I really like your broad framing on 'select and respect'. It feels a useful lens through which to have this discussion, though it won't surprise you that I'd put some of the specific parameters in different places! And it was great to read an academic willing to break cover on the fact that universities are not all the same and should not be treated as such.
Three thoughts I had:
1. Although the average working immigrant may be economically beneficial, a substantial minority are not. Reducing the numbers of these is a win-win and does not involve the trade-off you describe.
2. The one element I felt the piece missed was the crucial element of unfairness that many believe underpin the current regime. I happen to agree with you that we make it too hard for UK citizens to bring their spouses over. But until this month, refugees could bring over their families with no such maintenance requirements - and then be jumped to the front of the social housing queue (see Alice Thomson's very good piece in the Times this week). How can that disparate treatment be fair?
3. I would add a third element, after 'select and respect', which is 'deport'. The inability to automatically deport those who do wrong - whether that is committing a serious crime, or simply breaching the terms of a short-stay visa - hamstrings our ability functioning immigration system. Indeed, a functioning deportation system would mean we could be less harsh at denying tourist visas to young, unattached people from developing countries: the 'flight risk' issue would disappear if we could be confident we could deport those who breached their visa terms without being thwarted by human rights appeals.
Finally, I think our biggest underlying difference is that - as I read it - you see ILR, and citizenship, as rights that should accrue, and it is wrong for us to withhold them. As someone who lived for two and a half years in a foreign country, I always felt strongly that I was a guest in their home, with a duty to respect their culture and ways, and that anything I were to receive from them would have been a privilege at their discretion, not a right.
Thanks Iain - I think having gone through this exercise it does at least set out roughly what the parameters are and hence how we could move them back or forth depending on both our own preferences and those of the public. On 1, understood - but I fear this is where the question about the health and social work visa raises its head. Overall the pattern on 1 has been to higher and higher salaries due to recent policies. 2. I agree, that disparate treatment isn't fair (though has its own reasoning that is not mad) in terms of how it treats British citizens. It would I suppose be partly resolved by giving British citizens those rights rather than taking them from others. On 3. we do need a deportation system that is clear and robust. Right now, it's not the rules but the court interventions that have led to some odd cases. And one thing I hope we can avoid is deporting people who have been in Britain since they were infants but didn't or couldn't get citizenship, even if they commit crimes. We made 'em, we shouldn't make them someone else's problems. On ILR and citizenship. Yes I disagree completely! I think if people move for jobs they are usually moving to build a life here - I would like people to be able to do that. And it's a bloody expensive 'privilege' - it doesn't come easily. Thanks for reading.
"I think liberals are kidding themselves if they think these people are somehow misled or don’t know the real numbers etc."
That people don't know the real numbers is just a solidly documented fact. But it is a completely different question whether anything could be done about this; and again a different question whether it would make any difference anyway.
Immigration concerns are widely viewed as having swung the Brexit referendum. But look at where the net migration curve was in 2016: at roughly the level which you estimate would be a sustainable level now (after a further decade of declining living standards).
This discussion I fear will just feed simplified power driven social/political polarisation. It continues the use of “migration” as diversion, presenting as cause of broad and deep dissatisfaction with current situation of average citizen. Cost of living, availability of decent paying jobs, unaffordable housing, healthy affordable food, environmental and community breakdown are certainly not materially due to migration. While some are of the suggestions may make sense, without acknowledgement of how migration actually works and consideration of probable knock-on impacts single policies are likely to only situation worse, as the cause of dissatisfaction is much deeper. Until our politicians grow up, face realities of migration ( great assessable work by Hein den Haas
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455478/how-migration-really-works-by-haas-hein-de/9780241998779) and facilitate an open, non-ideological (political tribe) fact based discussion with the public as to what it wants/needs/values with respect to migration and type of society it wants, we allow politicans to use migration as scapegoated distraction. We as citizens are complicit if we allow ourselves to be herded down this path.
Our government’s crackdown on international students has not just been limited to “visa mills”. Permit cuts have been pretty drastic and have reduced their numbers across the sector, creating grave financial problems for almost all of our universities. It’s grim right now.
Our immigration policy should be set with the following considerations uppermost:
1. Headline GDP is irrelevant
2. GDP per capita matters somewhat
3. GNI per capita matters very much indeed
4. Democratic consent is more important than all of the above
There is a route to a rational, 'grammar school of the world' (h/t Neil O'Brien MP) immigration policy for the UK, which would be built around point 3 and be more selective than Ben's proposal. However, with voters having been promised such a policy by politicians for at least 20 years then saddled with mass, low-waged migration instead, the need to respect democracy requires us to follow a restrictionist policy for at least a decade first, partly to let the labour and housing markets rebalance somewhat in favour of the settled population but mainly to teach Westminster and Whitehall to obey the demos and rebuild a relationship with the rubes.
Mark I'm not entirely in agreement that we have in fact been saddled with 'low-waged' migration, particularly since Brexit. It really is quite hard to come here without being on a high salary. But I sense we will be at different points on this spectrum and thanks for reading in any case.
I'm including the student/Deliveroo visa holders, the dinghy passengers and the extended families - some of them unrelated by law or blood - that accompany or follow those who come by other means, not least the Boriswave 'health and social care' visa holders, an alarming proportion of whom never actually worked in those sectors.
I don't think a big % of people are more pro immigration than I, having migrated to Britain under freedom of movement in the days before everyone went stupid and then gone on to naturalise.
However it annoys me to hear "we made" criminals that have lived in Britain as non citizens from birth and i think phrases like this fan the flames of anti elite sentiment. How is it that a person is so much more the product of Britain than of their own (often insular) communities? This is all the more galling because the immigration system places no emphasis on assimilation and neither do public services.
Assimilation, not mere integration, should be a core pillar of the immigration system if the native population is to buy into it. If you accept this as a guideline, then questions of who should be allowed to stay become a little easier to answer. You'd favour occupations that are more dominated by British-born folks, professional occupations, etc. You'd purposely avoid one or two sectors relying on immigrant labour. You might even issue visas by region, hell even ward level. You'd test for very advanced levels of English, hell you'd probably give people the 11-plus.
Assimilation rather than integration would mean there would be, to use a relatively trivial example, no Chinese or Indian restaurants, indeed no suppliers of "foreign" food at all. Is that really what you want?
Does every part of the world that eats pizza or sushi have a sizeable italian or japanese immigrant population? Do you watch French films because of your French immigrant neighbours? Do we know about Picasso because Spanish immigrants brought his masterpieces to the UK? Do anime weebs watch manhwa because of korean immigration? Put differently, are italians or japanese people somehow genetically wired to make certain foods that others can't pick up from a recipe or video? Culture spreads much more readily online today than by physical presence.
But I'm not sure this angle is even the most important. Assimilation simply means "you can't be insular, you can't need accomodations"
Also, do you think anyone concerned by a loss of local identity or income and perhaps under the influence of bad actors will ever genuinely go, "i was going to be a raging racist but damn i like biryani so much."
Hi Ben. As someone who has had a student visa, a graduate visa (shock horror, I’ve been a drop in the infamous Boris Wave), a skilled worker visa, now works in a struggling department in academia, and has a British partner who works with asylum seekers, your thoughtful piece touched on many issues which impact me deeply. I’m also a political realist who is cognisant that any government needs to address public concerns about migration and that it is not far-right to ask of us - immigrants - questions about integration and contribution. Thanks for the nuance and detail of your piece; the simplicity of the debate is what frustrates me about the current media landscape. I wish some of these points - NHS fees, no recourse to public funds, trade-offs, draconian rules for Brits who fall in love with a foreigner - would also come up in the public debate alongside the ‘small boat crisis’. And I wouldn’t hold my breath for KS coming up with a narrative, like some avant-garde artistic movements he seems intent on abolishing it.
One paradox that I wanted to raise: the migration system and the public seem to favour so-called ‘high skilled’ migrants (which benefits me personally), yet the economy seems to need above all ‘low-skilled’ ones (hate the term). In other words, if British jobs are being taken by foreigners, it’s probably by me and not by someone working in care. That seems to me the unsquarable circle at the heart of the matter.
I broadly agree with your points, especially on the need for respect for migrants themselves and strongly agree that the spousal salary threshold is a moral issue. However I think the numbers presented substantially understate how extraordinarily high UK immigration fees are.
This seems unrepresentative. UK skilled visa fees are more usually 260% higher than the cost of next most expensive country, not just 45%. (Before PPP adjustments, nominal median wages in the US are 28% higher than in the UK.)
The OA1 term used in the report is a typo. The temporary worker visa for individuals of extraordinary ability is the O-1A. (I have fairly extensive personal experience with these US visa categories, having held H-1B, O-1A, and EB-1A visas before naturalizing.)
2. The proposed £1,000 (or even total!) reduction in the costs of settlement from £3,000 to £2,000 would be welcome but is only a small fraction of the total fees faced by spousal immigrants. Oxford's Migration Observatory calculator places the cost at £13,143 for the 5 year family route without dependants. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/qa-immigration-fees-in-the-uk/
This is £1,600 higher than the cost for skilled workers who at least made the choice to move to the UK on economic grounds.
The income restriction on spousal immigration is morally wrong, but even those of us fortunate enough to have done well for ourselves abroad are actively discouraged from moving back to the UK and contributing into the system that educated us. Having met my partner while working abroad I find it all utterly alienating.
My parents are getting older and we had thought about moving to the UK so our (British citizen!) kid could spend more time with his grandparents. But I even if I were prepared to pay the absurd £13,000 'you married a foreigner' fine, I don't want to bring up my child in a country that seeks to exploit us in that way.
Thanks for this, it clarified a paradox for me, which I hadn't quite put my finger on. Large immigrant population not much concern, large change large concern, even amongst immigrants themselves. Experience is the enemy of prejudice.
I really like your broad framing on 'select and respect'. It feels a useful lens through which to have this discussion, though it won't surprise you that I'd put some of the specific parameters in different places! And it was great to read an academic willing to break cover on the fact that universities are not all the same and should not be treated as such.
Three thoughts I had:
1. Although the average working immigrant may be economically beneficial, a substantial minority are not. Reducing the numbers of these is a win-win and does not involve the trade-off you describe.
2. The one element I felt the piece missed was the crucial element of unfairness that many believe underpin the current regime. I happen to agree with you that we make it too hard for UK citizens to bring their spouses over. But until this month, refugees could bring over their families with no such maintenance requirements - and then be jumped to the front of the social housing queue (see Alice Thomson's very good piece in the Times this week). How can that disparate treatment be fair?
3. I would add a third element, after 'select and respect', which is 'deport'. The inability to automatically deport those who do wrong - whether that is committing a serious crime, or simply breaching the terms of a short-stay visa - hamstrings our ability functioning immigration system. Indeed, a functioning deportation system would mean we could be less harsh at denying tourist visas to young, unattached people from developing countries: the 'flight risk' issue would disappear if we could be confident we could deport those who breached their visa terms without being thwarted by human rights appeals.
Finally, I think our biggest underlying difference is that - as I read it - you see ILR, and citizenship, as rights that should accrue, and it is wrong for us to withhold them. As someone who lived for two and a half years in a foreign country, I always felt strongly that I was a guest in their home, with a duty to respect their culture and ways, and that anything I were to receive from them would have been a privilege at their discretion, not a right.
Thanks Iain - I think having gone through this exercise it does at least set out roughly what the parameters are and hence how we could move them back or forth depending on both our own preferences and those of the public. On 1, understood - but I fear this is where the question about the health and social work visa raises its head. Overall the pattern on 1 has been to higher and higher salaries due to recent policies. 2. I agree, that disparate treatment isn't fair (though has its own reasoning that is not mad) in terms of how it treats British citizens. It would I suppose be partly resolved by giving British citizens those rights rather than taking them from others. On 3. we do need a deportation system that is clear and robust. Right now, it's not the rules but the court interventions that have led to some odd cases. And one thing I hope we can avoid is deporting people who have been in Britain since they were infants but didn't or couldn't get citizenship, even if they commit crimes. We made 'em, we shouldn't make them someone else's problems. On ILR and citizenship. Yes I disagree completely! I think if people move for jobs they are usually moving to build a life here - I would like people to be able to do that. And it's a bloody expensive 'privilege' - it doesn't come easily. Thanks for reading.
"I think liberals are kidding themselves if they think these people are somehow misled or don’t know the real numbers etc."
That people don't know the real numbers is just a solidly documented fact. But it is a completely different question whether anything could be done about this; and again a different question whether it would make any difference anyway.
Immigration concerns are widely viewed as having swung the Brexit referendum. But look at where the net migration curve was in 2016: at roughly the level which you estimate would be a sustainable level now (after a further decade of declining living standards).
This discussion I fear will just feed simplified power driven social/political polarisation. It continues the use of “migration” as diversion, presenting as cause of broad and deep dissatisfaction with current situation of average citizen. Cost of living, availability of decent paying jobs, unaffordable housing, healthy affordable food, environmental and community breakdown are certainly not materially due to migration. While some are of the suggestions may make sense, without acknowledgement of how migration actually works and consideration of probable knock-on impacts single policies are likely to only situation worse, as the cause of dissatisfaction is much deeper. Until our politicians grow up, face realities of migration ( great assessable work by Hein den Haas
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455478/how-migration-really-works-by-haas-hein-de/9780241998779) and facilitate an open, non-ideological (political tribe) fact based discussion with the public as to what it wants/needs/values with respect to migration and type of society it wants, we allow politicans to use migration as scapegoated distraction. We as citizens are complicit if we allow ourselves to be herded down this path.
Good piece - one note though, from a Canadian.
Our government’s crackdown on international students has not just been limited to “visa mills”. Permit cuts have been pretty drastic and have reduced their numbers across the sector, creating grave financial problems for almost all of our universities. It’s grim right now.
Our immigration policy should be set with the following considerations uppermost:
1. Headline GDP is irrelevant
2. GDP per capita matters somewhat
3. GNI per capita matters very much indeed
4. Democratic consent is more important than all of the above
There is a route to a rational, 'grammar school of the world' (h/t Neil O'Brien MP) immigration policy for the UK, which would be built around point 3 and be more selective than Ben's proposal. However, with voters having been promised such a policy by politicians for at least 20 years then saddled with mass, low-waged migration instead, the need to respect democracy requires us to follow a restrictionist policy for at least a decade first, partly to let the labour and housing markets rebalance somewhat in favour of the settled population but mainly to teach Westminster and Whitehall to obey the demos and rebuild a relationship with the rubes.
Mark I'm not entirely in agreement that we have in fact been saddled with 'low-waged' migration, particularly since Brexit. It really is quite hard to come here without being on a high salary. But I sense we will be at different points on this spectrum and thanks for reading in any case.
I'm including the student/Deliveroo visa holders, the dinghy passengers and the extended families - some of them unrelated by law or blood - that accompany or follow those who come by other means, not least the Boriswave 'health and social care' visa holders, an alarming proportion of whom never actually worked in those sectors.
I don't think a big % of people are more pro immigration than I, having migrated to Britain under freedom of movement in the days before everyone went stupid and then gone on to naturalise.
However it annoys me to hear "we made" criminals that have lived in Britain as non citizens from birth and i think phrases like this fan the flames of anti elite sentiment. How is it that a person is so much more the product of Britain than of their own (often insular) communities? This is all the more galling because the immigration system places no emphasis on assimilation and neither do public services.
Assimilation, not mere integration, should be a core pillar of the immigration system if the native population is to buy into it. If you accept this as a guideline, then questions of who should be allowed to stay become a little easier to answer. You'd favour occupations that are more dominated by British-born folks, professional occupations, etc. You'd purposely avoid one or two sectors relying on immigrant labour. You might even issue visas by region, hell even ward level. You'd test for very advanced levels of English, hell you'd probably give people the 11-plus.
Assimilation rather than integration would mean there would be, to use a relatively trivial example, no Chinese or Indian restaurants, indeed no suppliers of "foreign" food at all. Is that really what you want?
Does every part of the world that eats pizza or sushi have a sizeable italian or japanese immigrant population? Do you watch French films because of your French immigrant neighbours? Do we know about Picasso because Spanish immigrants brought his masterpieces to the UK? Do anime weebs watch manhwa because of korean immigration? Put differently, are italians or japanese people somehow genetically wired to make certain foods that others can't pick up from a recipe or video? Culture spreads much more readily online today than by physical presence.
But I'm not sure this angle is even the most important. Assimilation simply means "you can't be insular, you can't need accomodations"
Also, do you think anyone concerned by a loss of local identity or income and perhaps under the influence of bad actors will ever genuinely go, "i was going to be a raging racist but damn i like biryani so much."
Congratulations on proving my point
Thanks, just need to sort out a sabbatical so that I can work through this...
Hi Ben. As someone who has had a student visa, a graduate visa (shock horror, I’ve been a drop in the infamous Boris Wave), a skilled worker visa, now works in a struggling department in academia, and has a British partner who works with asylum seekers, your thoughtful piece touched on many issues which impact me deeply. I’m also a political realist who is cognisant that any government needs to address public concerns about migration and that it is not far-right to ask of us - immigrants - questions about integration and contribution. Thanks for the nuance and detail of your piece; the simplicity of the debate is what frustrates me about the current media landscape. I wish some of these points - NHS fees, no recourse to public funds, trade-offs, draconian rules for Brits who fall in love with a foreigner - would also come up in the public debate alongside the ‘small boat crisis’. And I wouldn’t hold my breath for KS coming up with a narrative, like some avant-garde artistic movements he seems intent on abolishing it.
One paradox that I wanted to raise: the migration system and the public seem to favour so-called ‘high skilled’ migrants (which benefits me personally), yet the economy seems to need above all ‘low-skilled’ ones (hate the term). In other words, if British jobs are being taken by foreigners, it’s probably by me and not by someone working in care. That seems to me the unsquarable circle at the heart of the matter.
Agree “simplicity” of debate is platform of our politicians, with priority being their power. Do check out Hein den Haas.
I broadly agree with your points, especially on the need for respect for migrants themselves and strongly agree that the spousal salary threshold is a moral issue. However I think the numbers presented substantially understate how extraordinarily high UK immigration fees are.
1. Figure 1 uses costs for US H-1B that includes a $4,500 charge payable only by "petitioners who employ 50 or more individuals in the United States if more than 50 percent of those individuals are in H-1B or L-1 nonimmigrant status." https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-information-resources/fees/fees-visa-services.html
This seems unrepresentative. UK skilled visa fees are more usually 260% higher than the cost of next most expensive country, not just 45%. (Before PPP adjustments, nominal median wages in the US are 28% higher than in the UK.)
The OA1 term used in the report is a typo. The temporary worker visa for individuals of extraordinary ability is the O-1A. (I have fairly extensive personal experience with these US visa categories, having held H-1B, O-1A, and EB-1A visas before naturalizing.)
2. The proposed £1,000 (or even total!) reduction in the costs of settlement from £3,000 to £2,000 would be welcome but is only a small fraction of the total fees faced by spousal immigrants. Oxford's Migration Observatory calculator places the cost at £13,143 for the 5 year family route without dependants. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/qa-immigration-fees-in-the-uk/
This is £1,600 higher than the cost for skilled workers who at least made the choice to move to the UK on economic grounds.
The income restriction on spousal immigration is morally wrong, but even those of us fortunate enough to have done well for ourselves abroad are actively discouraged from moving back to the UK and contributing into the system that educated us. Having met my partner while working abroad I find it all utterly alienating.
My parents are getting older and we had thought about moving to the UK so our (British citizen!) kid could spend more time with his grandparents. But I even if I were prepared to pay the absurd £13,000 'you married a foreigner' fine, I don't want to bring up my child in a country that seeks to exploit us in that way.
Thanks for this, it clarified a paradox for me, which I hadn't quite put my finger on. Large immigrant population not much concern, large change large concern, even amongst immigrants themselves. Experience is the enemy of prejudice.