Immigration policy is one of the most contested areas of contemporary politics. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Public debate often degenerates to trading numbers – how many people are coming in, and whether that number is too high or too low – but as Madeleine Sumption argues, the reality is both more complex and more difficult to resolve than that suggests.
In this episode of the podcast, George Miller speaks to Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford and author of What is Immigration Policy For?. They discuss why there is no single ‘right’ level of immigration, how the same evidence can lead to such different conclusions, and why attempts to control migration numbers so often fail.
Their conversation also explores the limits of data in policymaking, the trade-offs between economic, humanitarian and political objectives, and the ways in which public debate often misses the fundamentally different purposes served by work, family and asylum migration.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Madeleine Sumption is the Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, which provides impartial analysis of migration in the UK.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
What Is Immigration Policy For? by Madeleine Sumption is available for £9.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:33 – What drew you into immigration policy as a career?
07:39 – Do most people cost the state more than we pay into it?
08:48 – Why is data and policy such a tricky relationship?
14:41 – Why can’t you effectively cap net migration?
19:54 – What is the current state of the immigration debate in the US?
24:35 – How can we improve immigration policy?
31:11 – What’s the one thing you wish everyone understood about immigration?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: So, Madeleine, I think I remember reading somewhere that your interest in the field of immigration policy dates back to around the time when there were new accession states in Eastern Europe to the EU. And I wondered, what was it about what was going on then that particularly drew you in and turned it into a lifelong career choice?
Madeleine Sumption: Well, I think EU enlargement was really interesting because it was an occasion when there was a really visible connection between what was happening in policy and what people saw around them. So there were particular parts of the UK, for example, where there had been actually very low migration areas, around Lincolnshire, for example, in the east of England. And people were not used to having much immigration. And then suddenly, because of EU enlargement and countries like Poland and then later Romania becoming members of the EU, suddenly the communities around them changed and it catapulted immigration into the headlines. It became much more salient.
People started saying in opinion polls that they were much more concerned about it. I personally was quite interested in it because I had a background studying Russian and could partially understand a lot of the things that Polish people were saying. So it was something that was just very noticeable in society and created a lot of debate. And so I think it really underlined this fact that immigration policy, it is in some ways a very technical field. There’s a lot of discussion about data and the mechanisms of how policy works, but it is also just by its nature a human thing that people naturally are very interested in, regardless of whether they’re specialised in it or it’s just something that they see casually around them.
GM: So it was clearly a time of great change when those new states joined the EU and migration from those countries in the UK picked up. And you had this background of which gave you an interest in Eastern Europe. But I’m interested to know what was the animating question that you went to this situation with? What was it you wanted to find out more about?
MS: I think when I first started looking at the topic of immigration, I was really interested in this idea of, well, what is the right answer? You had these debates on either side. Some people worried about there being too much immigration, possibly having a negative impact on the labour market, on people’s job prospects. Others were saying, no, no, this is a great thing for public finances. We’ve got young people coming in, bringing dynamism. And these arguments seem to be in conflict.
And so perhaps naively, I thought to myself, well, let’s find out, you know, what’s right, what is the right amount of immigration, because there must be some kind of answer to this. And I think the thing actually that’s been most interesting about studying the topic is the extent to which there isn’t a right answer. And so much is in the eye of the beholder.
So if you think about EU migration, for example, a lot of the evidence, if you look at what does economic evidence suggest, it often suggests that the impacts of migration are smaller than many people expect, both the positives and the negatives. But what really struck me was how people respond to that evidence is very different depending on their underlying opinions and how comfortable they feel with migration.
So you have some people who look at the picture and say, OK, well, the evidence suggests that the impacts are not very big. So what’s the fuss about? Why is everyone complaining about this migration if it’s not creating all of the harms that they worry about?
And then on the other side, you have people who have a more sceptical outlook towards migration, saying, well, hang on, the benefits are not that. Why do we need so much immigration if actually it’s not the thing that the future of our economy depends on? We can get away with having much lower migration. And actually, both of those things are true. And I think this is just one of many areas where people look at the same set of evidence, and in my view, quite reasonably, they reach very different opinions.
GM: And people often reach mutually incompatible opinions, and they often, or sometimes, hold within themselves opinions which don’t actually point in the direction of one particular policy direction. They may be favourably disposed to one set of migrants and not another, or to one particular policy option but not another. But that doesn’t clearly add up to a coherent policy opinion. That’s across the electorate. And then I guess you see that played out also in the way that politicians have to work out policy and brief policy and ultimately implement it. So there’s incompatible ideas held in people’s heads all the way through.
MS: That’s right. And I think one of the things that really struck me is that people naturally, I think, have difficulty separating out whether they like migrants and think that from a social, cultural perspective, migration is a good idea and their views on the economic impacts of migration.
There was one survey experiment that asked people whether they thought a hypothetical Nigerian building contractor was bringing economic benefits to the UK. And they were much more likely to say that they thought that this chap was economically beneficial if they were also told that he was applying for citizenship. Now, in theory, that shouldn’t really be that relevant, because whether you have citizenship isn’t the major thing that affects your economic impact. It’s what you’re doing, how much you earn, the nature of your activities in the labour market.
But people actually really struggle to disentangle whether they think someone is a morally virtuous person from whether they are economically beneficial. And actually, these are completely separate questions, which is one reason I think that many people, particularly on the pro-migration side of the argument, struggle with some of the data around the fact that care workers, for example, who are often seen as this morally virtuous group of people who are working hard to give elderly people a more dignified life in the UK, they are not net contributors to public finances. Over the long run, there’s probably a net cost of having care workers in the country because they are on very low wages, So once they have access to benefits, there will be costs that are incurred.
I think people find this very counterintuitive because they struggle to separate out the hard numbers of what makes you a net contributor to public finances from who they think is working hard and doing a good job.
GM: Am I correct in saying that if you look across the population in general, most of us are not net contributors over the long duration of our lives? Most of us actually cost the state, if we’re looking at it in purely fiscal terms, we cost the state more than we pay into the state.
MS: Yes, we have a progressive tax system, so that means that at any one point in time you’ve got a lot of people in the top quarter of the population who are paying a huge amount in tax, and that is enabling people not to be net fiscal contributors. Even someone on the median income at any one point in time, that person over the course of their lifetime, one would expect them to have a slightly negative fiscal impact. Obviously, those people in the middle aren’t having a massive impact. The real impacts are the people who are at the very bottom, so people who are out of work for very long periods, would have quite a negative impact over the course of their lifetimes.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got people who are earning several hundred thousand, who over the course of their lifetimes would easily be contributing a million plus to public finances more than it costs to have them in the country using the NHS and so forth.
GM: Two of the things that I’ve learned from your book are that data is not always available to provide the answers that we might expect. And even if the data is available, that doesn’t always translate into policy that can actually be implemented in the real world. I began to think about it as a necessary but insufficient condition. You need decent data or your policy is going to be all over the place. But even if you have the data, you’re still going to have to be dealing with those things that we’ve just been talking about: the ideas that people have in their heads, the stereotypes and mistaken ideas. But can you talk about this idea about the data that we need in order to reach any kind of policy conclusions? But the fact that that in itself is not going to get us all the way there.
MS: Yeah, so data obviously is very important if we want to understand what the impacts of policies are. On the economic side, you’ve got basic things like, are people working after they come to the country? Are they, how much are they earning? So those will be the two major factors that drive their contribution to public finances, for example. And it’s actually quite surprising how difficult it is to get data. You might have some new immigration programme that’s announced with great fanfare: ‘We’re going to have the brightest and the best at this category, high potential individuals’, whatever you have you want to describe them.
And then sometimes there’s no plan for even collecting data to find out how they did. Did they realise their potential? We let people in as investors. Did they invest in anything? Well, we don’t know. So that obviously is a challenge. Even if you do have good data, it’s often really hard to work out what was the actual causal of a particular immigration policy. And if you’re lucky, there may be some other countries around the world who tried the thing that you’re thinking of trying and who have some good evaluations. Even then, the impacts of the same policy might not be the same in each country.
But I think it is disappointing, how many of policies just go completely unevaluated and how a lot of the arguments you see in policy debates is, ‘oh, well, Austria did this, so let’s do it too’ – which isn’t an argument really, it’s just saying that they did it, but maybe it was a disaster in Austria. And often Austria didn’t evaluate it either, so we just don’t know.
But people take the very existence of a policy in some other country as an endorsement of the fact it must be a good idea, when often then you look into the details of that policy and either no one knows if it was a good idea, or in fact often there were some significant unintended consequences, because the reality is that a lot of policies just don’t work.
GM: Yes, yes. Unintended consequences keep coming up, don’t they? Governments make declarations, they unveil policies, there’s fanfare. They’re either implemented or partially implemented or badly implemented. And things happen that seem to completely surprise them and us. I mean, one thinks of the Boris Johnson years when there was lots of declarations made about how immigration was going to be curbed and yet it went up. So to take that as a test case, was that a matter of insufficiently well worked out policy or poor implementation? How does that track with what we’ve just been talking about in terms of the reality versus the vision?
MS: Yeah, I think it was a combination of issues. So this is a classic case of policies not doing what politicians said they were going to do. People voted for Brexit, expecting immigration to go down and instead the net migration level – people coming in minus the numbers going out – tripled compared to pre-Brexit levels. They’ve now come down again quite a lot.
But part of it, I think, was just a failure to do the maths beforehand. So the Home Secretary at the time, for example, said, well, we could admit more than 200,000 Ukrainians as a result of the scheme for Ukrainians after the full-scale Russian invasion. And then there was almost a surprise when nine months later the statistics came out and those 200,000 Ukrainians were in there. And actually, that was a rare case where they did, the numbers that they had said in advance did actually relatively closely match the number of people who came in.
So there was, I think, some extent to which there were a lot of liberalising decisions. And I think the government maybe hadn’t anticipated how those were all going to add up. So it wasn’t just Ukrainians that were people coming under a special scheme for Hongkongers. There were new routes for various different work visas, people coming into the care sector, more liberal rules for international students, all that added up.
I think there was also an extent to which it was just an accident that resulted from the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to predict how many people are going to take up a given immigration policy. So I have some sympathy with the government here that in hindsight, it looks incredibly obvious. They liberalised the policies, loads of people came. And so it looks like it should have been really predictable.
There were similar policies that had existed 10 or 15 years before that hadn’t had anywhere near the number of applicants. So suddenly international students came in, much larger numbers. There were projections that maybe a few thousand, possibly low tens of thousands of people would come in the care sector. In practice, even in a single year, there were more than 100,000 care workers who were joined by over 100,000 care worker family members. So over 200,000 in total. That was unexpected. And it’s one of these things where with hindsight, yes, you can see why it happened. But I think that the government would, if it had known what the numbers were going to be, it would have done things quite differently. But projecting migration is just one of these notoriously difficult things.
GM: And I guess that’s something which the man or woman in the street finds quite hard to understand, because, you know, you’re describing a very complex system with lots of different moving parts and different motivations and different categories. But to the person in the street, it seems almost self-evident that a government should be able to set a cap and abide by that cap.
You must have those encounters from time to time, so what do you say to people who say, Why is it so hard? Why can’t we just simplify it to the extent that if we say this is going to be the cap for net migration – as we know there are political parties who are suggesting it’s quite simple to do that, so why are they wrong?
MS: Yeah, so you can cap the number of visas that you grant. You can’t cap net migration because people have a choice to emigrate. There are some people who are going to be allowed to stay permanently and you don’t know how many of them will leave. And a lot of them do leave. So emigration is not something that the government directly controls, although obviously its policies influence it.
The thing that you can cap most easily is just how many visas do you grant to people in different categories. And that is more feasible in some areas than others. A lot of people who come to a country like the UK, same is true of other high-income countries, are not coming through on work visas. And a lot of the debate actually kind of behaves as if everyone is here for economic reasons. And that’s actually not the case. Most people are not coming as main applicants for a particular job. And that means that it’s quite hard to cap some of the other categories. So one of the major reasons people can come to the country if they marry a British citizen. And if you cap that, you could, in theory, say, we’ll only allow 30,000 people a year to come in through that visa.
What that would mean in practice was that if a British citizen got married and the cap was filled up, they might then have to live apart from their spouse, depending on how heavily the cap was oversubscribed, for years. And so there are basically no high-income countries around the world that have a cap on their own citizens’ spousal visas if they marry a non-citizen.
Similarly, the asylum system, governments would dearly love to control the numbers in the asylum system, but the nature of the asylum system, effectively people come in without permission and then they apply for asylum and the refugee convention doesn’t allow governments to impose a cap on those numbers. So that’s already two quite substantial categories.
In the work category, because it’s economic migration, you can sort of do what you want with it in some ways without running into legal obstacles. So that can be capped. The issues there that governments face is a bit more technocratic, which is just, well, how do you decide? Who do you decide who to give the visas to? And do you end up with a situation? You’ve got to decide who to prioritise. And if you have a cap, then you might end up with some policies where basically whether this particular person, let’s say you’ve got a graphic designer earning 50,000 quid who’s going to come in and work for an employer. Whether that person gets in will depend on how many care workers applied for visas that month or that quarter, which isn’t necessarily the thing that governments want to use to determine whether to admit a graphic designer.
So you get into some tricky issues there, but it can, in theory, be capped. But sometimes when you have caps, they’re on the work visa categories, but then everything else sort of fluctuates in unpredictable ways. And you get, even when policies don’t change, the numbers might change quite a lot.
GM: So does that mean then that the honest but politically unpalatable answer that a politician would have to give if they were asked point blank, can you guarantee that net migration will not exceed a certain target? Is no, because there are some levers that they can pull, but ultimately is dependent on so many different things which are not predictable, not amenable to quotas. And therefore, the honest answer is no politician can guarantee that net migration will not exceed a certain threshold.
MS: It’s very difficult to guarantee a specific number of people. That doesn’t mean that governments can’t dramatically reduce and restrict migration. So I think some people go from, well, it’s difficult to cap it to, therefore, it should not be constrained at all. And I don’t think that’s right.
I think the challenge that we’ve often had with these numerical targets is that politicians may say, OK, well, we would like migration to be less than such and such. But then they don’t actually have a plan. That’s the political statement. And the actual policies that are implemented aren’t restrictive enough to get you there.
And so there’s been a mismatch between you’ve got the sort of restrictive rhetoric and then policies on paper that actually aren’t very restrictive. And that’s where the big disconnect is. So I think, you know, governments absolutely can reduce migration if they want to. There are loads of trade-offs when doing that, and this book is all about the trade-offs that they face when sometimes it’s humanitarian trade-offs, if they’re trying to cut down on family migration or on refugees, sometimes it’s economic trade-offs if they’re cutting down on numbers of skilled or highly paid workers. And those trade-offs are the things that you sort of can’t get away from, and governments need to just work out, well, what do they want to prioritise here.
GM: Now, so far, we’ve been talking in very civilised terms about basically UK migration policy, but you do also write about US and other polities in the book. And I just wondered, because I know that you’ve lived and worked in the US, the nature of the debate in the US has become so polarised, so potentially poisonous in the past couple of years, I mean, in Trump 2. And I was just looking at a New York Times piece this week, which quoted Stephen Miller, Trump’s lead advisor on immigration, saying, ‘we need a moratorium on immigration from third world countries until we can heal ourselves as a nation’.
So their immigration is being presented almost in existential terms, unless it is significantly curbed and indeed cut entirely., the whole nature of the American nation is under threat. And I just wondered what you made, you know, setting aside all these more technocratic questions that we’ve been looking at, what you make of the state of the immigration debate in the United States at present, because it certainly seems to have taken quite a turn in the last few years.
MS: Yeah, that’s right. And I think, obviously, there are policies that have been proposed or implemented in the US that would be completely off the table in most other high-income countries that tend to go for relatively mainstream… If they’re restricting migration, they are maybe tweaking some income thresholds around the margins, but not doing anything as significant as banning whole nationalities.
One challenge writing the book is sort of how, what is the Overton window, right? Sort of how much to talk about just, this is what most countries are doing and then how much to talk about the much more radical policy experiments, some of which we’ve seen recently in the US.
So, yeah, I think it is interesting what’s going on in the US. It’s very difficult to evaluate. I think one of the things it does underline is that a lot of the debate traditionally has been about the economics of migration and people quibble about, OK, well, is the net contribution to public finances this or that? In public opinion polls, the research really suggests, actually, that what people care about most is the social and cultural impacts of migration. And actually, people in some cases, people are often worried about the pace of change, and they’re often actually willing to take an economic cost. They don’t necessarily want to prioritise economics, and they are happy to see some economic cost in order to have lower migration. And so that’s obviously part of the debate that has become so divisive that’s playing out in the US at the moment.
GM: You mentioned the Overton window. I guess the question is whether, the way that has shifted in the States, if that might lead to a shifting in other countries, perhaps there are already signs of that, the discourse. I mean, countries like Hungary, for example, would probably even ahead of the United States, although maybe not so quickly and so extremely. But it’s, to say the least, going to be an interesting time in the next few years, isn’t it, to see how the immigration debate is played out?
MS: Yeah, and I think the Overton window has shifted in the UK as well a fair amount, just thinking about the last 10 years or so that I’ve been working at the Migration Observatory. Back at the beginning of that period, no one was really suggesting leaving the Refugee Convention, for example. The general narrative on the issue of asylum at that point was, yes, of course, if people are refugees, if they qualify as refugees, then they will be welcomed and they will be granted refugee status and we will help them to integrate. What governments want to crack down on is people who don’t qualify for, people apply for asylum, but they don’t qualify.
And that, I think, has shifted gradually over time to a narrative of like, well, actually, no refugees need to be deterred as well. Even if they qualify for refugee status, they should be the responsibility of another country. They should have stopped in a safe country like France along the way.
And then more recently, obviously, with reform and to some extent, the Conservative Party, there’s now much more questioning, sort of mainstream questioning of the very idea of the Refugee Convention and the basic principle of which is that people should not be sent back to a country where they could be significantly harmed. And that’s something that the Reform Party effectively is saying that it doesn’t want to comply with any more. And there is a much more mainstream discussion about trying to significantly reduce people’s eligibility for asylum.
So I think we see, obviously it’s nothing like what’s happening in some other countries like the US, but we do see a significant shift in the nature of the debate in the UK as well.
GM: So we’ve talked about the irreconcilable nature of the objectives that immigration policy might have. We’ve talked about problems of data. We’ve talked about unintended consequences and sometimes lack of follow-up on policy. So how does one avoid falling into despair and just thinking this is a kind of careering train … How might we move, not to a perfect world, but how might we think about it in a way where we sort of believe some kind of amelioration is possible?
MS: Well, in the book, I don’t set out any policy recommendations. And partly that’s because I don’t think there is any such thing as a purely evidence-based policy recommendation. I think the fact that there are trade-offs means that what you want to do after seeing the evidence is going to vary depending on what you prioritise.
Without going to specific solutions, I think one thing that would be helpful is, I think we all can do a bit more to recognise that this is complicated and there’s never a single perfect answer. And I think there’s some reluctance sometimes on both sides to recognise that these trade-offs exist and that the policy they prefer may also have downsides.
So we see this, for example, in the trade-off between humanitarian and economic goals of migration. You’ve got some groups of migrants, particularly refugees, who are probably imposing an economic cost, certainly at a cost to public finances. And that’s an area where I think people sometimes are reluctant on the pro-migration side may be reluctant to recognise that those costs exist. They would like to think that refugees are also bringing significant economic contributions. And obviously many of them work very hard or face very difficult circumstances. But I think it’s important to recognise that there are these trade-offs. There is likely a cost to welcoming large numbers of refugees. And you’ve got to be able to think about then, OK, well, if there is a cost, how much of a cost are we willing to accept? How do we try and mitigate and reduce those costs?
And I think being able to have a sensible conversation where people recognise that sometimes there are arguments that don’t support their position would be very helpful, if nothing else, just for having a more robust and civilised debate on the issue, rather than assuming that immigration is either incredibly good or incredibly bad and there’s nothing in between, because in most cases there are pluses and minuses for a destination country like the UK.
GM: And it may be the case that the electorate is more politically sophisticated than politicians sometimes give it credit for. We talked about sometimes holding incompatible views of immigrants and immigration. But perhaps rather than seeing that as just a lack of logic, there is something positive there in that their positions are not sort of ironclad fixed: anti-immigration or open the borders. And perhaps there is scope for a slightly more grown-up debate and less polarisation, you know, based on where the electorate actually is, rather than where political rhetoric and sometimes elements in the press seem to suggest it is… I’m trying to be optimistic.
MS: I think that’s right. And I think certainly my experience from being involved in projects with focus groups and the like, I think that the public are often less polarised than experts and tend to see pluses and minuses to immigration and want to chart a middle ground in many cases. One thing that has struck me is that it’s very easy to say, oh, these are unusually polarised times because there has been polarisation for very long periods. But it does strike me that many of the policy positions that are held by experts who are not considered fringe people at all are either way to the left or to the right of your average person, even your average person in the population with relatively sceptical view on migration.
GM: And would you say, because you meet politicians up close, would you say that they entirely grasp the complexity of the problem or feel themselves to be hamstrung by political constraints, election cycles and what is sayable and what is unsayable? It’s not that they are all ideologues, but they themselves feel constrained by what the system will allow them to do within that sort of short window when they’re in power.
MS: Yeah, this is a very difficult one. And obviously, if you’re looking at someone who’s an immigration minister, many of those people won’t have a huge amount of background in the brief. And they show up and then just as they get into grips with things, they get reshuffled to work in transport or whatever it is. Not because they’re not working very hard, but just because of the nature of how our political system works, where ministers get allocated to different topics, they’re quite reasonably not always on top of the finer detail.
There is a really interesting dynamic with the Home Office and equivalent ministries in other countries, where a government will often come to power with some kind of pledge to restrict and control migration. And then the Home Secretary or Immigration Minister or whoever it is, actually has quite a lonely existence because as soon as they get into government, they’re really the only one defending that position.
And you’ve got the ministers in charge of health want the doctors and nurses and care workers. And then the culture secretary will want creative workers. And the agricultural ministry will want the seasonal workers. And the education department wants teachers. And by the time you’ve added it all up, there isn’t that much. It’s only really hospitality that everyone agrees that they can restrict.
So there are very interesting tensions between different parts of government that we see across the world. They come in with, in theory, a unified policy, but actually there’s a lot of tension between many of the government departments that are set up to want to demand more migration and then the Interior Ministry / Home Office that is set up to try and restrict it.
And that is probably good, to be honest, to have some kind of creative tension, but it does create an interesting dynamic and is possibly one reason that some of the policies, some of the restrictive policies don’t end up being implemented because they may not be acceptable to other parts of government.
GM: Madeleine, I wanted to end today by asking you, if there’s one question that you get asked over and over by journalists that you wish you didn’t have to be asked because everybody had absorbed the answer to that question, what would that be?
Is this such a thing where you think, OK, if there’s one thing about immigration, I really just wish everybody could get into their heads, it would be this, other than it’s complicated, which I think we’ve probably conveyed quite well this afternoon. But beyond the complexity of it, is there one canard that you would like to dispatch?
MS: I think the single biggest thing that I think if people understood it would help them think through immigration policy more easily is that there are several different types of migration and they have different goals.
The debate that we have about migration often assumes that everyone is coming here for work. And if everyone was coming here for work, life would be so much easier. And you could have an evidence-based policy. It would be much easier to produce an evidence-based policy that would probably be quite liberal for highly skilled workers and quite restrictive for workers coming into lower skilled or lower paid jobs.
The problem and one of the reasons that it’s so difficult is that most people aren’t coming for economic reasons. And so I get asked a lot of these questions about, well, is immigration meeting our economic needs? Which I struggle to answer because actually a lot of, you know, family members, refugees, it’s not designed to meet our economic needs. That’s not the point of those policies.
And then you can conclude from that, whether you want to be liberal or restrictive on those particular routes. But I think it really hamstrings the debate about migration. If everyone proceeds on the assumption that this is purely about the economy, because there’s a lot of other stuff going on as well.
GM: Messy human reality.
MS: Indeed.
GM: Madeleine Sumption, thank you very much for speaking to us today.
MS: Thanks for having me.