Why Is Immigration Policy So Hard to Get Right?

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CHAPTERS 

02:47 Why is immigration so hard to get right?
04:52 Who’s to blame for public frustration?
06:29 Inherent trade-offs and political incentives
12:50 Do deterrence policies work? Integration trade-offs
15:27 Low-wage migration: shortages aren’t sufficient rationale
19:34 Public perceptions vs. economic contributions
21:27 Competence matters: small fixes beat grand visions
25:37 Outlook: improving systems amid persistent trade-offs

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02.960] 

Hi, welcome to World of Migration, a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that delves into interesting global developments on immigration, immigrant integration and humanitarian protection. My name is Meghan Benton, I'm Director of Global Programs at MPI and I'm your host today. Immigration policy has never been uncontroversial. People have deep, visceral feelings about who they want as fellow citizens, co workers or neighbors. But immigration has reached a level of divisiveness and polarization that feels like a tipping point. It's being blamed for a host of kitchen table concerns, rising rents, crowded hospitals, the cost of living. And populist voices have been quick to exploit those fears, channeling sometimes legitimate anxieties through the distorting lens of algorithmic social media. And the result is a picture that often bears little resemblance to fact. What gets lost in the noise is that not all migration is created equal. And publics know this. Opinion on migration is more nuanced and more contradictory than political debate often suggests. People broadly support skilled workers, nurses, engineers, but are far less comfortable with asylum seekers and irregular migrants. Yet the types of migration that are hardest to control are exactly the ones attracting the most anxiety.

[00:01:17.530] 

In this landscape, policymakers have grown uncertain about how or when even whether to communicate openly about the real trade offs in immigration. Do you act quietly and hope no one notices? Do you show you're working out as we used to get told at school? How do you communicate complexity in a debate that punishes nuance? What's often happened is that politicians have chosen to oversimplify immigration messages or to make promises that they can't keep. This has created a real trust problem and and an increasingly polarized debate with pro migration people, on the one hand, who don't acknowledge the often very real side effects of migration, and restrictionists on the other, who frame immigration as a threat to everything economies, culture, values, public services. And what gets lost between these two camps is the complicated reality immigration policy involves real trade offs. Most policies have winners and losers and there are known easy answers. My guest today is Madeleine Sumption, who's one of the most clear eyed thinkers on immigration policy. She's director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. She's a member of the Migration Advisory Committee, an independent panel that advises the UK government on migration issues.

[00:02:28.410] 

And she's also a former MPI colleague. She actually interviewed me back when I joined in 2011. Madeleine has written a new book, What Is Immigration Policy For? Which explores what immigration policy seeks to achieve and why so many people end up unhappy with the outcome. Hi, Madeleine. It's great to have you.

[00:02:46.490] 

Thanks for having me.

[00:02:47.850] 

So I wanted to start with an overarching question about this moment we're in. We have a backlash to immigration across many destination countries, the United States, the uk, Europe, Canada. We're seeing real and quite persistent discontent with how migration is managed. So why is it so hard for governments across the world to get immigration right?

[00:03:09.750] 

That's a very good question. And I think the first thing to say is immigration has always been contentious. If you go back in history where there have been periods of higher immigration, it's often led to conflict and concern. So I don't think there's some golden age in the past where everyone was really happy with immigration. I do think there are some specific challenges that we've seen in a lot of high income countries over the last couple of decades. We have more people who are able to migrate as the world has become wealthier, the of information is lower. I think there are more people looking for those opportunities and crucially able to take advantage of them. And that then has naturally created demands for restrictions. And one of the challenges we've seen is that politicians have often promised reductions in immigration without delivering them, which can undermine public trust. The other thing I think that we've seen recently is that quite a few countries in Europe, North America have seen historically high numbers of asylum applications. They go up and down over time, but we've seen historic spikes in the numbers of people claiming asylum. And this is one of the least popular forms of migration.

[00:04:22.560] 

It's expensive for governments. It also symbolizes a lack of control because people applying for asylum are often using illegal routes or they're using visas, work or study or visit visas for purposes that they weren't intended for. And so that I think the salience of asylum has also contributed to it becoming more divisive, to immigration becoming more divisive than it perhaps was a couple of decades ago. Because that is a less popular form of migration than people moving on, say, work and study visas.

[00:04:52.640] 

And so, I mean, I don't know if this is a possible question to answer, but if you were sort of to answer the question of who's to blame for the current situation. I mean, you say it's been going on for decades, but we have kind of reached a bit of a tipping point in quite the levels of frustration with how migration has been managed. I mean, do you think that policymakers have been asleep at the wheel or is the politics of this just too hard? Or do you think that the public is kind of unrealistic? In their expectations for what's possible in immigration.

[00:05:22.550] 

I think immigration policy is genuinely quite challenging for governments and one reason for this is structural. Right. It's kind of baked into the system which that governments are trying to achieve several different things at once. So they have economic goals, they have social and political goals, humanitarian goals. They want to produce a policy that is widely perceived as fair and those goals can conflict. It's not necessarily possible to come up with this perfect policy that's going to make everyone happy. And so, for example, we often see conflict, not always, but we often see conflicts between the humanitarian goals of migration policy and the economic goals. One of the the problems governments face is that the types of migration that are easiest for them to control and reduce, if they want to reduce migration, are also the ones that are most economically beneficial, namely people coming on skilled work visas. Whereas the types of migration that are not as economically beneficial, family migration to some extent, but particularly people coming through asylum systems, are very difficult for them for policymakers to control. And I think that conflict between these different goals crops up a lot in immigration policy.

[00:06:29.130] 

Now that's not to say that politicians are just hapless victims of a really difficult situation. Obviously I think it has also been very difficult for people on either side of the migration debate to recognize the trade offs. The fact that policies are usually going to have winners and losers. There are no perfect answers to many of these problems, but in the electoral marketplace I think it's just quite difficult for politicians to stand up and say, listen, my pulses aren't perfect, but I think they'll do an okay job. And if they don't, then maybe I'll try something else. That's not a message that sells very well compared to a message of certainty saying we've got the problem, just elect us and we're going to implement it. So I think there are some kind of structural background reasons that it is quite difficult to develop popular immigration policies.

[00:07:16.310] 

So you've written this terrific book that talks about all of those trade offs and how difficult the job of immigration policy really is. I also would liked that it calls out some of the slightly daft policies that have been adopted in recent years without good evidence and how they get copied or adopted for good headlines rather than long term outcomes. I was just wondering what your hope is in publishing this book. Are you trying to get more sympathy for immigration policymakers from publics? Are you calling for more transparency in setting out those trade offs that you mentioned or do you want to spark a more measured debate?

[00:07:53.910] 

I would like to see a more honest debate. I think I've been working on this issue for quite a few years now. And one of the things that's really struck me is that when you talk to people about immigration, they often assume that the answers are obvious and that it's just a question of politicians having the political will to do the thing that they think is a good idea. And one thing I think that comes out of the evidence on migration is that the answers aren't that obvious. And there are usually multiple ways of framing the issue, whether that's a question of what the economic impacts are, and particularly when you come to things like moral and ethical judgments. I think there are lots of different ways of thinking about what policies are ethical and which are not. And it's usually not that clear cut. So I think one of the things that I hoped to achieve, I'm not pushing a particular set of policies with the book. It's not one of those books that has a final chapter laying out this is what we should do in order to get to a happier place.

[00:08:51.760] 

What I'm trying to do is explain why it is a lot more complicated than many people think and why if we had a bit more recognition in public debate about the costs and the benefits and the trade offs, rather than both the tribes on either side, the pro migration, and the people who support more skeptical views, digging in and saying migration is all good or all bad, recognizing that actually the reality is this messy complexity in the middle.

[00:09:21.510] 

That's a noble endeavor. Just to zoom in a bit from this sort of big picture diagnosis to some of the specific categories. So the book talks about skilled work visas, low wage migration, family migration, unauthorized migration, and then refugees and asylum seekers. So all the main routes through which people generally come to destination countries. And you don't have a chapter on students, but they're also a big part of the discussion. And one thing I was really struck by, and you already kind of mentioned this, is while high skilled work migration is the category that policymakers and publics tend to like the most, it's the easiest to cut. And then as you said, irregular migration and especially asylum are the issues that are really salient. I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about why that challenge of irregular migration has proved so intractable. And have governments been able to get deterrence and enforcement policies to work?

[00:10:22.300] 

Yeah, I think there are a few reasons that it's very tricky. I mean, one, the obvious one is just that people who are either migrating without permission or overstay their visas and remain without status. The government doesn't know where they all are. Right. And they're not. These are people who quite understandably are trying to go under the radar and trying to avoid detection. And so it's just naturally quite a difficult challenge for the government to try and address, address that, especially if they want to avoid more intrusive policies, things like immigration raids, for example, that pick up a lot of people and then try and work out who has legal status and who doesn't. I think the other tricky issue is that some unauthorized migrants are much easier to remove than others. And that's, I think, largely because some are much less resistant to, to leaving than others. So if you think, for example, if you have a person who maybe overstayed a student visa, they come from a relatively functional country like India or Brazil, and they haven't been in the country for very long. They're often actually, it's not that difficult to persuade them to go back home if they're violating immigration law.

[00:11:41.850] 

On the other end of the spectrum, you've got people who've lived in the country for a long time. Maybe they come from a country that's chaotic and violent, but not to the extent that would, you know, that would give them a valid claim for asylum. And they can be very resistant to being removed. And I think when you add both of these things together, I think it means that there's some amount of immigration enforcement and numbers of deportations that the government in different high income countries can bring about at relatively low costs, whether financial or social costs. But when the government's trying to increase the numbers, they move towards harder cases, people who are more resistant, people where the government doesn't know who they are. And so the costs, the financial and social costs per person removed are actually going to go up the higher the number of people that the government is targeting, this higher degree of compliance that they want with the law. That's not to cast judgment either way on what should be the government's goal, but just to explain why increasing the numbers of people removed can be difficult. On the issue of deterrence, you mentioned deterrence.

[00:12:50.400] 

And this is obviously a really important piece of policy in a lot of countries. One reason that governments say, okay, well, we know that it's very difficult to remove people who are here without permission, but if they could be deterred from entering in the first place, then you avoid some of those problems associated with unauthorized migration. And there is some evidence on this, mostly actually in the asylum context, that certain types of Deterrence policies can have an impact. A lot of them involve restricting rights that people have after they come to the country. So for example, making it harder for them to bring family members or not giving them secure legal status. And I think there is impact that these policies can have an impact and do change some people's decisions and deter them from coming. The challenge is what happens with the people who are not deterred, the people who migrate anyway. What you often see is this trade off that the same policies that were designed to deter people, such as restricting the rights that people have, are also ones that make it harder for them to integrate and do well in the country if they decide to come anyway, despite those deterrence measures.

[00:14:03.780] 

And so you have quite a problematic trade off that governments face between their deterrence goals and their integration goals.

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And as you've point out in the book, there's also the challenge that governments are dealing with mixed migration movements. So they don't know who they're deterring. They're sort of deterring, trying to adopt blanket policies for everyone. And there are no alternatives, no alternative safe routes for refugees, largely.

[00:14:28.240] 

That's right. And I think in an ideal world, governments might say if you have a government that is committed to the Refugee Convention and wants to grant status to refugees, they would introduce a policy that has a big deterrent effect for people who are not going to qualify for refugee status. But that doesn't affect refugees. And as you say, they don't know until they've gone through the whole process what the impacts are going to be. Plus, then you, you have countries that actually want to deter refugees as well. And there you have this integration. Trade off is very much in evidence that they want to say, on the one hand, yes, we are complying with international law, we will accept refugees if they come to the country, but they also want to make it as unattractive as possible so that they have fewer asylum seekers and refugees, which, after all is expensive, it's operationally difficult. And we're talking about people who at the end of the day usually need a fair amount of support if they're granted refugee status.

[00:15:27.240] 

I mean, this is switching gear a bit. But another area that you say is surprisingly thorny is low wage migration. And we hear a lot right now in the media, in policy circles about huge labor shortages across many high income countries in sectors like care and hospitality. But you're quite clear that the existence of unfilled vacancies alone is not itself an argument for migration. You might have employers who are unwilling to raise pay or don't have decent work conditions, for instance, that could attract locals. So could you tell us a bit about some of the challenges and trade offs with low wage migration decisions?

[00:16:08.340] 

Yeah, I think that the case for work visa programs in low wage jobs is actually not that strong. There are some specific cases where you have. You can make a good argument that without some kind of migration program, the sector is not going to survive. And the clearest example of this is seasonal agricultural work, where broadly speaking, this industry would more or less go out of business if they weren't able to find seasonal workers to do this work. It's not very attractive to local workers. Local workers want a year round job that's not in a remote rural location. So there are cases like that where you can make quite a good argument that if you are going to have this industry, then you need migrant workers to be a very significant part of the labor force there, possibly all of it. In a lot of other cases, I think it's much less clear. The care sector is another example where we often see reliance on low wage workers. Some countries have visa programs, some rely on low wage migrant workers who are not coming through work visa programs, for example, refugees and family members who have work authorisation anyway.

[00:17:22.070] 

And I think there the trade off really is how much does the government want to. Is the government willing, if it's a public sector role or sort of public subsidized role like care is in many countries, is the government willing to spend a lot more to make those jobs attractive to local workers? Or are they going to rely on migration as a substitute for trying to make those jobs more worthwhile for people to do in the private sector things like hospitality things here? I think it's a bit trickier. Effectively there isn't really a right size for the hospitality sector and so hospitality employers would benefit if they get to bring in low wage workers. But there isn't really an optimal number of lattes that the public ought to be consuming. And so I think it's less clear that you have, in the case of care, you have this strong social reason to believe that we want people to have care in order to have a dignity unified old age. It's less clear that having baristas and coffee shops is crucially important in that respect. Plus then the final thing is that if people come in on low wages, then even if they're working very hard, if they're on the minimum wage in most countries with a significant welfare state, they are going to present a net cost over the course of their lifetimes to public finances, not necessarily in the short run.

[00:18:53.340] 

In the short run, they may not be eligible for benefits. They probably don't use much health care if healthcare is publicly subsidized in the country. But over the longer term, as people get older, they become less likely to work, eventually retire, use more healthcare, you get some significant costs.

[00:19:08.220] 

It's very interesting how economists and publics often disagree about the most valuable types of migration. So you mentioned this poll where respondents wanted to reduce the number of bankers admitted but were happy to see higher numbers of restaurant staff or truck drivers. Those might be people who do come out fiscally negative over their life cycle. So people have quite a different idea of which occupations are sort of socially desirable.

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Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think people in general struggle to distinguish between which types of migration are economically beneficial and who they believe to be nice people. Which is why I think that bankers always get hammered in these polls of which which occupations are beneficial to admit. Even though bankers, they pay a lot of tax. Right. Despite all of the people's assumptions to the contrary and the debates about bankers bonuses, if you're on a high salary, you're going to be paying quite a lot of tax more than it costs to provide public services and benefits. One of my favorite little snippets of polling on this is a study that asked people whether they thought they gave a vignette of a Nigerian building contractor and they asked, do you think this person is going to make an economic contract? Retribution. And what they found? Half of the respondents were just given the ordinary vignette and the other half were told that he's applied for British citizenship. This was a UK poll and people were much more likely to say that they thought the person was making an economic contribution if they had learned that he wanted British citizenship, which is really a social outcome.

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And actually there isn't any reason to believe that someone's economic impact is going to be considerably different, holding constant what they're doing in the workforce simply because they're a citizen. But I think we as humans naturally find it difficult to disentangle these impacts.

[00:21:03.470] 

Yeah. So all of this suggests that how you design the system matters enormously. Which brings me to one of my favorite bits of the book where you argue that competence is underrated and unsexy. Policy implementation often matters more than grand vision. So what are your favorite examples of where a boring administrative change had a positive impact?

[00:21:27.090] 

Yeah, I think there are a few of these. One of the ones that springs to mind is in the point Systems of New Zealand, Canada and Australia. For years they had this real problem with backlogs. And backlogs are very damaging in immigration systems because people sitting around for long periods not knowing if they're migrating or not, or not having status. And actually it really undermines efforts to try and admit people who will then be know ready and able to work after they arrive. And there was a little tweak that sounds kind of really unassuming that these countries made to move towards an expression of interest system. So effectively, instead of just saying anyone can get into the backlog and wait for their place. If they have enough points in the points system they would have, you know, over a period of a month or so they would collect up the applications and then only invite the people who are the highest ranked to apply. Now as it happens, I don't actually think that points systems are necessarily a particularly effective way of dealing with migration. I think there's a lot of hype about point systems and they don't really do as much as their proponents think they do.

[00:22:37.980] 

But this little move to an expression of interest system I think made a really big difference in getting rid of backlogs and making those systems much more efficient. And I think in general there are quite a lot of these smaller policies often involving collecting decent data and ironing out problems as they emerge that don't tend to get people very excited. And I understand why politicians wouldn't want to stand up and make a major speech about them, but they can make a difference to how efficiently the system is working.

[00:23:07.270] 

Yeah, I'm interested in that question of how you balance the sort of like ironing out, doing things carefully, using evidence with just the raw politics of this area. I mean, you talk about how sometimes there are aren't right answers, there are just different considerations to balance. So for instance, you say there's no single evidence based ideal migration level decisions. There are ultimately political. But what does this mean at a time when immigration is so politicized and you have politicians under pressure to just chase headlines which might detract from more considered even political judgment. So if you're advising a civil servant on how to balance that careful use of evidence with managing the directives from their political masters and these media pressures. Sorry, what do you say?

[00:24:00.680] 

Well, what I argue in the book is that evidence is incredibly important, but evidence can't tell you what to do. And I think the implications of this for civil servants is that you need to have the evidence right. You need to understand we know that most policies have winners and Losers, pluses and minuses. And what the evidence can do is tell you what those impacts are likely to be. The pluses and minuses, it can't really tell you which ones you should consider are most important because those are political decisions. And so I think the job for government is to try and develop good enough evidence so they understand what the impacts of the policies are going to be and then just have a clear rationale for, you know, there may be cases. For example, if you look at economic evidence, people often say, oh well, if this policy is going to have a negative economic impact, then it is inherently wrong. Now, I don't think that governments have a responsibility to choose the option that will increase GDP most. Right. There are perfectly sensible reasons that governments may decide to do something that costs money if they think that it's the right thing to do or if they think there are social benefits to it.

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So I think the. Just because immigration is politicized doesn't necessarily mean that there is no evidence in this debate. It's just a question of using it in the right way.

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Well, I'd love to chat for hours. We've got to keep this short and sweet. So I just wanted to end by, well, looking ahead a little bit. How optimistic are you that governments can design immigration systems that work better for migrants and employers and destination countries and countries of origin?

[00:25:37.180] 

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think some of the fundamental challenges that governments face can't be resolved. I think there will always be trade offs between the different impacts of different policies, like for example, the trade off between humanitarian goals and economic goals. That is going to come up in a lot of cases and they can't be sort of carefully whittled away through good policy design. They're always going to be there. I think that governments can do a better job. I think that generating evidence to, regardless of people's opinions, there's a value in understanding whether the policies will have the desired effect. And I'm a little optimistic here. I think that the research understanding of the impacts of migration is gradually improving. I think there's also a lot that everyone involved in this debate can do to contribute to a more honest and measured discussion. Recognizing that no policies are perfect, that and that there are trade offs, whether that will improve, I think I'm less clear. I think the political incentives in the current debate don't necessarily favor it.

[00:26:46.590] 

Lots of homework for us all. Thank you so much, Madeleine. This has been a great conversation.

[00:26:50.830] 

Thanks for having me.

[00:26:52.030] 

That was Madeleine Sumption, the Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford and author of What Is Immigration Policy For? I'm left with a sense that we all need to do more to contribute to that honest, measured discussion that she spoke about out and acknowledge more openly that immigration has costs and trade offs Governments and commentators unwillingness to tackle these realities, either because they don't trust publics to understand complicated things or because of concerns about xenophobia and racism, has in fact given more fuel to the fire of anti immigrant voices. So thanks to Madeleine for bringing more light to the issue and I do hope that you'll check out her book. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of World of Migration. If you enjoyed this conversation, please check out our other episodes. You can find World of Migration wherever you get your podcasts and while you're there, please leave us a review. You can find all the episodes for this and other MPI podcasts also at MPI's website, migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. This episode of World of Migration was produced by Daniella Espacio with assistance from Lisa Dixon and editorial input from Michelle Mittelstadt.

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Our show music is called Bright Idea by Geographer.

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I'm Meghan Benton.

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Thank you again for listening and see you next time.