The latest ONS figures suggest that net migration to the UK has hit a new record, meaning that the UK government’s pledge to reduce net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’ seems further than ever from being achieved. Christina Boswell explains that while the target is a failure, it has nonetheless managed to make the immigration debate one of numbers, and has irreversibly affected the way we define immigration policy
Figures released by the ONS today suggest that net migration to the UK stands at an all time high, at 336,000. So why hasn’t the government killed off its compromising ‘tens of thousands target’? One obvious answer is the political risk of abandoning a target once it has been set. Cameron and Theresa May are fully aware that the target is in many ways a liability. But they have calculated that dropping the target at this stage will send out an even more damaging political message: that their commitment to reducing immigration has been diluted.
But while the target may have been a failure, it has had significant effects on the way we talk about immigration. By setting a single, high-profile, quantitative target, the government has irreversibly shifted how we define and assess policy on immigration.
In our ESRC project on the Politics of Monitoring, we distinguish two main effects of this type of quantitative performance measurement. The first concerns how we categorise and count immigrants. The exercise of counting net migration implies suppressing important distinctions between groups – whether students, intra-company transferees and European Economic Area nationals, family migrants or refugees – and counting them as equivalent units. This glosses over important differences in the reasons behind migration, for example whether it is economic, family-related, linked to study, or fleeing persecution. And it overlooks the varied impacts of immigrants on the UK economy and society, as well as differences across regions of the UK.
Importantly, this re-classification of which immigrants ‘count’ has shifted political attention, bringing previously unproblematic – or even unobserved – groups of immigrants into the political spotlight. Few people were anxious about foreign students or high-skilled labour migrants before the target was introduced. Now they are all part of a problem to be reduced. What’s more, these new classifications are now embedded in the way statistics are produced and disseminated, and the way in which the public expects to appraise the government and hold it to account.
The second effect concerns the role of measurement. It has now become normal to frame immigration issues through using statistics, and especially in terms of overall flows. The use of numbers provides a particularly clear and authoritative way of expressing goals, one that appears more precise and objective than qualitative descriptions. It promises an especially rigorous way of holding government to account.
Opposition parties have played into this, frequently pegging their critique on the government’s failure to meet its own target. This constant invocation of the target – even by its detractors – only reinforces the idea that such targets are valid and appropriate ways of framing policy. Meanwhile, Labour has struggled to articulate a clear and compelling message on immigration, partly because of its (justifiable) refusal to adopt a clear and simply target. The fact of the matter is, targets work very well as political messages.
We may dislike targets. We may find them simplifying, distorting and in many cases unrealistic. But once policies are framed in terms of precise quantitative goals, it is very difficult to undo these effects. In UK immigration debates, it has become difficult to resist assessing policy in terms of overall inflows of migrants, or articulating goals in terms of numbers. The net migration target may have failed, but it has profoundly influenced the way we deliberate on immigration policy.
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Note: This article was originally published on the author’s blog, Politics, Knowledge & Migration, and is reposted here with permission. Please read our comments policy before posting.
Christina Boswell is Director of Research for the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh
Featured image credit: Danny Howard CC BY 2.0
What has not been addressed in this piece is that being net migration it doesn’t actually give the full figure of immigration because the amount of emigrants is taken from the gross amount of immigrants. It also doesn’t address the simple fact that whilst we can and have cut migration from outside the eu, which means the loss of Indian Doctors in particular, we cannot and haven’t been able to stop the burgeoning number of migrants from the eu, so instead of allowing highly qualified useful migrants into the country we now get any european who is unemployed coming looking for work. The migrants from europe can and do apply for benefits on day one and it is not infrequent that they are sending monies back to their native country.
David Cameron set an arbitrary limit of 100,000 net immigrants without explaining why this level was sustainable and a higher level was not. Since he set this target we have had a average of 200,000 net immigrants each year while our NHS is still creaking on; people are managing to find houses and schools and our economy has steadily improved. Was there or is there any justification whatsoever for the target of tens of thousands? I tried a Freedom of Information request but got nowhere. My wife is an immigrant and I had to prove that I could house and support her and she had to prove she could speak English before she arrived. Now, despite the fact that I own our houses in UK and abroad and have no rent costs I would not be allowed to bring her to the UK unless I earned £18,600 a year. This is to stop her being a burden on the taxpayer – despite the fact that she is not allowed access to public funds/benefits anyway.