THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION

How could business voices engage positively in the
immigration debate?
This parliament could well see increased conflict between government
and business over immigration policy. Quotas for skilled migrants,
which were unfilled in the last Parliament, look set to bite much more
often in this one. The government, with few policy options to control
EU immigration, and with non-EU net migration well above the overall
target on its own, is now looking at hardening policy further towards
skilled migration, leading to concerns from many quarters, most vocally
the tech sector and the NHS, about the impact on their ability to fill
skills gaps. The departure of the pro-migration Liberal Democrats from
government has also shifted the political veto points. It remains to be
seen how far this might trigger a more active effort from pro-market
Conservatives to defend skilled migration, as has been the case in the
recent Cabinet split over the value of student migration.
How should economic advocates of the benefits of migration respond to
a tougher context? Existing approaches will bring diminishing returns.
Business advocates have presented evidence about the economic gains
of migration and argued that these need to be protected from the public
politics of immigration. Advocacy has typically involved combining
detailed policy submissions, scrutinising new restrictive proposals, with
the general argument that the net migration target is broken, irrational
and damaging to economic growth. This approach may mitigate the
impact of specific restrictive proposals, but it is insufficiently engaged
with the challenge of how to influence the policy framework.
The challenge to business is to make its public arguments in a way
that can get a hearing beyond the boardroom and the financial press,
to public audiences that include the anxious middle as well as the
economically confident and culturally secure. Business also needs to
think about the political challenges of seeking to influence a shift in the
policy framework. There is an increasingly broad consensus that the net
migration has not worked. But that will not be enough to bring about
change, unless critics of the target can propose viable alternatives to
it that make both economic and political sense. It is unlikely that the
answer to a broken target would be to abandon targets altogether.
Rather than calling for the economics and politics of migration to be
kept separate, business advocates need to engage in an active search
for constructive alternatives - proposing achievable targets which do
defend the economic gains of migration and keep Britain open for
business, while working out how economic actors can also contribute to
constructive and practical proposals that can respond to public concerns
about the pressures of migration.
49 British Future / The Politics of Immigration