Arguing migration during the general election campaign:How will the issues pan out?
The opening shots for GE2010 seem to have come from the Balanced Migration Group – the cross party parliamentary set-up formed to advance the position of MigrationWatch UK. Its “Declaration on Population” proclaims that “70 million is too many”, thereby setting the parameters for a discussion destined to generate more heat than light.
But by reading such statements alongside the positions emerging from the political parties, and intuiting the broad shape of the mood of the voting public, it should be possible to get some sense of the way immigration will be discussed during the election campaign, and the options that might be available to the proponents of rights for migrants and refugees.
It seems that old anxieties about ‘out of control’ refugee movements have subsided in recent years, to be replaced by more cosmic worries about ‘change’ being imposed on the British people, with no one consulting them about it. This more cerebral, post-modern approach to the issue is paving the way for anti-immigrant sentiments which no one is supposed to feel guilty about. It provides opportunities for advocates of liberal immigration policies to be characterised as ‘elitists’, working with the grain of an unfeeling globalisation, and turning its back on the people who actually have to live with this folly.
The dangers implicit in the emergence of this current should not be underestimated. To date middle-of-the-road public opinion has been restrained from explicit movement in the direction of overt anti-immigrationism by the feeling that its spokespeople, the sort of vulgar oiks who wear shell-suits and who speak too loudly when addressing foreigners and black people, are too far beyond the pale.
Expect this to change. A prolonged period of economic downturn and restrictions on personal income will erode past enthusiasm for global cafe culture and the rationalisation that, “well, they do seem to be willing to do the jobs we don’t want to do.” Larger segments of the population, currently held in check by a residual commitment to liberal social attitudes, can be expected drift rightwards on this issue, and this will be facilitated by arguments which make concern for the ‘British worker’, and natural limits to population densities as their special appeal.
This is a drift that has to be checked, and it is falling to those civil society organisations which are been immersed in the concrete realities of migrant and refugee life over the course of the past decade to come up with the strategies that will do this job. But what can be done?
Firstly, the benefits which the anti-immigrant currents get from the sheer abstraction of current arguments, dealing with figures and postulations about trends, etc, has to be stripped from them. The claim that anything in particular – good, bad or indifferent – can be deducted from a UK population sized 70 million in itself is nonsense. The proposition should be got into this discussion that the levels of welfare, prosperity and general quality of life is likely to be very high in a country the size of the UK with a population of 70 million, living and working in a dynamic economy which is providing good and services to a global community which tackling the alleviation of poverty, resolving longstanding wars and conflict, and meeting all the dangerous challenges of climate change.
Contrast this with what life would look like in a Britain operating sort of policies designed to deliberately constrain the numbers people across its frontiers in order to maintain population levels at the 60 million mark. The only policy context in which this target is likely to be met is one marked by a long period of low growth, wage restraint, higher levels of unemployment, and savage reductions in the level of public spending on education, housing, health and welfare. This is effectively the programme of the Balanced Migration Group.
Turning to what we can anticipate the mainstream parties will be arguing during the election campaign, the picture seems to be panning out as follows:
Labour its case on the basis of what it regards as its ‘achievements’ over the last thirteen years: Asylum figures down, numbers removed, creation of UKBA as s single border force, the Points Based System, fines on people employing undocumented migrants, ID cards, and as a sop to its liberal wing, ratification of the Convention Against Trafficking.
It will promise a future made up of electronic border controls, and expanded detention estate, an ‘earned’ route to citizenship, a migration impacts funds generated from a tax on third country immigrants, and local immigration partnerships tasked to maintain surveillance over migrant communities.
Its problem, which increasingly seems insurmountable, is that these policies have failed to make any sort of positive impact on the thinking of voters. The British public today are showing themselves to be the least tolerant of migrants in any of the larger European countries, or the USA or Canada (Transatlantic Trends Survey, December 2009). It appears to have no cards up its sleeve that would turn this situation around. The charge against Labour is therefore that they have patently failed to produce the policies that would help sustain a progressive majority in support of broadly liberal immigration policies. On the contrary, its programme increasing looks like a desperate flounder in a direction which undermines the hope that this progressive majority will ever be created.
The Conservatives, currently the shoo-in favourites to win the election, have offered only the vaguest sketch of their plans for government. It differs from Labour on only two commitments. The first of these is the promise to supplement migrant admission policies with an annual quota on numbers which will be calculated on the based on “the wider effects on society and the provision of public services.” The second is the promise to reconfigure UKBA as a Border Police Force.
Rather than strength, the annual quota promise could well turn out to be the Achilles heel of the operation. It satisfies no one and yet provokes everyone to contortions of bafflement as to what it might mean.
The Balanced Migration people say that the quota needs to be based on the figure needed to contain population growth – by their calculations around 40,000 a year. This will surely be too extreme for the Tories. In the context of free movement for EU nationals it is unenforceable. The imposition of limits can only be placed on third country nationals, who currently are admitted under Tiers 1 and 2 of the PBS. Fine, except these are the very group of migrants for whom there is a proven need, based on the applications of sponsoring employers and the research of the economic gurus working out of the Migration Advisory Committee. To attempt to achieve quotas by eliminating the migration of the most skilled sections of the workforce will risk major confrontations with important stakeholders amongst employers and regional economic planners.
The Liberal Democrats don’t summarise their position on migration on their website, as do the other two parties, but a policy briefing dated October 2009 sets out their most recent thinking. They call for the creation of a ‘National Border Force’ but offer no real clues as to how it would differ from either the existing UKBA or the Tory’s plans for a Border Police Force.
But there is some novel thinking in their advocacy of a ‘regional strand’ to the PBS. In their words, “This would provide a hard-headed assessment of the needs of different regions and parts of the economy…”.
This is an interesting proposal that we should do a lot more think around. The current tenor of the migration impact debate is very drab, with little being offered up in the way of concrete evidence in support of one proposal as against another. A glimmer of what the discussion might look like came from the publication of the Centre for Cities report, Accession to Recession, published in March 2009.
For the first time the report dealt with migration impacts within the concrete contexts of regional economies and urban communities – in this case, Bristol and Hull – and sketched out a better sense of what the real impacts agenda might be. Needless to say it led the discussion away from a priori assumptions about congestion effects and resource competition and into a more dynamic consideration of the contribution different types of migration made to the structure of local economies and it potential for contributing towards growth and renewal. This is what we should be insisting the politicians address in the context of this election campaign.
So, what are the options for people looking for opportunities to argue the progressive case on immigration during the course of the election campaign? The rules for this kind of work are intricate and involved as always require an assessment on how a particular proposal will play in a real life set of circumstances. These include the rule that you should avoid demand that x does y in circumstances where circumstances where y is clearly unpopular and the candidate will find it very easy to reject the suggestion and leave you look isolated and bereft of any degree of popular support.
What we will be doing, each from the tradition of our particular areas of work, is making a solid case for positive policies which both contribute to the public welfare of local communities and provide adequate protection for the rights of the migrants we are working with.
But we will also be laying the basis for the work we will be doing under a new government, whoever that will be. For this we need to inject a sense of direction into public discussion on immigration policy, rather than a specific set of demands. This direction should be expressed in terms which relate to the manifesto and policy commitments of the significant players in the election stakes, in a way that allows them to see the advantages they would get for it in the policies they want to pursue.
Doing down the sort of abstraction and populist rhetoric which we can expect to see from the anti-immigration forces is will be a high order priority for us all during the campaign. In its place we should find popular and local ways of expressing the need for more and better information about the nature of the way we live our lives today, and how this involves the lives of migrants. We should insist that it is only with information and evidence of this quality will we really lay the foundation for policies for which a plausible case can be made that they really do represent the best interests of a clear majority of the people, and where the leaders of local communities can locate their interests and take ownership of the issues they want to campaign on.
In future GE2010 blogs I’ll be trying tie some of these ideas down to what our campaign interventions might look like in different parts of the country. Hang on for more…..