Politics
What is immigration policy for?
Madeleine Sumption looks at immigration policy and the surrounding debate and explains the inherent competing policy objectives and trade-offs.
At Ellis Island in the early 20th century, doctors inspected prospective immigrants for signs of contagious diseases before admitting them to the United States. In Singapore today, migrant domestic workers must show a negative pregnancy test every six months if they want to stay in the country. In many European countries, wealthy investors can secure residence permits with a sufficiently large cheque.
These are all examples of immigration policy. What is it all for? In my forthcoming book—to be published in March by Bristol University Press—I answer this question.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the purpose of immigration policy is to keep people out. Many people more people want to migrate to wealthy countries than will ever gain admission. Governments and their electorates use immigration policies to separate “us” from “them” – to decide who should join their societies and who should not.
This is difficult. To start with, many immigration policies don’t work even half as well as expected. For example, in the book I explain the curious case of an ‘investor visa’ that was supposed to attract venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and ended up admitting well-heeled Russian housewives who liked the London social scene.
But perhaps the bigger problem governments face is that they have to achieve several goals with the same set of policies. Economic impacts, social impacts, fairness, national security, foreign policy… The objectives compete. This presents politicians and the public with difficult trade-offs. Here are just a few examples.
- Economic and humanitarian goals often conflict
“How much migration does the economy need” is a question I am often asked. It has no answer. One reason is that different migration routes—for family, workers, or refugees—have different purposes and impacts. Who migrates is more important for many economic measures than how many.
Skilled work migration will generally benefit public finances, for example, while humanitarian migration will usually bring costs. As a result, a decline in migration could be positive for the Exchequer if it meant fewer refugees, but costly if it meant fewer highly paid workers.
It is not surprising that immigration routes introduced primarily for ethical, legal or humanitarian reasons—e.g. for partners of citizens or for refugees—are not particularly beneficial economically. That was not the point. It does mean that governments face a trade-off between economic and humanitarian goals.
- Immigration policy is a blunt tool for dealing with social and cultural impacts
Policy debates often focus on economic impacts, but research suggests that what people care about most is the social and cultural impacts.
The challenge for policymakers is that it is easier to select potential migrants on economic characteristics than on values and attitudes. Attempts to do the latter are usually blunt.
For example, Donald Trump opted for banning entire nationalities his administration perceived to be culturally threatening, often but not always from countries with Muslim majorities. This affected everyone, regardless of their actual beliefs or attitudes.
At the other end of the spectrum, many attempts to select for cultural ‘fit’ feel trivial. For example, the UK’s ‘Life in the UK’ test checks that people applying for permanent status know that the statement, “Britain encourages people to have extreme views and act upon them” is false.
The immigration system is not well equipped to judge people’s views.
- Different types of fairness conflict
People on different sides of the debate generally agree that fairness matters, but they disagree on what counts as fair.
Take the question of unauthorised migration, and particularly whether and when people without legal status should be deported.
Ethical arguments depend a lot on how the issue is framed. Humanitarian framing presents migrants as victims of an overly restrictive system. Integrity arguments present migrants as rule-breakers who should have complied with the law.
Public debates often present the ethical issue as black and white, relying exclusively on one of these two frames. In reality, elements of both may be true. Unauthorized migrants are vulnerable to exploitation and the process and consequences of being forcibly removed can be brutal. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine a functioning immigration system without any enforcement, and it is not surprising publics expect compliance with the rules.
The bottom line
The life of immigration policymakers is harder than many people expect. Immigration ministers are ruthlessly lobbied by their own colleagues in other departments with competing interests. They manage a sprawling bureaucracy that governs the lives of millions of people, and they get the blame when an individual case they had no idea existed goes wrong.
That’s not to say politicians are innocent victims. Many also over-promise, exaggerate the evidence, and deny the trade-offs.
They are not alone. People on all sides of the debate present the answers as obvious – if only governments had the ‘political will’ to follow their guidance. But the inevitable trade-offs immigration policy presents mean that the reality is messier and more complicated than it might initially seem.
By Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford and author of forthcoming book Bristol University Press | What Is Immigration Policy For?