Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System

by Colin Yeo;

  Law-makers have several options available to them and doing nothing is not one of them. While inaction might have been a justifiable position to adopt in previous years, it is hard to see how a rational and responsible politician could reach this conclusion today, given that the estimated size of the unauthorised migrant population in the UK today is between 600,000 and 1.2 million. Further deterrent policies should also be ruled out as a way forward; even if it was desirable to force the existing population to ‘self-deport’, there is no evidence that deterrent policies would achieve such a result anyway. Many members of the unauthorised migrant population, having been tolerated for many years, are now deeply embedded in our society and entirely estranged from their country of origin. One way forward would be to offer improved routes to regularisation, and subsequently citizenship, with a view to gradually diminishing the size of the group, rather than allowing it to grow further and further. The current twenty-year wait for regularisation is simply too long, and even then, it only puts a migrant on a ten-year route to settlement. As with the Deferred Action for Children Arrivals (DACA) initiative in the United States, new regularisation routes could initially be targeted at the least controversial groups, such as children and young people. However, the drawback of narrowly targeted measures is that it would take many years even for the existing unauthorised population to become authorised. This would pointlessly prolong unauthorised status in the meantime, for migrants who would eventually be offered regularisation anyway. Any children born during this time would be born without British citizenship and would face precarious futures.

  A more effective alternative would be to offer a more comprehensive regularisation programme, often referred to as an amnesty. This would have the virtue of providing a more complete and rapid solution to the sheer number of unauthorised migrants currently residing in the UK. There are several precedents for similar programmes in the United Kingdom, including a 2003 regularisation programme for families and a ‘legacy backlog clearance exercise’ that was carried out between 2006 and 2010. Some would be concerned that an amnesty rewards past illegal behaviour and might even act as a ‘pull’ factor for future unauthorised migrants, who might rationally expect a further similar exercise at some point in the future. Neither of these reasons seems sufficient to justify inaction now, given that the current situation is unfair on citizen and non-citizen alike and no credible politician or public figure could propose the mass-scale detention and deportation of up to 1.2 million migrants.

  Regularisation, whether piecemeal or comprehensive, could be combined with improvements to the existing Assisted Voluntary Returns programme for those who are not eligible for that route. The Home Office has been funding this programme since 1999 but so far it has met with mixed success. Run for years by the International Organization for Migration, which runs many such schemes globally, it was taken over by charity Refugee Action in 2011 and then brought in-house at the Home Office in 2015. Essentially, migrants are offered resettlement assistance, including cash, if they leave. Effective programmes do not rely entirely on money, but that is all that is available from the Home Office at present. On a purely financial analysis, voluntary returns are far cheaper than detention and enforced removal. On a moral and social level, they are surely far preferable to dawn raids – and if done well can promote international development. The number of assisted returns has fallen in recent years, but think tank the Social Market Foundation reviewed the operation of the programme in a report in December 2019 and proposed various ways in which it could be rebooted and revitalised, including through expansion and outsourcing to an independent body capable of building international partnerships.4

  In the United States the quid pro quo that campaigners for regularisation have been willing to accept is enhanced border security, intended to prevent the growth of a replacement unauthorised population. Here in the United Kingdom, though, that is not really an option; it is hard to see how the border could be made even more secure than it already is. A rational trade-off in our context, based on the supposition that it is in no one’s interests for an unauthorised population to be allowed to grow again, might be acceptance of a system of identity cards.

  It is doubtful that the introduction of identity cards would have a significant deterrent effect on future unauthorised migrants. There is no evidence that country-specific deterrent policies have any impact on the decision-making of migrants. Identity cards would, though, reduce the provable harm done by hostile environment measures to citizens and settled migrants who are black and minority ethnic. As we saw in Chapter 3, the hostile environment encourages discrimination against those perceived as potentially foreign. This is because financial penalties are only imposed when a service is provided to a person who does not have legal status. Evidence suggests that skin colour influences whether service providers think a given person might be foreign or not and therefore whether their immigration status needs to be checked. Identity cards would work in a different way, as penalties would be imposed for failing to check the identity of any person, irrespective of their immigration status. This would be more inconvenient for white, middle-class, middle-aged, home-owning, self-employed men like me, who as things stand are rarely subject to immigration checks. But it would be less discriminatory towards people who are black or minority ethnic, female, young, old, casually employed, disabled, sick or poor. It also involves employers and others asking less of their employees, as to ask to see a citizen’s identity card as part of a mandatory check is less challenging and offensive than to ask them to prove their immigration status. This is not to underestimate the political and practical difficulties of implementing an identity card system. But to do so would, to my mind, be defensible in a way that the present hostile environment system simply is not.

  THE LIMITS OF DETERRENCE

  Even if citizenship laws are not to be reformed, it would be helpful for law-makers to recognise that many migrants are future citizens. When migrants are seen in this way, many of our present immigration rules seem unwise, particularly those that intend yet fail to deter immigration in the first place. For instance, detaining unauthorised migrants – and thereby causing them huge distress, trauma and mental suffering – before releasing over half of them back into the community, where many attain lawful status and perhaps eventually citizenship, looks like very poor policy indeed. The abysmal treatment of refugees who arrive by illicit means, even though more than half are allowed lawfully to remain, belongs to another era. The sky-high immigration application fees amount to double taxation for migrants and their families, who as a result have significantly less disposable income than their peers and are therefore socially disadvantaged. The unforgiving approach to minor technical breaches of immigration procedures also leads to terrible hardship for those affected, but it does not necessarily result in departure from the United Kingdom. The raft of policies that constitute the hostile environment cause race discrimination against citizens and settled migrants who are black and minority ethnic. The harsh family rules we considered in Chapter 5 do not prevent mixed nationality families from forming but they do punish and break apart some of those that do form, with lasting consequences for the implicated children.

  All such policies are intended to make migration to the United Kingdom a less attractive proposition. The whole point of them is to cause social and financial disadvantage to migrants and their families. This approach urgently needs to be rethought. There is no evidence and there never has been any evidence that the policies do actually deter migration, but we do know that they genuinely cause disadvantage to those affected, often of a lasting nature. In so doing they must surely also cause resentment, which is entirely incompatible with the integration that politicians purport to desire, making it virtually impossible. The policies disproportionately affect black and minority ethnic migrants, future citizens and actual citizens; whether or not politicians think of it this way, these immigration policies amount to discrimination, not just sanctioned but ac
tively imposed by the state.

  FAMILY IMMIGRATION

  The family migration routes need reform. With as many as 40 per cent of workers earning less than £18,600, the minimum earnings rule for sponsoring a spouse or partner visa catches far too many families. The impact on them is a disaster, not just for the adults involved but also for their children and wider society. The £18,600 figure was found by the Migration Advisory Committee to be ‘the annual gross pay at which no income-related benefits would be received (in a two-adult family), assuming that the family pays rent of £100 per week’.5 The experts were clear that this recommendation was based on a purely economic analysis that did not consider the moral or social impact of splitting affected families apart, nor the longer-term positive contribution to public finances that a family would make over its lifetime if permitted to remain and flourish in the United Kingdom.

  Other options were presented to the government, including setting the threshold for family sponsorship at the equivalent of a person earning the national minimum wage, which would have worked out as £12,600 in 2011. It is not just the headline figure of £18,600 that is problematic; six months of earnings are required to qualify, setting up a further significant obstacle, and the alternative route of showing sufficient savings requires an absurdly high bank balance of £62,500 for a person with no qualifying UK earnings. No minister has ever suggested what affected families are supposed to do or how they should respond. It has also never been said that the existence of the rule has a deterrent effect on the formation of mixed-nationality families, if that was supposed to be one of the purposes behind the rule. The implicit position is clearly that affected mixed-nationality families should either separate or leave the United Kingdom altogether, both of which are grossly disproportionate responses. In order to begin fixing this problem, the level of earnings required for sponsorship should at the very least be reduced to the national minimum wage, proper allowance should be made for families relocating from abroad and the impact on children should be a meaningful factor to be considered if the income rule is not met.

  Both the outdated Immigration Rules relating to children and the cruel rules that effectively prevent the entry of parents and grandparents need to be revised. The number of migrants entering under these family routes has never been very significant compared to, say, economic or EU immigration, but the impact on affected families can be disproportionately vicious. Migration is not a purely economic matter and if migrant integration is to be promoted then both they and their families must be treated with respect and humanity. The family immigration rules fail miserably by these measures.

  ASYLUM

  There is no prospect of any voluntary reduction in the security of the external border that the United Kingdom has constructed over the past twenty years. Any such move would be deeply unpopular with the general public. If the external UK border in France has to be repatriated following Brexit, this and its consequences are likely to cause considerable concern. Politicians would be on the hunt for alternative means of making themselves look as if they are in control. A similar reaction may follow the UK’s withdrawal from the EU’s Common European Asylum System and in particular the so-called Dublin arrangements, which allow for removal of asylum seekers from the UK to their first point of entry into the European Union. The next few years could be a dangerous time for asylum policy.

  Nevertheless, pressure to expand the refugee resettlement scheme should be maintained and there may be scope for changes to the awful reception to which refugees are subjected once they have arrived. Given that more than half of refugees eventually secure status, policy needs to be adjusted so they are not traumatised and for ever handicapped by the way they were treated when they first arrived. This includes better support and accommodation, improving family reunion rights and funding DNA tests and travel for refugee families, particularly for separated children, who currently have to be taken into local authority care.

  Refugees should also be permitted to work if their applications are not decided quickly and the absurd ban on voluntary work by refugees should be scrapped. Politicians and officials should recognise that genuine refugees do not often behave in the preordained ways that the authorities would like. Genuine refugees who would suffer persecution if returned to their home country do travel through safe third countries, do have economic and social needs as well as safety needs, do struggle to provide a clear narrative of what happened to them, are not always able to explain why they left when they did and do sometimes lie to protect themselves. Proper workplace therapy should be made available to Home Office officials, who should be strongly encouraged to make use of it. Charities like Freedom from Torture and the Helen Bamber Foundation, which offer support and counselling to torture survivors, are acutely aware of the risk of secondary trauma for their staff; the risks are no less for asylum officials. Above all, refugees need to be seen as people not problems.

  IMMIGRATION FOR WORK

  The economic migration routes for working in the United Kingdom also need revision, particularly given the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union and the end of free movement rules. In previous years, the economic case in favour of immigration was made in such starkly and exclusively utilitarian terms that it harmed migrants’ rights and alienated members of the public who did not think in purely economic terms. If we go back to first principles, there are broadly three reasons to support and promote economic migration. The first is that economic migration can benefit the existing population as well as the migrants, for example through filling labour shortages and promoting economic growth, productivity and tax take. In particular, migrants can bring skills and investment into the economy that would otherwise be absent. Secondly, migration brings less concrete but still tangible benefits, such as enhanced consumer choice and cultural diversity. Thirdly, economic migration can be seen as a form of international development, as migrants can export their income through remittances and their skills through re-migration. This should not be underestimated: remittances sent home by migrant workers dwarf international aid budgets and there is strong evidence to suggest that such money is invested far more beneficially than aid money. On this last point, it might well also be argued that the United Kingdom, given its legacy of empire, has a moral duty to promote economic development in the countries from which it extracted so much wealth in the past. Economic migration is one way for us to do that.

  If evaluated against these criteria, some of the existing economic migration routes might be found wanting. As the Migration Advisory Committee reported in 2014, ‘The underlying policy objective of the Tier One (investor) route is not readily apparent.’6 What it does do, essentially, is to allow wealthy individuals to buy visas. Similarly, the policy rationale for the UK Ancestry visa is unclear. It almost exclusively benefits white entrants from Old Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, and it is hard to see how this route is justified today. However, there is surely a strong case for enabling skilled migrants to undertake roles that cannot be filled by the existing workforce, enabling wealthy migrants the opportunity to invest usefully in new or existing businesses and enabling some other migrants to move temporarily, for cultural exchanges, training, work experience and economic development.

  The first function for skilled migrants is currently performed adequately but imperfectly by the Tier Two route. The principle that skilled migration should be employer-led could be retained, routes could be considerably simplified and the conditions could be loosened and made more respectful to migrants themselves, for example by allowing for changes of job more straightforwardly and providing a reasonably secure route to permanent residence and then citizenship. The second function of investment is currently performed woefully inadequately by the relatively new innovator and start-up routes. In the first six months of operation, these routes together attracted just fourteen applications, compared to nearly 1,000 for the predecessor visa types in the same period of the previ
ous year. A substantial rethink is needed. The third function, of exchange and economic development, is currently performed very badly and only in incomplete fashion by the existing Tier Five routes. The youth mobility visa, for instance, is numerically capped at a low level and is also limited only to certain already economically developed countries. Worse, Australians and New Zealanders only take up around 30 per cent of their allocated 31,000 and 14,000 respective Tier Five visas, whereas the 1,000 visas allocated each to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan are fully subscribed and now allocated by a lottery system.7 This certainly looks racist and it is hard to see how this can be justified today. The cultural exchange elements of Tier Five can be seen as minimalist tokens rather than meaningful contributions to economic development. A major rethink is required on this front. The lottery system could be expanded to other, new countries that are not currently included in the scheme and incentives to depart at the end of temporary work visas could be explored and tested.