Articles

Government fighting yesterday's migration battles

Email this to a friend Print Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit

by Tim Finch, Head of Migration policy, ippr
politics.co.uk - 27 August 2009

New government figures released today showed that the UK population increased by more than 400,000 in 2008. But, in contrast with recent years, this was largely due to increases in the birth rate - net immigration in 2008 was down 44 per cent to 118,000 (from a peak of well over 200,000 in 2005/06).

The rapid decline in net immigration levels is unsurprising. There is strong evidence that migration responds to economic conditions – people come to the UK when there are jobs, and leave when there aren't. The cyclical pattern of migration in the most recent period of economic growth was exaggerated in the UK by the impact of EU accession, but this was only a short-run effect - most of the migrants who came to the UK after 2004 always planned to go home.

Anti-immigration groups will no doubt focus on the fact that grants of settlement in the UK rose by 26 per cent in the second quarter of 2009 compared with the second quarter of 2008. They will claim that this shows that the immigration system is a 'soft touch' and take this statistic as evidence that the UK is set for uncontrolled population growth in the future. They will also highlight the increased numbers of children born to non-UK born mothers.

In fact, the rise in grants of settlement, and in births to non-UK born mothers, is a predictable consequence of the peak in net immigration that the UK saw in recent years. Some of those who came to the UK in the good years have (as they have been exhorted to do) integrated into UK society, and decided to stay for the long term, or to start a family. Since this process of settlement takes a few years, it is unsurprising that this data lags behind migration trends by a similar amount of time.

The truth is that net migration to the UK is declining, and so, in time, will the numbers of people settling here permanently, and the numbers of children born to non-UK born parents. Those who have used recent high levels of net migration to scaremonger about unrelenting and rapid population growth driven by immigration have made the mistake of assuming that the next few years will look like the last. They have also made the false assumption that all or most migrants to the UK want to stay forever, and must be prevented from doing so in order to prevent uncontrolled population growth. (This is sometimes backed up by misreading statistics)

But this view of migration bears little relation to the reality. ippr's recent report Shall We Stay or Shall We Go shows that migration is increasingly temporary – many migrants who come to the UK return home, or move somewhere else. The UK needs to find new ways of managing these more flexible migration patterns to maximise their benefits.

In this context, the government's attempts to appease anti-migration sentiments and population scaremongering by tightening the rules for highly-skilled migrants and introducing a point-based system to limit access to settlement and citizenship look like a case of fighting yesterday's battles. Ministers need to block their ears to the siren cries of the anti-migration groups, focus on the evidence, and find new ways to discuss migration and population with the public which take people's concerns seriously but which also communicate the reality of migration in the 21st century. Hopefully, today's migration statistics will make that job a little easier.

Tim Finch is head of migration at the Institute for Public Policy Research.