Main Edition
US
FR
August 30, 2024 - 4:10pm
For anyone interested in policy, this has so far been a very frustrating Conservative leadership contest. Half the candidates are making a point, even taking pride, in saying nothing at all about how they’d govern; when the other half do make suggestions, they’re often not very good.
Immigration is a case in point. In a speech on Thursday, Tom Tugendhat announced that if he became prime minister he would introduce a binding annual cap for net immigration of 100,000 people a year. This follows Robert Jenrick’s promise of a lower cap — and an annual debate in Parliament to set it.
On one level, this sort of thing is understandable: immigration was perhaps the single biggest policy failure of the last period of Tory government. In particular, Boris Johnson’s decision to use his post-Brexit freedoms to massively liberalise the system was an own goal of historic proportions.
A hard cap also has the advantages of being simple, both to communicate and to legislate for. But such a policy is extremely unlikely to deliver the promised results, as it does nothing to directly tackle the various ways in which parts of the British economy are dependent on imported labour. As a result, the likely consequence of introducing a hard cap with no warning would be that every vested interest would start screaming at the same time.
That would be a very difficult thing for any government to face down, and both universities and employers know it. As a result, they would be more likely to play chicken with ministers than take the Conservatives at their word and begin voluntarily preparing for a difficult adjustment.
Alternatively, the headline cap could remain in place but become an administrative fiction. Consider the way that Conservative ministers would boast about historically low unemployment rates, without accounting for the fact that we now have lots of categories of person (collectively known as the “economically inactive”) which are no longer counted in the unemployment figures.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“Actually reducing immigration sustainably requires thinking hard about the deep structural problems within the British economy.”
Dealing with the many deep structural problems we have, all of which have excessive migration as a significant contributory cause? What a ridiculous idea! far better to ignore them all and just call them the snake oil of populism.
This seems to me to be the key point:
‘immigration was perhaps the single biggest policy failure of the last period of Tory government. In particular, Boris Johnson’s decision to use his post-Brexit freedoms to massively liberalise the system was an own goal of historic proportions.’
We had a government that did not want to reduce migration. That’s the issue – in his defence Sunak was simply left holding a timebomb. At the very least Sunak did start to face down some of the vested interests, particularly on student dependent visas. He probably deserved more credit than he got for that.
I wish that I could think of a better term, but what we are talking about here really is Treasury Orthodoxy. Why bother going to the expense and bother of training up young home-grown workers when one can just go and import labour and taxpayers fully trained at someone else’s expense. Why bother with sustainability and the longer-term when you can always get an immigration sugar rush. I do believe that the Conservatives (and probably Labour) would ideally want lower migration but they have no will to find a route to get there and certainly no desire for what it would involve in economic loss. Be in no doubt that the current ultra high immigration is not causing prosperity, rather it is simply keeping the welfare show trundling along.
All this of course is leaving our domestic young in a rotten position facing never-ending labour arbitrage, a baked in housing shortfall and being seen as debt cows to service inflated universities and the triple lock pension for property millionaires.
What I think too often is missed is that the system, awful as it is is probably sustainable. There are enough vested interests – employers, pensioners, universities, and so on that are actually quite happy with the sugar rush approach to the economy and migration. Never mind a sacrifice like ending the triple lock, Starmer with a 170+ majority apparently can barely take away a ‘fuel payment’ from one of the best-off sections of society without them and their mates in charity sector and media getting the hump.
Ultra high migration is here for the long-haul.
Don’t think this is fair to Mr. Hill. His point is not that we shouldn’t try to bring down immigration or even have a cap, it’s that imposing without thinking it through will fail because either businesses or universities (particularly universities) will say we’re going bust without immigration or even without that the civil service will undermine the cap. This is surely very likely given the ideology and incentives. Therefore it does require thinking about and Hill is saying he wants to hear about how the candidates will address these challenges. But they don’t say.
Don’t you think it’s worth hearing how the candidates seeking to impose a cap will stop universities from going bust? Or if they want to let them go bust, what do you do with the institutions? Where the local economy depends on all the students of the university (many) what do you do to keep the local economy afloat?
We need answers to these questions. Someone who answered these questions would demonstrate they were actually serious about cutting immigration. So I definitely want to hear.
Diatribe over. Are you convinced?
The comment was satirical.
The university sector is a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions. Large numbers of international students are currently coming in for a year’s MA, bringing all their dependents with them – thanks Boris – then disappearing into the cash-in-hand economy for ever, rather than returning home (or paying taxes). I know because I teach lots of them – some can barely speak English. We really don’t need a university sector with such degraded standards. Arguments about patriotism & unity & safety & culture & defense & history aside, there have been some interesting studies recently revealing how migration within Europe is a net fiscal benefit to European countries, but migration from certain countries (Somalia, Syria & Afghanistan for example) is a net drain. Ie certain nationalities are statistically unlikely to work in our care homes looking after the rhetorical lonely English grandma who always seems to get wheeled out in defense of mass immigration. And even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to communicate with her. (If you don’t need to speak English to study an MA in English Literature, why would you need to to work in the care sector?) On the contrary, they live in social housing, claim benefits, use the NHS & public education system & then presumably will add to the number of people in the care home system, rather than the workforce tasked to care. So we can argue all day about morality & duty & what kind of ideal we’d like the country to aspire to be – all the nebulous stuff – but can we at least start being honest about the practicalities of the situation?
No fundamentally you being infantile in your level of engagement by blaming net migration for all our problems. It’s the other way round. Our structural problems create a reliance on more migration than most of us think sensible. Let’s sort the structural problems.
The real difficultly is too many numpties on the Right can’t engage beyond the prejudice. That is the real fundamental problem. Lazy, half baked engagement where the gripes are amplified and any real practical thought suppressed.
Are you really this stupid naturally or do you have to work hard at it?
You certainly keep demonstrating why we have a conceptual problem.
it’s a totally discredited ideology JW, the question is (yet again) why are those on the left so desperate to defend it? Go on JW, tell us the real reason…
There are a number of complex interrelationships here, where in some cases immigration is both the problem and the solution.
A good analogy for immigration is salt – we die if we don’t have any and we die if we have too much. We have had too much net migration for far too long and there is no chance of as you rightly say “Let’s sort the structural problems” whilst keeping net migration at these excessive levels. Note that I said “all of which have excessive migration as a significant contributory cause” hence part of any solution must be to cut down on the excess, whilst also dealing with the impact of past excess sensibly.
Before we can tackle any problem we need to admit we have a problem. Starmer is like an alcoholic who won’t admit he has a problem (he is ideologically opposed to admitting the real problem, so he uses simplistic obfuscations like far right and snake oil of populism to avoid having to even acknowledge the real problem). The Tories ignored it too and the machinations we are now seeing in the leadership contest are pretty fake as they are just a reaction to the number of Tory voters who voted Reform.
Once we admit we have a problem, next we need to understand the problem properly. That must be done through sound analytical principles and practices and not ideology and be from the perspective of the structural problem itself so we look at all the causes, not just just one of the most obvious and significant. Then we stand a chance of actually fixing the real structural problem, which will involve tackling all the causes, one of which will be, in the case of all the structural problems (Housing, healthcare, education, economically inactive numbers, social cohesion and falling GDP per capita which have complex interrelationships between each other) excessive net migration. So to come back to my analogy, when the doctor tells you you have heart disease, he / she will tell you you need to cut down on lots of things, including salt and increase lots of other things like exercise. If excessive salt intake is a big part of the cause of your disease, then not cutting back drastically will only make your disease worse no matter what else you do. Equally eliminating salt from your diet completely will still kill you.
Now I have explained all that do you want to withdraw your fundamentally infantile comment?
You can make any and every point you like about the “various ways in which parts of the British economy are dependent on imported labour”, but to be flatly, completely brutal that all is an irrelevance. The comparison in effect is one saying that because of the gaping holes in native demographics, the economy is like an inverted version of the jenga tower game – if you stop adding more and more blocks of imported labour, you risk collapsing the tower.
My takeaway is rather different: if our economy has this inherent instability in-built, the only sane thing to do, is stop immediately and provoke a smaller collapse now rather than keep building the tower until a much bigger collapse later. You cannot play a different game until you stop playing this one. Translating that, the only thing which makes any sense at all is a near hard-stop on all inward migration for a few years, once Labour is out. Because it is clear that Labour will not do anything remotely like this, which means by the time their five years are up, the UK migrant population will have churned (inward/outward migration) by yet another 3% of the total (if the last five years are anything to go by), so by then something like every 1 in 13 to 14 people in the UK will have arrived within the previous twelve years. And that’s even not counting migration since 2010. Any country which allows this to happen is not a country – it’s a global dormitory-town, where people there have no loyalty or affection for the country, it’s just somewhere to live, somewhere to earn a better living, something like a global version of Crawley.
This basically means, time’s up on the migration game – it’s a hard stop or you may as well not bother calling the UK a state. Will anyone in our political class be willing to bite this bullet?
Well argued position. The transition would not be that painful with the right automation investment incentives and tax policies to encourage work (9.4m working age non-workers). Robotics is ready to hit prime time. Better that then build a bigger ponzi scheme.
Stopping anything “immediately” in a country of 60 million will cause instability of your Jenga tower. A “smaller collapse” as you put it will result in pensioners dying lonely without care and an NHS crisis. All for some ideal about what our country means. Whether people have affection or loyalty to a country depends on whether they are warmly welcomed or simply used for convenience.
We are of course not going to agree on the trajectories or consequences of UK inward migration, but I make a few points for debate. The UK population is in fact 67 million, not 60 million, that extra 7 million having arrived since 2003. By 2030 the UK population is projected at 70 million, pretty much all of that being inward migration. That speed of population increase is totally unprecedented and has very obvious very big detrimental consequences, periodic ethno-sectarian terror being the least of it. Which of course the leaderships of the main parties are too craven to discuss directly, instead they all fall back to this stupid dance of words picked from an alternate universe of euphemisms. ‘Warmly welcomed’ in this context is meaningless, a complete non sequitur because from my perspective ‘some ideal about what our country means’ has a very direct meaning for me, it means: if the country comes under attack like for example Ukraine has, will you stay and fight or will you cut and run because you have no real history with the country you are in? I won’t even bother with the point about pensioners dying lonely because such a debate would only be fit for idiots or dissemblers.
PK let’s put aside your view on your Country because that’s a more nebulous concept more difficult to reach consensus upon. Let’s focus on the practicalities of reducing net legal migration – which I think the majority would welcome. Your suggestion we pull the plug and wait for the ‘market’ adjustments that follow might have some theoretical medium term attraction but it would behold any politician looking to be elected to be honest about the shocks that would occur and how best those would be mitigated in the short term at least. So your contention doesn’t really get beyond the infantile stage because it either doesn’t understand what the shocks would be or doesn’t care on ‘I’ll be alright Jack’ basis. Wait until you’ve had to pack in work to look after Mum who needs care that’s ceased could be one consequence. There’s no ‘market’ solution coming to help you then.
The Author actually makes some sensible, practical suggestions about how we go about this. He alludes he’s deeply frustrated the Tories/Right ducked this sort of approach for 14yrs. Your level of engagement will just perpetuate the problem because it half engages with the challenge. You’re not alone obviously.
No, I’m with PK on this one. The author cites ‘parts of the British economy’ as ‘dependent on imported labour’ but then goes on to discuss the university sector which is a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions. Large numbers of international students are currently coming in for a year’s MA, bringing all their dependents with them – thanks Boris – then disappearing into the cash-in-hand economy for ever, rather than returning home (or paying taxes). I know because I teach lots of them – some can barely speak English. We really don’t need a university sector with such degraded standards.
Arguments about patriotism & unity & safety & culture & defense & history aside, there have been some interesting studies recently revealing how migration within Europe is a net fiscal benefit to European countries, but migration from certain countries (Somalia, Syria & Afghanistan for example) is a net drain. Ie certain nationalities are statistically unlikely to work in care homes looking after your rhetorical lonely English grandma. (And even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to communicate with her) On the contrary, they live in social housing, claim benefits, use the NHS & public education system & then presumably will add to the number of people in the care home system, rather than the workforce tasked to care.
So we can argue all day about morality & duty & what kind of ideal we’d like the country to aspire to be – all the nebulous stuff – but can we at least start being honest about the practicalities of the situation?
Logical comments. I cannot understand why an international student, which generally is of a younger age cohort, has dependants. Who are these dependants? I presume we’re not talking about young children, but parents or other older close relatives. Surely a student is more likely to be dependant on parents, financially speaking.
This appears like an obvious abuse of the Uk’s lax immigration system. And who is doing the checking of these international student applications to third-rate universities. Oh, let me guess!
I also teach international students at a lower tariff university and, yes, they are primarily here for work reasons/as part of a strategy for longer-term migration (I know because some are honest about it with me and/or they are obsessed with their postgraduate visas – you probably have the experience I and many other academics have of struggling to get grades to boards on time. The gap between the board sitting and the visa deadline is a few days – causes endless problems). I agree their English is terrible (supposed to have IELTS 6.5 but I suspect there’s some dodgy stuff going on). I’m heartily sick of it all and seriously considering jacking it all in and taking early retirement and supplementing my income stacking shelves in Lidl. Honestly, I’d feel happier doing that. I feel like I’m part of some dirty, big, money-making racket.
The public did not ask for mass immigration, the policy was hidden from them. For the last twenty years they have asked for it to come down and they have been ignored by every successive government. Twenty wasted years of doing nothing and here we are and still no one wants to deal with it, keep on kicking that can down the road.
You writing long meandering sophistry does not make a compelling case.
When you actually talk to the public about specific sectors – e,g staffing Care Homes; they are much more nuanced and think ok. Same with picking their fruit & veg etc. So you again are being too simplistic. Phrase the question differently and you get different answers and therein lies part of the problem.
Public also regularly indicate they want low inflation. Well a ready labour supply key to that. So you happy with a trade off? Think others are too?
Weaning ourselves off imported labour has to take time and needs proper strategy. You just don’t get it I’m afraid.
The pro-immigration lobby could also poll the public with the following question “The population has increased from 57m in the 1991 to over 67million in 2024. It is estimated to reach 80 million by 2050. Do you think the country can sustain such numbers?”.
You could also ask – ‘by 2030 one in five of us will be over 65′ and those over 80 will rise to 3+ million by 2040, how are we going to look after them, generate the tax revenues to make that possible etc when the cohort of young is at the same time diminishing?’
The issue AR is we are aging and that creates a pressure. Our demographics are not in equilibrium and a significant problem. You yourself will probably need care and support, as well as someone else paying tax for all the services you might need to be sustained. Who’s that going to be?
That doesn’t mean an open door, but it does mean this is not as simple as you often convey.
How are we going to look after 80 million people JW? I know you think that immigrants are “unicorns” (have they become pets?), they never get old, never get sick, don’t have children, don’t commit crime or require other public services. All paid from an endless supply of low skill, low paid, part-time services (think car washes, nail bars, florists etc).
The rest of us will either be on welfare, or have an UBI so we can sit indoors smoking weed watching hard core p0rn.
It’s just been annouced that we have to build over an area the size of Surrey to accommodate new housing, that’s before the schools, surgeries and other requirements are factored in (energy, waste disposal, sewage etc).
Just think of the catastrophic damage to the environment. Maybe we can allocate more land for solar panels and wind farms from the National Parks and AONBs? Or we can used to the idea of shanty towns, next to the pro-immigration, privately policed gated communities in this mid century Utopia of yours.
Keep repeating the appeal to emotion fallacy, the only argument you have.
Twenty wasted years, that’s right twenty wasted years… when we should have weaned ourselves off this dependency. That’s the thing about drugs (like ideologies), best not to take them in the first place.
Comment now out of moderation.
My reply is in moderation, marked as “spam” after making a couple of minor edits!
“Any country which allows this to happen is not a country – it’s a global dormitory-town, where people there have no loyalty or affection for the country, it’s just somewhere to live, somewhere to earn a better living, something like a global version of Crawley.”
Exactly.
In Australia where we have had a 30% plus growth in population since the year 2000 (the vast amount of which has been due to net immigration) we are constantly being told that we have skill shortages across the board and need more immigration.
As an example, we have a massive housing shortage because of large scale immigration and we are also informed that building skill shortages necessitate more immigration of skilled persons to address the housing crisis.( We also have close to a million recipients of unemployment benefit).
Therefore, we need to import more people to address the extra demand caused by importing large numbers of people in the first place. It is the ponzi scheme that constitutes Australian fundamental economic policy. The interesting thing is that millions of people would love to migrate to Australia so we have a ponzi policy without end.
Some have called it quantitative peopling. Sadly, aggregate number wins every time. Qualitative measure comes a long way behind.
The lucky country? Maybe the luck will end when the quality of life starts to visibly suffer. If ever, how long?
Too simplistic BK. That has an attraction of course as the neurons don’t get overly taxed
You need to factor in demographics and what happens as a population ages. You need to factor in what national industrial policy you have, skills & training, and whether folks are voting for the costs that might come with that and how you sell it.
Economies that grow and develop almost always have a decent level of migration. US capitalism thrives on it. The issue is where the sensible limit is. It may not be the level you outline, but it’s not zero either. So engagement requires much more thought and that to be fair to the Author is what he’s trying to prompt. He’s from the Right too.
Obviously Australia in it’s modern sense only exists because of migration. Perhaps the indigenous population might welcome a broader perspective?
When did you ever care about the indigenous population?
Exactly
‘…requires hard thinking’ – yep and that is something the majority on the Right haven’t done and hence so frustrated. The question is can they now or is amplification of the grievance all most can summon?
The Author is from the Right and making some decent suggestions which one can tell he’s exasperated his side failed to do over 14yrs. Things don’t look good in the leadership election as the candidates duck the practical issues, but one can understand they are having to appeal to arguably the real problem in the UK – the Tory members and who either can’t stomach what reducing net migration might actually require or simply lack the neuronal capacity in their dotage to engage properly..
The hard thinking comes from actually reducing the numbers rather than shrugging the shoulders, saying ” Oh, it’s all so difficult isn’t it, best carry on as before”.
Do you honestly think importing 3 million people each decade is a viable policy? You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to think the country can support that number of people.
Try pouring a pint of water into a half pint glass and let me know how you get on.
I never quite know if you are just a bit dim and can’t grasp the salient points, or deliberately want to avoid them becuase it’s an easier load on your neurons if you don’t. I’m agreeing with the Author – we need a reduction but it’s how we go about it so the transition can be managed. Whereas you just want a reduction but appear clueless on how to get there. Which of course is why it’s not happened.
JW that same argument has been used again and again and nothing changes.
Can’t we please have a more polite discussion between people who at least agree there is a problem and a nasty one? Robert Mules
There is no mandate for the astonishing levels of inward migration we have seen. The radical changes to our demographics and culture we have been subjected to did not appear in any manifesto. We have not been consulted and so there is no obligation on us to be ‘reasonable’ about it. The extremism on this issue is entirely the property of the centrist-progressive class who cheerlead for the new multiculturalism.
That may be true GW but, as an example, lowering inflation and keeping it there is in manifestos. Immigration aids that, in fact in many regards been fundamental. Without it specific sectors costs rise. And guess who feels that the most – yep generally those not keen on migration too. The Tories entirely know that. Even Farage knows that, although because he’s not going to be near power he can avoid ever facing the conflict. Now perhaps you begin to understand the trade-offs and how we grapple with those and you just might begin to understand why we are where we are and what we need to do about it. It’s simpleton thinking left us where we are.
Portes said that we would be drowning in tax receipts thanks to mass immigration. How’s that working out…
We are where we are because of Blair’s, O’Donnell’s and Portes’ idiocy.
Do you think florists, car washers, nail salons and the “black economy” are essential to the British economy? Must be Portes’ “Lump of labour fallacy” being played out.
The article talked about how different Sectors would be managed. I doubt we have Visas being signed off for those you list above now. As regards ‘black economy’ – why not introduce ID cards and stiffer penalties for employers? They’d make a massive difference to what some get away with.
You see I think you show you have your rants way out ahead of thinking through the problem.
Twenty years JW, I know how much you love to ignore the damage Portes’ ideology has caused. What stiffer penalties do you suggest? It seems we can’t deport anyone here “illegally”, the criminal gangs are here to stay.
You really don’t to want to solve the problem, just pretend that you do.
Any more “last words”.
I think ID cards would be a good thing, but the Labour party has just ruled that option out. Despite being a recommendation from Tony Blair.
Yes I was disappointed in that, but hopeful they ease towards it over next couple of years
“…a shortcut to visas for those with much-needed skills, such as florists — must first agree with the Government a clear plan…”
If anything ever, were to illustrate the total insanity of every approach I have seen from every conservative pushing back against a hard, draconian approach to reducing inward migration, it’s that sentence. In which universe is a ‘florist’ possibly a much needed skill?
This tells me, not just the conservatives at ‘Conservative Home’ but our entire entire process-obsessed ruling elite, are Arc B Golgafrinchans – they can see they need to invent the wheel in the new landscape they have found themselves in, but have got rather hung up with ‘review meetings’ and ‘inquiry commissions’ on what colour the wheel should be, so they never actually get round to inventing it.
A shortage of florists. A shortage so severe we need to import trained people with those skills. Seriously!!!!???
In my area – comfortable Dorchester, Dorset – new florists open and then close again.
Oh hold on, what they actually mean is “people who bunch blue chrysanthemums into cellophane for Sainsburys on a production line for minimum wage”
That’ll be the one!
Amusing that a minor tear in one’s passport can stop one boarding a flight (enforced by jobsworth officio-gnomes, but backed by no basis in actual law), yet people with no identity, are escorted in by ” border” ( we are an island, and bar Ireland have no borders!) farce and wedged up and given free accomodation. Why will no government use our special forces to go over to France and take out the people who are making the money? We managed it between 1941 and 45 without French permission, so why not now?
PS why can’t politicians and the media be more honest about who we welcome and appreciate as migrants, not least Poles, Czech, Slovakian, Indian?
Cap of 100000 net immigration. is actually 400000 immigrants a year. Ludicrously high and hugely destabilising .
Measure govts on gdp per capita and watch immigration cease
This article is depressing. If “every vested interest is going to start screaming at the same time” if there is the threat of a cap on immigration, and the author concludes that this means calling for an immigration cap is pointless and even wrong, we might as well give up now. With time the situation will only get worse and there will be MORE vested interests screaming LOUDER. Some government at some stage is going to have to grasp the nettle and there’s not a lot of time left. As Lionel Shriver wrote in her article on the topic (Spectator 25 May 2024) “authorities will get serious about border control only once it’s too late”.
Everyone seems to agree that migration is the solution to today’s economic problems, while being the cause of tomorrow’s. And tomorrow’s problems will be bigger.
So it’s a Ponzi scheme.
It seems clear to me that we have to drastically reduce migration while acknowledging it’s also going to be very painful.
Whatever Britain does is going to be painful. It’s an awful country with little productivity and collapsing infrastructure.
Presumably that’s why nobody’s having babies. You don’t build a family when everything is in decline.
Massive change is needed in Britain and it’s all going to hurt. But at least that would give people hope. People can withstand pain if they have hope.
Right now, there’s no hope and it doesn’t get more miserable than that.