national statistics’ to ‘experimental statistics’ because they were not considered sufficiently reliable.4
There is almost nothing that a government can do to control outward emigration, short of crashing the economy and thus sending citizens abroad in search of work. There is also little if anything that the governments of European Union countries can do about inward EU migration. After the UK joined what was then the European Economic Community in 1973, imposing a quota on European migration would have been illegal under European law. It is primarily the economy that governs EU migration, as the vast majority of the union’s citizens move across borders to find work. If Britain’s economy were to outperform the economies of other EU countries, for example, citizens of those countries might well be incentivised to move to Britain in search of work. This is exactly what was to happen from around 2012 onwards, as Britain recovered from the global economic crash faster than some other countries in the union.
Other types of inward migration from outside the EU might be possible to control in theory, but the social and economic consequences of doing so need to be carefully considered. From 1962 onwards, the cross-party, mainstream political consensus was that immigration needed to be limited if good race relations were to be maintained – but there had never before been a policy of aiming to limit immigration to a particular level. Policy-makers and civil servants with particularly long memories might have recalled the total failure of informal controls to limit Commonwealth immigration in the immediate post-war period.5 To truly restrict immigration, quotas or caps would be needed. While caps had previously been used, their history was not really an auspicious one. A voucher system for migrant workers was introduced by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, but the number of vouchers available was slashed in 1965 from 40,000 to just 8,500.6 Then, after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 shut the doors on the East African Asians, a special voucher scheme was introduced to allow in a very small number every year, until it was finally abolished and replaced with citizenship rights by David Blunkett as Home Secretary in 2002.
The idea of imposing quotas on skilled economic migration is therefore plausible, but it is always likely to be unpopular with the business community as well as amounting to a form of economic self-harm. Preventing unskilled workers arriving may be more attractive to a policy-maker, who may envisage any number of resulting favourable headlines. But in 2010 there was no immigration route for non-EU unskilled workers anyway. Because foreign students pay far, far higher tuition fees than domestic students, limiting the numbers of such students via a quota system would cut off a crucial source of funding for higher education; besides, there is no public pressure to do so. Application quotas would also be very problematic for family immigration; they might be a fair way of deciding which lucky individuals get Glastonbury tickets, but would it really be fair and reasonable that a first-come-first-serve, when-they’re-gone-they’regone system may prevent the entry of a spouse, child or parent, just because others had applied before them? Setting a quota for refugees is likely to be portrayed as heartless, not to mention that it would require the radical step of withdrawal from the Refugee Convention, the international treaty ratified by 145 countries around the world that determines who is and who is not a refugee.7
To make matters worse, from a savvy politician’s perspective, the statistics on net migration are published quarterly, meaning that the issue recurs in the media at least every three months. It is rather hard to defuse and entomb an issue when it has to be wheeled out in public every three months. For all these very good reasons, there had never been an overarching immigration policy that aimed for a certain level of immigration. Now that a specific numeric limit had been introduced, however, it turbocharged the subject’s political importance. Ministers and civil servants had to try to find ways in which to meet it. Arrivals needed to be discouraged and departures encouraged. The reality was that unless the quotas were to be imposed in the strict ways laid out above, the only way to do this was to crash the economy and make the U
K a less attractive place to live. Yet crashing the economy is hardly a sure-fire way of winning elections – at least in normal times.
THE ACCIDENTAL TARGET
So, net migration is inherently very difficult to manage without doing so indirectly, through a politically suicidal economic policy. Even the migration routes that can be directly affected by domestic immigration rules involve some very serious trade-offs, as we have just seen. David Cameron could certainly be criticised for his short-term thinking, but he was no fool; this is why I believe he never intended to set a net migration target in the first place.
Returning to Andrew Marr’s cocktail chair, at the time of Cameron’s interview the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, had recently attached his name to a controversial report calling for immigration to be reduced, opining that the population of the UK was growing too quickly.8 Given the media coverage attracted by the report and Carey’s remarks, it was unsurprising that Cameron was asked by Marr whether he agreed. In response, Cameron started to talk about pressure on public services but was soon pressed by Marr as to whether the previously announced ‘cap on the numbers coming into this country’ would involve a specific figure. Cameron responded that he would like to see net migration in the ‘tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands’9 and Marr follows up again, asking whether there would be a ‘specific figure, a real cap that you will announce and stick to?’ Cameron notes that there should be ‘a clear annual figure that people should see’, which would be announced each year. No specific number was given there and then.