Getting Serious About Immigration
How do the Tories win back trust when they have failed so dismally to keep promises in the past?
It’s undeniable at this point that immigration is an issue that’s going to dominate British politics for the foreseeable future, and it may be the single issue that cost the Tory Party the most. Had the Tories not lost control of the border, allowing immigration numbers, both legal and illegal, to skyrocket, Nigel Farage would have had a much smaller bazooka to blast them with.
Perhaps luckily for the Tories, immigration is unlikely to be a problem that disappears this parliament. On Tuesday alone this week (9/7/24), 419 migrants crossed the Channel, an average of 70 per boat, an increase from the average of 50 per boat that it’s been for most of this year so far. There seems to be little chance of Keir Starmer living up to his promise to ‘smash the gangs’ to prevent illegal immigration. Indeed, even making the promise seems farcical.
Gangs are notoriously hydra-like, in that you cut off one head and three more pop up. This is especially true in enterprises that require less complexity, and therefore a lower barrier of entry to engage in. Smuggling people into Britain requires the ability to buy a dinghy, a selection of which are sold perfectly legally all along the French coast (and on Amazon for less than £60), text a bunch of hopefuls a time and date to meet you on the beach, take their money off them, load them up into the newly acquired dinghy, point it in the general direction of the United Kingdom and push it out to sea. The occupants of said dinghy then only need to make it 50% of the way towards the United Kingdom, at which point they’ll likely be picked up by the RNLI or the Coast Guard and escorted safely back to British soil.
The idea that an activity as lucrative as this, and of this level of simplicity, can be stopped, even by the machinations of a very clever prosecutor turned prime minister, is an absurdity sold on hubris or cynicism.
The Conservative Party has two major problems when it comes to immigration though. The first is obvious: Nigel Farage, who has made his post-Brexit bread and butter by talking about immigration. The second is a problem of credibility and trust. In every election in recent memory, the Tories have promised to decrease immigration and in every parliament following, that has categorically failed to happen. Indeed, they did the exact opposite.
That means the Conservatives have a difficult path to walk to win back trust. They have to be simultaneously more radical, more compassionate and more realistic than Nigel Farage’s Reform.
Whatever the future immigration policy is, it can’t be vague promises of getting net migration down to the tens of thousands or of stopping the boats. It needs to be specific, it needs to sound reasonable and fair to the disinterested voter and substantial and radical to the engaged and concerned voter, and there needs to be a clear path to achieving it that can be methodically followed step by step.
I’ve written in the past that solving the illegal immigration challenge will need a multipronged approach, including offshore migrant processing likely in a British Overseas Territory (BOT) to which illegal migrants can be removed unimpeded when they arrive, and a safe third country to which to remove illegal migrants once they have been processed, but paired with safe routes being made available for legitimate refugees and a legal cap put on the number of refugees taken in each year. No doubt leaving the ECHR will be necessary too. I also discussed ways of offsetting the (likely not insignificant) expense of such a facility on a BOT by making it available to other European partners who are also struggling with illegal migration and considering offshore processing.
A significant reduction in legal immigration will also take a methodical and gradual approach towards a specified end goal. Nobody—except for very online right-wingers—believes immigration could be cut super drastically overnight, so they won’t believe anyone promising to cut it super drastically overnight. Of course, that doesn’t mean efforts shouldn’t be made to rapidly reduce what can be reduced, especially low-productivity chain migration, but most people are aware that other changes will also need to be made. Industry needs time to adapt and to wean itself off the economic amphetamine it’s been using to mask its lethargy, the government needs time to change the education system so it’s providing the technical education and training the workforce necessary for a non-immigration-dependent economy, policy needs to be passed to encourage investment in the technologies that will allow us to have a high-skilled low-immigration economy, university funding needs to be reconsidered so they’re not just printing visas because they need foreign students’ cash to keep the lights on, and the welfare and tax system needs to be rethought to get people back into work. Slashing immigration without doing these things will just cause a spike in inflation, spook the markets, and whoever is in office at the time will be Liz Trussed out of No.10 making it impossible to seriously talk about cutting immigration again for at least a decade.
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So the next leader has a big task on his or her hands. What do these policies look like? And what should the tangible end goal be? 600,000 gross? Around what it was in 2005. Or nearer 300,000 gross? Closer to what it was in 1991 which would, if trends stay the same, lead to a period of net emigration. I’d imagine the latter will be more enticing to disillusioned Tory voters. It’s also more radical than anything Reform UK has proposed. But how do you get to that number? A gradually lowered visa cap? A gradually increased minimum wage requirement? And what sort of immigration should be prioritised? The public would likely have very little concern about doctors, semi-conductor engineers and quantum physicists, but would be extremely disappointed if there weren’t reductions in immigration for lower-skilled jobs which depresses the wages of the people in those jobs.
Articulation of future policy goals and methods of achieving them will need clarity and sobriety, earnestness and sincerity, and compassion balanced with forthrightness. It would probably also help if the future leader had a history of trying to push the party towards a more robust immigration policy. Who that person is will be for the Conservative Party to decide in the weeks and months to come.