Immigration policy
in Epiphanies
This discussion was created from comments split from: The impact of government passing the Rwanda bill..
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Out of interest, is this a claim about "immigration" in total, or the set of people who claim asylum following a trip across the channel in a small boat or the back of a lorry in particular? Does the latter group of people look economically the same as the set of all immigrants?
Refugees, and those seeking asylum, naturally come with the need for additional support - they're (almost by definition) traumatised to varying degrees, and will need counselling and a supportive community; they're very unlikely to have documentation including proof of education and so finding work that they're qualified for will have additional hurdles; they may not have as good a grasp of English (or, French, German etc depending on which nation they go to); they won't have had the chance to organise accommodation, schools for children etc before they arrive and will thus take longer to settle into new communities even without their additional needs.
Welcoming refugees does present additional costs for the host society initially, but in the longer term the same benefits from other migrants - they settle into communities, get jobs, establish businesses etc.
Is there evidence to support this claim? It's not an implausible assertion, but I'm curious whether it is supported by evidence, or just assumed to be true. I think what you'd like to see is a graph for UK-born people showing economic contribution to the UK vs age (perhaps divided in to interesting subgroups), a graph for immigrants who arrive with a visa, showing economic contribution vs time after arrival, and a similar graph for those who arrive illicitly, showing economic contribution vs time after arrival.
Whilst I completely agree that it's a demand problem, the rest is not helpful.
I was deliberately conflating the two. We should not normally do this, of course. I was, because that's what the right wing hacks do. This is done deliberately to prevent sympathy with asylum seekers. It's so much easier to lump them all together. The two are very different. To me, the UK should take as many asylum seekers as would be a 'fair share.' Never going to happen as we've left the EU but it would be a lot more than current numbers. Additionally, we should take those to whom we have particular responsibility - I.e. Afghans. Then economic migration should be examined separately without targets to absolute numbers but based on social and economic need.
Anyway, give me a bit of time and I'll find some data but even asylum seekers once granted leave to remain are usually net contributers.
AFZ
Fixed quotes, -- chrisstiles, Hell Host
So, I've just been skimming this report.
https://refugeeintegrationuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/CIR_Report.pdf
There's so much in there, I have only skimmed it. The economic modelling they use is by LSE. So, like the UCL link above, it's good data.
A couple of thoughts:
1. Accepting refugees is a moral imperative, economics shouldn't come into it. The same does not necessary apply to other kinds of migrants.
2. The report shows that stupid policies cost us lots of money. Integration could make a big difference. But, even then refugees are a net positive to the public purse.
So, the data for 2020/21 last complete government figures showed the cost of the Asylum System to be £1.36Bn.
The more interesting point here though is that at 3 years, refugees are a net cost to the exchequer but by 5 years they are a net contributor. This aggregates out at -£169m in year three (I.e. around £1.2Bn of the £1.36Bn has been returned through direct and indirect taxation). This becomes +£570m by five years. This means that £1.36Bn spent this year comes back as ~£1.9Bn of extra revenue over the next 5 years. In purely economic terms that's a 40% return over 5 years.
Also of importance here is the analysis that this net gain could be more than doubled if the government adopted policies thar work well rather than those that sound or look good to a particular constituency. Partly by reducing costs and partly by getting refugees established in society and therefore paying taxes quicker.
(This is the economic analysis that the LSE did:https://refugeeintegrationuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Economic_Analysis_Report_20_March.pdf).
To sum up;
The line "we can't afford to take refugees" is simply not true.
AFZ
The economist Jonathan Portes did study which showed similarly positive impacts when refugees have their status regularised:
https://citizensuk.contentfiles.net/media/documents/Settle_Our_Status_-_Impact_of_Regularisation.pdf
A study by NIESR finds something comprable:
https://www.niesr.ac.uk/publications/economic-social-lifting-restrictions-people-seeking-asylum?type=discussion-papers
There are other studies from the US that find analogous effects.
The problem is that British press has a debating society mentality and is easily impressed by contrarianism (especially of the cruel and unusual kind), so genuinely regressive policies end up being positioned as 'politically bold', whereas actual investment is greeted with furrowed brows and queries about affordability. Lobby journalists are easily the worst here, as they inevitably repeat what their contact told them.
Calling it a debating society mentality, is far too generous in my view, but you're absolutely right. I think we have to be realistic about where we are. Starmer has to find a way to right policies (both morally and pragmatically) in this context. Of course I want to see politicians stand up and say "These people desperately need our help, they are welcome here" but he also has to* win this election.
What's interested me most here is that the political management has been so good. He's made good use of the defection of the Dover MP which could have created other problems. He's been absolute that Rwanda is not happening. He's introduced a policy that is (subject to certain caveats**) a good policy - tackling organised crime across multiple continents is necessary. This is (I think) a very good block to the Tories only thing (stop the boats). At the same time, there's some serious proposals about actually making sure people can claim asylum in the UK on the side, away from the headlines.
Of course, we should hold their feet to the fire. Of course, we should demand the best policies both morally and practically. But I sit here thinking, that's been done very well. Optimistic that the election will be won. Knowing that Rwandan flights are stopped and hopeful that overall policy moves in a much better direction.
I may be reading this completely wrong. I may, in a few months be decrying how badly they have done on this but... but... in this climate and in this situation, it's not bad.
AFZ
*For him, for the Labour party, but most of all for Britain. We desperately need to be free of these Tories
**I understand the concerns about this policy, even though I think they're misplaced here. In one sense, it's inevitable that some asylum seekers have been arrested as the actual smugglers bugger off and expect someone to steer. The measure of good policing / criminal justice / policy / etc. in this area is not that arrests took place but what happened next. I do not know the specifics but it's easy to imagine that there's sufficient cause to arrest the person at the helm while investigations are started. Wrongful arrest could be the case as well, but prima facia, the fact of arrests means nothing. I am willing to bet two things now: 1. Labour will publish detailed plans for the Border Command. 2. The press will not report them and keep banging the drum of the Tory talking point 'of course Labour has no plan...' etc. I will judge the policy on the details and then the results.
What makes you think that there is insufficient room for the thousands we could take in?
Anyone who thinks that’s not a problem isn’t thinking about it properly.
Three things.
1. The UK (currently home to circa 65 million people) is 97% green*
2. We have lots of options for medium rise building... three storey town houses for example.
3. We have a low birthrate: currently 1.49** which means, absent immigration, we have a falling population.
AFZ
*I need to find the reference but IIRC, it's something like 90% of the UK is countryside; 6% of cities towns are green spaces with parks and woods and 1% of Britain is private gardens.
**latest figure from ONS (2022). They use total fertility rate which is number of children per woman. Given that women are ~50% of the population, any number below 2 indicates a falling population.
This is a different study with a different methodology but yields very similar results.
AFZ
The net migration figures put out by the UK government count people who have moved to the UK for at least a year, so includes people who have moved here temporarily but for longer than a year - i.e students.
One major reason for the sudden spike in 2022 (it was lower in 2023) was that there a modest expansion in overseas students compared with 2019, but there were fewer people emigrating on the debit side as far fewer students had started their studies in 2020/2021 (Covid).
This is another case of the UK's political class hating something the country does well, as from another angle it's the product of an incredibly successful export industry. If the present government has its way and brings down student numbers expect a number of institutions to go bust and a bunch of secondary cities and towns to undergo the opposite of levelling up.
Some of us would like to keep it that way.
My day job is strategic planning for a Russell Group university, with a specific focus on student number planning, so oddly enough I am aware of that fact. Personally, I favour removing international students from immigration numbers altogether.
The overall point about rising population, however, remains. See, for example this report from the Office of National Statistics.
If I’m honest, I already think there are too many people in the country. Adding millions more over the next decade will make the strain on public services even worse - unless taxes are raised to painful levels in order to fund massive increases thereof.
The boomers retiring and needing pensions, and health and social care, in vast numbers is what's going to put strain on public services. People coming here to work and pay taxes will relieve some of that strain, not increase it.
Interesting how flat the asylum-seekers' line is.
Anyway... let's do some maths.
Net migration was 745,000 in the year to December 2022. (Home Office figures).
UK Population 2021: 67,030,000
UK registered deaths 2022: 657,000
(577,000 E&W; 63,000 Sc; 17,000 NI)
UK registered births 2022: 673,000
(605,000 E&W; 47,000 Sc; 21,000 NI)
Hence Estimated UK Population 2022:
67,030,000
- 657,000
+ 673,000
+ 745,000
67,791,000
An increase of 1.1%.
Let's assume for the sake of argument, therefore, that we need an increase of land usage of 1.1% per year to accommodate the increase in population.
As noted the UK is only 3% build-on. So The increased building would mean coverage of 0.03 x 1.011 = 3.033%. So the UK remains 97% green and the change is but a rounding error.
Essentially, the arrival of 745,000 immigrants per year (the record high with all the caveats on the figures above) increases the need for developed land by 0.033% per year. So after 30 years of this level of immigration, Britain would be 96% green.
Physical space is not a factor.
AFZ
The housing question is easily answered. There are currently over a million vacant homes in the UK, enough to house new migrants for several years. They often need some work to bring them upto acceptable standards, some may be so bad they should be demolished and a new building put on the site, others may need reconfiguring into multiple dwellings ... but all of these could be places for people to live without building over any of our countryside.
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In particular from the guidelines, please be mindful that we have rules on source quality and that we ask people 'who don't have personal lived experience of a particular subject to focus on the voices and first-hand experience of those who do.'
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Thanks!
Louise
Epiphanies Host
@Alan Cresswell has provided a reasonable and sensible reply, anyhow.
I was fortunate some years ago to be somewhere where a lot of asylum seekers were being dumped. I saw myself the injustices they faced from The System and the petty obstacles that were continually thrown in their way. I got to know so many lovely people whose stories were heartbreaking. And I saw the lucky few who managed to beat The System and get refugee status and went on to be highly productive and valuable members of the UK society. The vast (and I mean VAST) majority of the asylum seekers I knew didn't want to scrounge on UK welfare. They wanted to be allowed to settle, to work and to rebuild their lives.
In general, Immigration conversations have started or ended in Hell. This is appropriate as the emotions run high and ranting against certain policies is an appropriate reaction. AFAIK, we've not done it in this place before. This could be interesting.
I have a few thoughts. What underpins much of my thoughts about this is that various arguments go on about policies and approaches and targets and whatever. It's almost as though immigrants are an agricultural product - where policy-makers can decide what works for them without any regard for the crop itself. This dehumanising is constant, insidious and often unnoticed. It is evil.
The first thought is political. Up until very recently, this was an issue on which the Conservatives could not lose. They seemed to be unable to resist returning to this vote-winner. This is due to a combination of two factors:
1. Immigration is like the rhinoceros.* If I tell you not to think about a rhinoceros, then it's quite hard to do because now all you want to do is think about a rhinoceros. Most of the country are not cognisant of immigration, most of the time. We know this for a number of reasons. One of which is that opposition to immigration is consistently highest in areas with the lowest levels of immigration and vice versa. For most of the population, it is not an issue. There is no measurable effect (in the sense of their day-to-day experience) on their lives. So consciousness of immigration is directly related to how much attention it gets in the press. I don't worry about boats arriving on the South Coast unless I know about it. I live in the West Midlands so I only know about it if the media reports it. Similarly, it is unequivocally true that opposition to immigration correlates with the level of media attention not the level of immigration.
Therefore, in order to make people worried about the level of immigration, one just needs to talk about it more. Cue newspaper front pages about 'invasions.' Public concern goes up, people want to vote for a party that they think will deal with the issue.
2. By those who worry about immigration, the Conservatives are more trusted on this subject than Labour. That has been true, consistently for two decades. I recently saw a poll that shows for the first time Labour are ahead on the question "who do you trust more on immigration?"
You see, the thing is, the recent past has shown that regardless of the fact that the Conservatives have never done anything to actually bring down immigration when people are worried about immigration, Conservative support goes up. When the newspapers talk about immigration, concern about it goes up. When Conservative policies do nothing to change the numbers** then the newspapers write more stories about it.
It's the perfect politics for the Tories as the last thing they want to do it fix it. Talk about it as much as possible, talk tough and then people will worry more. The people who worry about this trust the Tories more than Labour.
This is basically what's been happening for the past decade and a half.
Never mind the poor souls caught up in this mess. It was always a win for the Tories.
Things have changed.
To some extent, it was always a dancing-with-the-devil strategy as UKIP and their many reincarnations have been hoovering up these disaffected voters with the We'll be tougher and actually stop things approach. They are safe to say this because unlike the government they can bang this drum as much as possible. What the government knows is that - especially at the moment for various reasons - immigrants are vital to various sectors of the economy and net contributors. The costs of artificially blocking immigration are too high for a party that wants to get re-elected. Not too high for a swivel-eyed but for everybody else.
So, to me this is how me have got where we are today: a bidding war of cruelty. The last thing to government actually want to do is reduce immigration. They'd be blamed for the financial fall out and they'd lose the ability to campaign on it as a wedge issue. Every Tory failure has been successfully spun into a need for tougher and tougher anti-immigration policies.
That's the politics of where we are. And with the media landscape it is incredibly difficult for Labour. I desperately want to hear the Labour party speak out morally. I often think they can make the case - first and foremost for asylum-seekers - to a public that when faced with the facts is often deeply compassionate. But I am wrong. Labour cannot win by leading the charge.
Which is why I've looked at what Labour are putting together carefully. I believe there are reasons to think the policies in office will be much closer to what I believe is right than headlines would suggest. Judge them by their actions in office, is what I am saying.
More thoughts to follow, no doubt but that's my starter for ten...
AFZ
*With thanks to Sir Terry.
**Which is consistently the case because they are wedded to gimmicks and soundbites not workable policies.
Given that the Labour leadership has tacked right on this issue, there's limited scope to affect their policy before an election and virtually zero afterwards when they have a huge majority, at which point it'll be government by two people who are fairly instinctive authoritarians, with the backing of a cabinet full of weathervanes (in the sense the word was used by Benn).
Here is an example and you are all entitled to ignore it or say it isn't symptomatic of wider beliefs in England as you wish.
My parents are older and lower middle class. Currently their concerns are mostly voiced around the building of houses immediately around the suburb where they live in Western England. Their house was built in the 60s for context and they've lived there for 40+ years where nothing much changed. Recently there has been a *lot* of housebuilding immediately around them and I read in the local news of a plan to build many more thousands in the county.
I was talking to a friend of theirs who was linking the housebuilding to immigration in the most racist of ways. In words I don't want to type but maybe you can imagine.
Which is saddening and weird. For one thing they live in a very white suburb where there are few non-white people. For another, the vast majority of the houses are in the £300k+ range and are unlikely to be used by the bleeping bleepers who arrive in the bleeping bleeping boats bleeping bleeping and are given jobs and houses to live in.
It's obvious bullshit. And they must know it is bullshit.
Housebuilding in their area has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with a (relatively) booming local economy in some sectors which can support relatively well paid employees.
Really pisses me off.
And they get really uncomfortable when challenged.
I'm a big bloke, 6 foot three. I tend not to be the target of aggression.
My perception even in my own community is that white people generally, particularly when they are over 70, have lost inhibitions about loudly saying racist things in public. It isn't a class thing either, I've heard very racist things from ex-miners and university Professors. This seems to me to have changed in the last 10 years and in my opinion closely follows the previlance of anti-woke media. Which in that context makes this story about the founder of GB News (and suitor for the Daily Telegraph) quite interesting
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/14/paul-marshall-religion-bidder-for-telegraph-influence-tories
In the case of my parents' area, the population is extremely segregated. So whilst overall there are minorities present in the county, they are unusual in these suburbs. I don't know the demographics of the people buying the new housing, but it is unlikely to be poorer ethnic minorities and almost definitely not new migrants.
Thanks,
Louise
Epiphanies host
Does the UK have an immigration policy? I think the answer to that is a resounding "No".
It doesn't matter whether you're a well-heeled banker from a western country or a desperate stowaway on a lorry, the bureaucracy to look at your case is sclerotic and chaotic in equal measure. It is more than 20 years since John Reid described it as Not fit for purpose but, with the exception of multiple nam changes, little has changed - in fact if anything, matters have got worse.
The UK desperately needs an immigration policy We need to assess applications in a timely, efficient and equitable manner. We need to have in place decent accommodation for refugees and those entering the country without the correct permissions, and those centres need to have their own dedicated staff to deal with health issues and education facilities to get newcomers speaking English so that they can integrate into wider society for their own, as well as our, good. At the moment every single "answer" to the handling of immigrants is lacking. Wild allegations by politicians of every persuasion of massive cost are unhelpful and guaranteed to feed the worst instincts of a section of society that sees every immigrant as "other", a person to be feared and/or loathed.
I’m a short dumpy woman 5’3” butI can give an almighty serve (verbally) to aggressive neo-cons. My response to holy rollers who offer to pray for me is “be careful what you ask for”.
I'd like to think that the Kafkaesque nightmare that is the UK's immigration and asylum system is the result of incompetence rather than an act of deliberate policy but I'm unconvinced thus far by the evidence. Bureaucratised cruelty (see also: work capability assessments) are the hallmark of much of the last 45 years of government policy in any area where support is supposed to be directed to people in need, but most particularly of the last 14 years of tory misrule.
A lot of people don't want their town/village/whatever to expand. They like it how it was, and want stability.
Stability is hard. In general, towns are either experiencing growth (which tends to mean an increase in suburban sprawl on their outskirts), or decline (empty, boarded-up homes). Stability is generally only possible if what you have is a demand to live in that area, but a ban or near ban on the building of new homes.
On a national scale, an increase in population requires an increase in liveable homes. I'm sure that @Alan Cresswell will show up to tell us how much of the projected increase in housing need over the next decade could be met by placing empty homes back in to service, and probably even what fraction of those empty homes are in places where people actually want to live (jobs are available etc.)
So there is some truth buried in your parents' friends' concerns: The UK population is growing, and all of this growth is caused by immigration (UK birth rate is below the replacement rate). An increase in population requires an increase in homes, and so building.
With a static population, it would be possible to have restrictive housebuilding policies that would generally not permit new developments in their area.
This is not entirely true, while overall life expectancy is somewhat static, there is enough growth at the margins that there will still be more births than deaths in the average year.
Stability is also only possible if you have a virtually static economy in a given region, which is rarely the case for any length of time.
Well, that depends on how you read the numbers.
You're right that there are slightly more births than deaths per year, so in the absence of additional immigration, the population would be growing very slowly (and aging - the population is not declining despite the falling birthrate because people are living longer. Modal age for adults at death has increased 10 years over the last 40 years.)
But the birth rate is also propped up by the immigrant population. Birth rate is close to 2 for foreign-born women in the UK, and close to 1.5 for UK-born women. So I think my assertion that the growth is "all due to immigration" is numerically correct, when you include the additional children of those immigrants.
Yep.
I wondered if this was an evil plot on the part of the tories, who seem determined to leave as much mess as possible for the incoming Labour government.