Migration: political challenges, policy choices
by Professor Shamit Saggar

Introductory observations
The intellectual and practical issues thrown up by mass immigration are far from new. This is particularly true when looking at a small club of wealthy industrial societies that have experienced mass inward migration waves in the post-war period. Britain, France, Germany and The Netherlands are prime examples, all of which have used rather different approaches to regulate immigrant flows and domestic integration.

The challenges and choices thrown up by immigration largely appear to be recent in nature and directly linked to accelerating patterns of globalisation. In the main, they are. But this should not be exaggerated or detract from the fact that these controversies are connected to earlier waves of immigration and, therefore, to constant tensions about population movement and national cohesion. Apocalyptic predictions of social decay and national crisis are by no means new. This conference takes place on the fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in which he warned that Commonwealth immigration to Britain would spell the end of British nationhood. Echoes of those same concerns are evident today as well. Arguments over identifying accurate costs and benefits are familiar. And disputes over immigration’s effects on social change and national character have always been present.

The UK case is one that especially revolves around the set of similar concerns. For instance, in the 1960s and 1970s politicians grappled with mass Commonwealth immigration, touching various raw nerves in voters and the press. The political parties were usually as divided amongst themselves as they were across party lines. And large, imponderable questions hung over the political landscape centred on the sense of erosion of national identity, racial preferences, and the responsiveness of parliament.

A generation on, the large-scale immigration that preoccupies political life today is global and highly cosmopolitan in character. It is also skewed by heavy movements of mostly temporary East European workers and rising number of skilled and entrepreneurial individuals from developing societies seeking to make their mark in developed economies. Yet the political and social impacts are curiously similar to those arising from migration in the past.

This pattern is not unique to Britain by any means. It is also found in an evolving picture of immigration politics across many developed economies. France’s new president, Sarkozy, has been keen to point out that the country’s future development should not be held back by a shortage of personnel in key sectors. Germany has sought to recruit global IT and financial workers over several years, often losing out to the pro-immigration reputation of California and London. And in Australia in late 2007, an administation closely associated with scepticism towards immigration, notably from Asian sources, was swept from office.

The current context
There are, however, some notable distinctions in the current climate. These ensure that immigration is usually near the top of the list of burning issues for the electorate. They are contribute to a sense of immigration as pulling or stretching apart stable societies. Crisis is not too strong a term in many countries.

The hallmarks of immigration today can be described, and several form the thematic backdrop to discussions at this conference. For instance, six themes stand out:

·    Political parties are deadlocked and leaders susceptible to populist pressures. Mainstream parties, irrespective of local electoral systems, have struggled to maintain voter confidence. Many parties have been captured by soft anti-immigrant sentiment which leaders have sought to manage, often inelegantly. Intra-party divisions have been commonplace, partly because immigration sits poorly across existing ideological, regional, class or other fault lines. The migration that most often tests party leadership can result from internal population movements. For instance, Mumbai’s settled communities have recently forced, sometimes violently, their dislike of north Indian settlers onto the top of agenda of city politics.

·    Multiculturalism is openly questioned. The general doctrine that was loosely adopted by several immigrant receiving countries - namely to support immigrant equality alongside cultural diversity - has been severely tested. This has been most starkly seen in the integration policy U-turns of Dutch governments since 2002, partly fuelled by elites’ doubts about the character and motives of Islamic communities locally. A similar reversal has been seen in Denmark where, for instance, a differential age of legal marriage is now operated between immigrants and non-immigrants. And in Britain, the country’s equalities supremo, Trevor Phillips, has been praised and criticised in equal measure for reading the funeral rites on multiculturalist ideas.

·    Patterns of segregation and separateness are actively challenged. In part in the wave of misgivings about past multiculturalist tendencies, many countries today take a sceptical view towards immigrant groups who stick together. Immigrants’ sticking with their own is criticised even though it may be a short-term pattern giving way to eventual dispersal. The immigrant ghetto becomes the object of suspicion and anxiety most of all in relation to those groups that have remained clustered even after three or more decades. In Britain this is largely the case among Pakistani and Bangladeshi descended groups; in France and Belgium, it describes many North African descended communities; in Germany, it is a by-word for several million Turks. The push to desegregate and disperse is equally frustrated by the very few levers enjoyed by governments to deliver such outcomes. In Canada various measures have been tried to bribe, cajole or promote immigrant settlement beyond MTV (Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver); the evidence regarding their impact is unimpressive.

·    Ethnic diversity and social cohesion are widely thought to be irreconcilable. Doubts that modern societies would buckle undert the growing ethno-religious diversity that immigration brought are far from new. These were expressed - loudly and with reverberations - a century ago in America in respect of southern Europe immigration and also against further Jewish influxes. The absorptive capacity of Australia towards non-white and non-European immigration was widely debated in the two decades after the end of the country’s “White Australia” immigration policy in the early 1970s. The basic premise of Enoch Powell in Britain in the 1960s was that ties across ethnic lines were both undesirable and, worse still, unimaginable. This basic theme has been significantly extended in recent years. First, commentators such as David Goodhart have argued European liberals’ support for welfare values are in tension with mass immigration: the friction stems, it is argued, by a reluctance to reciprocate and share across unfamiliar, ethnic boundaries. Second, Bob Putnam has published empirical evidence which suggests that Americans’ levels of inter-personal trust is inversely related to levels of ethnic diversity: growing diversity, he fears, may be rolled up with diminishing social trust and solidarity.

·    Loss of control over borders looms large in public sentiment. The capacity of governments to make and deliver basic claims about borders is regularly tested in contemporary debates over immigration. This is fuelled by two elements. To begin with, the permeability of borders is easy to see. The US-Mexican case stands out despite significant injections of financial and political resources to deliver control. The second element is more controversial, and holds that immigration policies which aim for permanent immigrant settlement are the true cause. This is because most immigrants desire something less than permanent settlement. Many are specifically motivated by short-term advantage factors. The difficulty is that there are comparatively few immigration programmes catering for this appetite. The bulk, by contrast, prioritise and value permanency, perhaps not so surprisingly given the need of host communities to sanction explicitly new membership. Citizenship policies in particular seek this bargain and long term contract. One by-product has been greater numbers seeking to penetrate borders designed to keep out permanent illegals. This is ironic since temporary immigrants of various kinds are also caught by this citizenship filter.

·    Grave doubts are expressed about security and immigration. Arguably the most dramatic change within the past decade has resulted from the securitisation of immigration debates. This is overwhelmingly the result of the post 9/11 global environment, ratcheted up significantly by the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts and the Madrid and London mass civilian attacks of 2004 and 2005 respectively. The reputation of western Muslim communities is the basic point of contention whereby evidence and argument interplay. The supply of extremist and radicals, some of whom have a keen appetite for violence and confrontation, is unmistakeable. In fact the link to immigration is somewhat tenuous given that the recruits to most violent conspiracies are often drawn from settled communities that are unaffected by immigration policies. Nevertheless, there is a growing tendency for governments to view long term immigration objectives through the lens of security.

Underlying issues
The conference will examine in broad terms: a) the various causes and factors behind immigration; b) the different social, economic and political impacts of immigration; and c) the implications for the makers and shapers of public policy. These issues obviously need to be looked at through a sensible historic lens so as to help isolate whether, or how far, and why current immigration political debates are connected with earlier ones.

The political controversies can be seen everywhere. The most pressing day-to-day controversies are five-fold:

·    Political disputes mostly centre on the scale or quantum of fresh immigration. This means that there is only limited focus on looking at migration in net terms, even though many wealthy, high-inflow countries also report high-outflows simultaneously. This may be explained, crudely, by a sense that the human capital rich “leavers” are somehow giving up on their home society, whilst, strangely, the “arrivers” are only driven by self-gain. Nevertheless, there is plenty of pressure on politicians to declare a simple numeric target, and usually a lower-one-than-before at that. The Conservative Party in Britain stated to the electorate in 2005 that their policy would allow parliament to set an annual net fresh target to be implemented by the executive. It was rejected electorally but that does not mean that such an approach has no future prospects.

·    The composition of immigration also matters. This may or may not be spelt out politically but it nevertheless features tacitly in public debate. But the composition question can vary: it might involve the mix between skilled and unskilled migrants (a familiar and comfortable distinction); or it may be between migrants who are ethnically and culturally different to host populations as compared with those seems more “like us” (something that is much more vexed and volatile emotionally). The latter is, of course, a regular source of controversy not just in immigration matters but also in foreign affairs. For instance, Britain, France and Germany all became in the post-war period immigrant-receiving societies for large-numbers of immigrants and settlers that were seen as ethnically distinct from their host communities. In all three cases, South Asians, North Africans and Turks respectively have been linked with major debates about the absorptive capacity of host communities. It is hard to imagine similar debates based on composition had these countries experienced large-scale influxes of other European immigrants. A further illustration is reflected in current attitudes and policies towards possible Turkish accession to the EU. Whilst EU eastern enlargement (and free movement of labour) has tended to be supported by governments across Europe, the case of Turkey has created a political storm. France’s government, for instance, has openly argued that it is not possible such a large ethnically and religious different country into the EU club. If that argument holds, then it would be equally implausible (and thus undesirable) to seek to open up EU labour markets to tens or hundreds of millions of Turks who “cannot” be successfully integrated.

·    The capacity to manage migration is probed constantly. The clearest effects of the pressures created by globalisation are seen in the determination of governments to control their borders. This applies equally to traditional immigration “open” countries as it does to “closed” ones. In some cases the immediate driver tends to be lax controls and implementation of extant immigration policies. For example, many have lost count of the number of UK immigration ministers who have been on the back foot - and in many cases, lost their jobs - as a result of a political row over the efficacy of existing controls. In other cases the drivers are more to do with diminishing public confidence in government’s ability to refresh population growth through immigration using the best available talent. For example, Canada’s long-standing commitment to annual inward immigration of 1 per cent of its population has recently been swamped by arguments about the selection of immigrants and the speed of converting applicants into landed migrants. The control of borders needs to be demonstrated by all governments but often for significantly different reasons.

·    Planning a population equilibrium lies behind immigration, often uncomfortably. With border control also comes the broader task of planning or at least influencing population dynamics over the medium to long term. Few governments are entirely relaxed about this task and indeed many have an appetite to shape outcomes arguably in excess of their capacity to do so. That said, control pressures are mainly about two longer term goals:

Delivering sustainable equilibrium in labour markets, so as to allow fresh immigration to fill unmet demand whilst also ensuring that the human capital profile of the existing population keeps pace with labour market needs. This is a balancing act that many governments struggle with. For instance, by allowing in significant numbers of immigrant plumbers it is likely that training and development for domestic plumbers will be subdued.

Ensuring that the healthiest - and wealthiest - mix between working and dependent populations is created and in line with public expectations about welfare entitlement and public services. The worker/dependent ratio has deteriorated across many developed economies and it is clear that injections of younger immigrant talent can only provide short term fixes to this challenge. Other, complementary strategies include raising the productivity of the labour supply (whether boosted by immigrants or not), greater investment in education and training efforts, structural initiatives to move towards high value-added economies, and, most difficult of all, downward revision of public expectation about public spending.

·    Congestion effects (in schools, housing, healthcare, etc) are a further managerial burden. Not only are governments under pressure to show that borders are under control, they are also struggling to manage the short-term dislocations that immigration has led to in public services and in social cohesion. This has been partly accentuated by large short term movements into communities where allocation of school places and healthcare are already under pressure. But it is also driven by the changing pattern of immigrant settlement. The traditional immigrant “ghetto” model has given way substantially in, for example, the US where the Midwest and prairie states have attracted large numbers of Latin American low skilled workers. In the UK this has also been apparent, with large, unplanned settlement in semi-rural areas and in East Anglia and the north east. In these places, it is not surprising that political concerns have erupted. These are partly about relieving scarcity, and partly about sudden social change. The congestion effects are meanwhile experienced in urban areas already used to past immigration. The climate here is one of frustration and neglect, with widespread feelings of being on the immigration front-line. For example, one inner London borough has effectively turned its back on national government population statistics, using instead to invest faith in the figures generated by local supermarket loyalty schemes!

Cross-cutting challenges
Migration involves a number of important cross-cutting challenges. These involve looking at the phenomenon in terms of both opportunities and threats. A brief discussion of the key challenges (below) shows that: a) the causes and impacts cannot always be easily separated, and b) developing a solid framework for solutions is often as hard as identifying the solutions themselves.

a) Costs and benefits. In most countries the cost and benefits of immigration have shifted over several decades Today, they are often unclear, open to manipulation and thus controversial. For example, the gains to labour market efficiency cannot be easily pinned down unless these are examined in both the short and long term. Also, the gains that flow to particular population sub-groups or social classes may vary considerably. London’s vocal middle class have come accustomed to a cheaply-funded and flexible service sector propped up by mass immigration. It stands in contrast to the poor white class (and some parts of the black and Asian working class) whose prospects have been severely squeezed by recent immigration. The overall aggregate gains are also hard to agree upon. Migration Watch, an anti-immigration pressure group, has claimed that the net gain per capita per annum may only equal the price of a Mars bar. While this may not be accurate, it reveals the lack of consensus about economic benefits alone. It is mainly for this reason that Philippe Legrain has called for a Stern Report on migration.

b) Identity politics. The economic calculus, however fraught, shrinks in comparison with debates about group and national identity. Recent immigration to the UK for instance now creates a completely new identity dynamic. This has been called “hyper-diversity” by Steve Vertovec: no one group comes close to being a majority except in a small handful of places untouched by immigration. This means that black/white models of ethnic relations are now rather redundant. It also means that policies are needed to make the most of the mosaic and to curb tendencies towards separateness and Balkanisation. At the national level, there is considerable appetite to develop a settled understanding of identity that is both ethnically and culturally neutral whilst based around generic civic values.

c) Political pressures. The political salience of immigration has increased in most developed countries in recent years. This is partly in response to the rising levels of immigration to begin with, and also a reflection of the reactive stance of many governments. The central challenge however remains the extent to which these pressures are harnessed to shape strategic policies or merely seen as reasons to keep out immigrants at all costs. Zig Layton-Henry has noted the “zero-immigration mindset” that many politicians have adopted, even though many have presided over progressive immigration policies. Anti-immigrant public sentiment in particular has led to very little room for manoeuvre in France, Austria, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland especially. The elite response all too often has been to follow rather than lead the political crowd. And yet, recent general elections in Australia and Spain have shown that resisting such political pressures can be associated with electoral success.

d) Policy questions. In the past, policy-making questions tended to be tackled in a non-partisan climate. This has eroded considerably and policy matters are now addressed in a divisive and controversial atmosphere. That said, there are three main policy questions that governments face:

-    The degree to which an effective immigration policy is based on simple managerial competence. Immigration, in that sense, is no different from most other public policy challenges, so it may be useful to think about the task in a business-as-usual manner.

-    The use of immigration policies in a way that supports the logic of trade, aid and developments policies. The use of cheap labour in western economies may alleviate poverty elsewhere through remittances but it can also thwart effective development of poor economies.

-    The extent to which immigration’s rationale of economic advancement is attained without threatening social cohesion. This is sometimes thought of as a trade-off, suggesting that immigrants are not just small parcels of human capital but also people with faces, identities and a desire to belong.

Concluding remarks
The idea of managing migration operates at two distinct levels. At one level, it is about understanding how effectively government can pull and influence policy levers to smooth the movement of people who are needed and wanted. This chiefly involves calibrating demand and supply in the labour market, anticipating congestion effects, championing transparency about costs and benefits, and also smoothing the settlement of new groups into existing communities.

It is also operates at a second level, whereby migration is managed to create successful plural societies. These are societies that not so much react to the challenge of migration but rather see it as a normal part of their character. The role of government may not be to lead so heavily on policy matters. Its role is likely instead to be about championing a cosmopolitan ethos that values difference and engenders solidarity at one and the same time. It is hard to do so in practice, not least of all because of the policy trade-offs that everyday issues create. This dimension of managed migration is therefore centred on a shared future that is both attainable and desirable.

Respected elite opinion in the US about a century ago had concluded that the country had inevitably reached its absorptive limits for new immigrants. Past waves of immigrants had been plentiful and future candidates seemed unattractive, it was thought. And the religious and cultural character of Jews and southern Europeans in particular appeared most unappealing. That settled view doubted that the US could have succeeded like no other country in the twentieth century in the main because of - rather than despite - its substantial patterns of immigration.

There is a lesson in this observation. It is that political imagination is likely to be the biggest obstacle of all in addressing immigration challenges. Many developed societies appear unable and unwilling to think of immigration in terms other than representing a cultural and security threat. The political and policy challenges are considerable without doubt. These may or may not be soluble in the long-term. Strong strategic leadership is one obvious pre-requisite of increasing the odds of success. And imagination of a better, shared future is another.

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