The Tory leadership contenders are back to targeting net migration: Cameron’s 2010 election gimmick that he didn’t believe in himself. George Osborne’s biography revealed that around the cabinet table, only Theresa May believed in the policy.
Even if you want to control migration, net migration is the wrong number to target. Net migration is the difference between the number of people arriving, and those leaving. It makes no distinction between nationalities: a teenager returning from their gap year increases net migration by one person. It can be a useful measure, but is a rotten target. The number is relevant when it comes to the need to build houses and infrastructure, but the large impact of UK nationals leaving the country and returning, means it is beyond the practical control of government. I suppose that implementing really bad domestic policies is a way of encouraging people to leave and so a government could cut net migration that way, but doing so would be ludicrous. The number of British Citizens living abroad who want to return could surge in response to a natural disaster, economic crash, or political instability on the other side of the world: again, matters beyond the control of our government.
The government should not even try to control the number of UK citizens coming home, or the number leaving for foreign adventures. Happily it does neither. How would Robert Jenrick’s proposed legal cap on net migration work if the cap was set at 99,000 per year, and there was another Spanish Civil war and the three hundred thousand (some suggest it closer to a million) Brits living in Spain tried to come home? Would they have to form an orderly queue and wait years in a war zone until it was their turn? Obviously not. A cap on migration that limited the ability of Brits to live in their own country would fundamentally re-define citizenship. The whole idea is a non-starter.
There are about 5.5m British Expats living abroad. On a typical day 270 of them will return home, with the returners usually offset by a similar 270 heading out. That’s about 100,000 in, and 100,000 out each year. During the last thirty years of our EU membership, the average was nearer 150,000 emigrating each year. Even with an emergency safety valve to cater for unlikely events such as that second Spanish civil war, or a natural disaster, seriously shrinking the 5.5m émigré population, trying to hit a 99,000 net migration figure, when 200,000 uncontrollable Brits are coming or going each year is preposterous.
Why choose net migration as the figure? Its neither controllable, nor meaningfully altered by migration policy. Its attraction to politicians is that it gives them lower headlines. Emigration is running at around 500,000 per year (those 100k Brits being joined by 400k other nationalities). Talk in terms of immigration figures (1.2m per year), rather than net migration (700k pa), and instead of ‘Net migration down to 99k’ headlines, we would have ‘Migration Down to 599k’ which might not win the Daily Mail vote.
So we have a debate about a nonsense target which politicians hope will respond to their policy changes. Other things being equal, cutting the number of discretionary visas issued to foreigners will cut net migration. But other things are never equal, or not for long, even without the dramas & challenges to any government, which Harold McMillan characterised as ‘Events, dear boy, events’.
The truly radical approach, and the only one with any chance of success, is to be honest with the people. We don’t control the movement of citizens, if you fall in love with an American (or any other foreigner) we are not going to prevent them joining you here, we are not going to help our economy by shutting out the world’s brightest & best, nor will we maintain our position as the preeminent European university sector if we ban foreign students & academics (currently EU universities in the world top 25: 0, UK universities: 4 often including first place).
The bits of immigration that it is practical to control are those relating to skilled workers below the global high-flyer level, and those seeking asylum (or just a better life) who are not actually in war zones or refugee camps. Where to draw the line in each case is a subject of legitimate debate, involving trade-offs that are either economic (for the skilled workers) or moral/political (for the asylum seekers and economic migrants).
The asylum system is a mess, full of perverse incentives, counterproductive official lying, and alternating between treating asylum seekers as variously sub human, and beyond reproach (half devil, and half child). But, there are under 100,000 Asylum seekers a year: eight percent of new arrivals. The system can be made cheaper, more humane, and fairer, but lets not pretend that doing so will cut annual net migration from 700k to under 100k.
The government has a lot of control over ‘how high should the bar be’? for companies sponsoring workers. Should it be only for senior white collar jobs paying more than £100k per year, or do we also want nurses and oil rig workers? What about carers to look after the elderly, when no locals want those minimum wage jobs? The most restrictive polices seen recently were when Theresa May’s Home Office kept Skilled worker migration to under 60k pa in 2015, while the much more liberal 2023 policies gave us c200k skilled and healthcare workers. Add in dependents and the numbers almost double: c400k in 2023 vs c120k in 2015. The choice looks quite significant, but the 2015 number excluded EU nationals. Add in c300k EU immigrants, or even the c220k net increase, and the change is rather less dramatic.
But the debate is useful. Look a little deeper and we find that most of the increase is down to the health and care worker visa. There is no shortage of people in the UK who could be carers, the job requires empathy & kindness not a postgraduate degree. People don’t apply for the jobs when only minimum wage is offered, but offer £25/hr (£50k salary) and people would queue to join up. Unfortunately, most care is already funded by Local Authorities, and, if the costs doubled, the number who could afford to pay for their own care would be even smaller. Local Authorities now spend almost £600m a week (£400m pw after charges) on adult social care, double salaries for carers, and we are looking at serious money. Perhaps we would only need to increase pay to £17.50/hr, rather than £25/hr, to fill the vacancies with locals, and perhaps this approach would tempt people away from benefits, reduce pressure on housing, etc. Perhaps not.
I welcome a debate about migration.
Those of us who support migration should be prepared to argue our case, rather than pretend that opposing migration is evil. Calling for lower net migration is not evil, but suggesting that a cap on net migration will solve any problems is unintelligent, and/or is treating the voters as fools.
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