Transforming the politics of immigration

 

Much public discussion about immigration, including much of the print and broadcast media, negates rather than promotes understanding. The most obvious example is that polling companies still ask voters whether they think immigration is too high, and those in the media treat the results of those polls as indicative of what voters really think. As a result, much media discussion about immigration views it as a problem, and the solution involves reducing the number of immigrants coming to the UK.

Why do I think that negates understanding? In my view it is like asking voters whether they think taxes are too high, and then framing all public discussion of taxation around how to get taxes down. With taxes we know (now at least) better than that. The right question to ask is whether people want lower taxes and lower public spending, because the two go together. If I do a google search for polls about whether taxes are too high, most results present voters with that tax/public spending trade-off. The opposite is also true. Asking politicians how they would pay for additional public spending has become ubiquitous (although less so for Conservative politicians who want to cut taxes).

If we exclude asylum seekers, students and dependents, then most immigration today involves people coming to the UK to do specific jobs. Making it more difficult for firms to employ immigrants would have consequences, just like reducing taxes has consequences. This is why, when voters are asked about skilled immigrants, they have substantially more favourable views than for immigration in general. Furthermore, although voters want less rather than more low skilled immigration, when specific occupations are mentioned that antagonism is substantially reduced. As Stephen Bush noted recently, there is public dismay at the recent drop in immigrants into the health and social care sector.

Of course one reason we don’t have more joined up discussion of immigration is that large sections of the media and the political class don’t want us to. It suits a Conservative opposition to pretend that immigration is always too high, and to blame the government for this. In fact it’s worse than this. The whole Conservative political project today relies on talking up the ‘problem of immigration’, and their media arm is more than happy to oblige by talking about ‘waves’ and ‘invasions’ in much the same way as it did last time the Tories were in opposition.

When Labour was in opposition it felt obliged to nod along to most of this, and only raise their hand to object at some of the most egregious policies, like the Rwanda scheme. After all, they knew that if immigration was a problem the voters would see the government rather than the opposition as responsible. Now Labour are in government the situation is very different, but so far the rhetoric coming from Labour has not noticeably changed. In this respect it appears to be following a similar path to the later Blair and Brown governments.

In a powerful piece, Nesrine Malik suggests this is both regrettable and inevitable. She writes

“What [Keir Starmer] should say is that immigration is not “out of control”. That we do, in fact, have control of our borders, and that the vast majority who come to the country are allowed in after meeting an extremely high visa threshold. That we do in fact, invite many of them in, to fill gaps in our health and care sectors, and that those who come as students, or to work in the private sector, pay hefty residence permit fees and pay twice for the NHS, in taxes and in NHS surcharge.

[Keir Starmer] will not say this, because the illusion that immigration is something that a government can fully “control”, that is not subject to economic dynamics and the needs of public infrastructure, is important to maintain. Shattering this illusion makes it difficult for a government to present itself as having a “solution” to the problem of a country that, as Starmer previously said, needs to be “weaned” off immigration.”

While I’m convinced that such an approach is regrettable (who wants public discussion based on falsehoods), I am far from convinced that keeping it so is in Labour’s interests. While the government may benefit in the short term from falling immigration numbers, there will come a point when that trend is reversed, and the Conservative media machine will make sure everyone knows about it. When that happens, a Labour government is no more likely than the last Conservative government to implement measures that will significantly control numbers, because of the economic damage that will do. In that situation, keeping the debate at the primitive ‘immigration is a problem’ level will hurt Labour a lot.

According to some reports, those around Starmer believe that if they can show the government can work to improve people’s lives, and restore faith in government, this will lessen the attraction to voters of right wing populist attacks on immigration. This is a reasonable point. As I have noted before, austerity is associated with an increase in votes for right wing populist parties, because socially conservative voters are very susceptible to claims that poor services are due to increased use by ‘outsiders’.

However there are two reasons why the immigration issue will not go away under a Labour government. First, it seems highly likely that it will take some time for Labour to return public services to acceptable levels (‘to end austerity’). Second, the experience of the last Labour government suggests the political right can still use immigration as a powerful weapon even in economic good times.

Having a more sensible debate is not inconsistent with ‘weaning the UK’ off immigration, if this means ending the situation where pay in certain sectors is so poor that immigration is necessary to fill vacancies. However many of those sectors are in the public sector or depend on public sector finance, so once again changing that situation is likely to take considerable time, which leaves Labour vulnerable to right wing attacks on immigration when numbers stop falling. It is also obvious that a Labour government should end cases where immigration is used by unscrupulous employers as a means to exploit their workforce.

So it seems clear to me that it is not in Labour’s interests to keep the debate on immigration at its current primitive level, where immigration is always seen as a problem and trade-offs are ignored. As in other areas, Labour’s approach to this issue in opposition (what Mark Thomas calls a ‘small target strategy’) will not work when it is in government. This isn’t a call for Labour politicians to be ‘braver’ in talking about immigration. It is instead an argument that making the debate better and more informed is in Labour’s own longer interests.

The reason for this is straightforward. As long as the public debate refuses to acknowledge the benefits of immigration, it gives the political right the space to make false claims about why immigration is a problem. They can claim, in particular, that immigrants are responsible for poor public services, whereas the reality is that on average immigration benefits the public finances, and immigrants provide much of the manpower in key public services. When Labour politicians fail to counter these false claims, they leave the impression among many voters that these false claims are true.

As I noted here, pretending to be ‘concerned about immigration’ but not doing anything significant to reduce numbers because of the impact this will have on the economy has played a key role in bringing down three recent Prime Ministers. Attitudes towards immigration have become more favourable since Brexit in part because the benefits immigrants bring have become clearer. It is to Labour’s advantage to build on that, just as it is to the Conservative’s and Reform’s benefit to reverse it.

The time for Labour politicians to start changing the public debate on immigration is when aggregate immigration numbers are falling, which means this is an issue they need to address sooner rather than later. Whether the Labour leadership recognise this is another matter,