1.1 Introduction
Hardly a day goes by without immigration featuring in the headlines. The issue dominates debate across the political spectrum and has been a top voting issue amongst the British public for over a decade (Duffy and Frere-Smith 2014; Blinder and Allen 2016), becoming the most important issue facing Britain for voters in 2014 (Dennison and Goodwin 2015, 173). It is one of the most divisive and at the same time, with public concern over immigration being acute amongst working and middle classes and across partisan divides (Fabian Society 2017), paradoxically unifying issue of our times.
The referendum in Britain on membership in the EU in June 2016 sent shockwaves across the political establishment not just in Britain itself but also throughout Europe and the world beyond. This was a campaign and, some would say, a vote fuelled by anti-migrant sentiment (Portes 2016). Current Prime Minister Theresa May is so convinced that âBrexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europeâ (May 2017) that the government, against damaging economic forecasts, plan to take Britain out of the single market for the apparent trade-off of reduced immigration. Immigration has undoubtedly shifted from the periphery to the centre of the political landscape and will be a fixture in Britain for years to come. To understand how and why immigration has gravitated from low to high politics, we have to turn to the New Labour governmentâs period in office between 1997 and 2010.
Under New Labour , Britainâs economic (or labour) immigration policy went from a highly restrictive approach to one of the most expansive in Europe: work permit criteria were relaxed, international students were doubled, the government expanded existing and launched new low and high skilled migrant worker schemes, and, from 2005, a new points-based system (PBS) was initiated. Overshadowing these important reforms was the decision in 2004 to allow citizens of the eight EU accession states the right to work in Britain, resulting in one of the largest migration flows in Britainâs peacetime history. Couched in the narrative of managed migration, these policy reforms signified a new approach to immigration based on economic utilitarian arguments (Balch 2010). Coupled with the mantra of attracting the âbrightest and bestâ immigrants, managed migration denoted an alternative immigration system based on the supply and demand of skills, and above all embracing the positive economic benefits of immigration. With two and a half million foreign born workers added to the population since 1997, and over half of Britainâs foreign born population arriving between 2001 and 2011 (ONS 2012), immigration under Labour âquite literally changed the face of Britainâ (Finch and Goodhart 2010, 3). This period was, and is, the Making of a Migration State.
New Labourâs managed migration policy stood in stark contrast to Britainâs restrictive immigration past. Writing in 1994, Gary P. Freeman famously described Britain as a âdeviant caseâ in Western European migration policy. For over three decades, successive British governments had managed to combine a liberal approach to flows of capital and trade with effective limits on the flow of immigrants. Historically for Britain, and comparatively across Europe, Labourâs reforms were an âunprecedented policy reversalâ (Hansen 2014).
By the time Labour left office in 2010 then, a âreluctant country of immigrationâ (Layton-Henry 1994) had been transformed into a fully-fledged âmigration stateâ (Hollifield 2004). This was the defining breakpoint between Britainâs post-war bipartisan consensus of âzero immigrationâ (Freeman 1994) and todayâs political fixture, where far from being a taboo subject for politicians, immigration could not figure more prominently in political debate. This was an unprecedented period of immigration policymaking, which both broke with the past and set the stage for where Britain is now.
The Labour governmentâs rapid policy change is puzzling for at least two reasons. First, the existing political science literature has often emphasised the âpath dependentâ character of immigration policy in Britain and indeed elsewhere (Hansen 2000; Tichenor 2002), suggesting that immigration policy change is likely to be incremental at most. Immigration policy is often shaped by legacies of the past because policies can change populations and set the policy norms for successive administrations (Ellerman 2015; Wright 2012). Second, in no Western country can a party gain votes by promoting or expanding immigration (Lahav 1997). The Labour governmentâs liberalisation of immigration policy went against public opinion, and therefore there was no obvious electoral dividend to their expansive regime. Whilst the British public has long been in favour of reducing immigration, the high level of public concern began in 2000, at a time where the New Labour government were pursuing the most expansive immigration regime to date (Ipsos Mori 2015; Evans and Chzhen 2013). Indeed, Labourâs policies were certainly not a vote winner; they have since dogged Labourâs time in opposition, and public concern about large-scale immigration contributed to their electoral defeat in 2010 (Carey and Geddes 2010; Bale 2014) and hindered their chances of winning office in 2015 (Beckett 2016, 7; Cruddas 2016; Geddes and Tonge 2015).
How then to explain a change that was both electorally risky and ran counter to Britainâs past immigration policy? How did a country that was defined by its âaspiration for zero immigrationâ (Freeman 1994) evolve into a fully fledged âmigration stateâ? The Making of a Migration State explains why such a policy transformation transpired under the Labour governments by unpacking the mechanisms and processes that led to such an unexpected outcome. Ultimately, this book is about why governments liberalise economic immigration policy and the unintended consequences of intended actions. This book will be of interest for anybody who wants to understand why immigration is dominating the political debate and will be essential reading for those wanting to know why governments pursue expansive immigration regimes.
1.2 Unpacking the Migration State
The objective of this book is to explain the expansionary developments of economic immigration policy under the Labour administrations of 1997â2010. It is important to stress from the outset that the focus of this research is explicitly with labour and student immigration, which combined I refer to hereon in as economic immigration. These two categories are closely related because these streams are âwantedâ immigration in contrast to âunwantedâ immigration such as irregular, humanitarian or family migration (Joppke 1998). I use the terms expansive and/or liberal policy to signify the Labour governmentâs approach to facilitate entry of migrant workers, rather than any liberalisation in terms of migrant rights. Although workers rights in terms of transitions and qualifying settlement periods were also loosened under Labour in conjunction with the wider managed migration regime. While other areas of immigration policy, such as asylum and irregular immigration, became increasingly restrictive during this period, the Labour governmentâs economic immigration policy, which this book is concerned with, was undoubtedly an expansive one.
In the context of economic globalisation and an embedded international human rights discourse, some contend that there has been a decline in power, significance and sovereignty of the nation state. In turn, it is argued that nation states have âlost controlâ of their borders and are thus no longer the crucial actors in immigration policymaking (Soysal 1994; Sassen 1996; Jacobson 1996). This may hold true for some migration streams, such as humanitarian immigration or family reunification where international conventions can override domestic autonomy, but given that the nation state primarily determines the management and regulation of economic immigration policy, at least in Britain, this book employs approaches that focus on the domestic political arena.
The literature on immigration was once dominated by accounts from economists and sociologists suggesting (if only tacitly) that the nation-state and the institutions that comprise it were of secondary importance relative to international market forces...