Britain’s immigration policy has been run by researchers who were never right — and rarely challenged
Since at least the Blair era, low-grade Home Office ministers have found it far too easy to justify their harmful migration policies by deferring to the work of a self-fancying epistemic community that tells them what they want to hear.
Migration researchers, by and large, combine two dangerous ingredients; a veneer of respectability, and a burning desire for open borders. Research in the US by the social scientists George Borjas and Nate Breznau found that less than 8 per cent of those working in the migration field believe in a toughening of immigration laws, with 72 per cent favouring a relaxation. These ideological predispositions have a direct impact on modelling choices that are made and the conclusions that are eventually put forward.
Nowhere is this bias more evident than when reading a 2000 Home Office and Cabinet Office paper entitled “Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis”. A piece of polemic, masquerading as empiricism, that conformed with the existing anti-British psychosis of Tony Blair’s frontbenchers and ultimately defined New Labour’s open border experiment. It brought about one of the most liberal migration systems in all of Europe, dramatically increased low-skilled worker routes, and aimed to double the number of foreign students in the country.
The piece reflects the intellectual inadequacies and personal desires of its authors, relying less on data and more on wild assertion, perhaps best exemplified by a central premise of the paper that “Britain is a country of immigration”.
To the authors – Jonathan Portes, Sarah Spencer et al — it was somehow “obvious” that allowing foreign students to stay after completing a humanities degree at Swindon Roundabout University (formerly North Wiltshire Polytechnic) would bring vast economic benefits. It was, they insisted, “widely recognised that zero or near-zero migration of low-skilled workers to the UK is neither an available nor a desirable policy choice”. And, even more, that the majority of the public “consistently regards immigration has having a positive effect on British culture”.
No actual evidence, few proper citations, and the kind reckless postulations you would expect from a sixth form debating society. Yet its conclusions were adopted wholesale by a Labour government that wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, and led to net migration running at an average of 200,000 per year for the next decade.
The country never recovered from the decisions taken off the back of these scribblings. Indeed, researchers have been compounding the problem ever since.
In 2004 the Eurofederalist Labour Party were weighing up whether to open Britain’s borders to citizens of the A8 EU member states. The same caste of ideologues told them that forecasts suggested between 5,000 and 13,000 would arrive. In reality, 129,000 migrants arrived between 2004 and 2005 alone.
In 2018, as Theresa May somehow clung on as Prime Minister, the post-Brexit EU Settlement Scheme was created to give EU citizens resident in Britain at the time of departure the indefinite right to stay in the country and claim welfare. Whitehall’s eminent migration researchers estimated that 4.1 million migrants would be eligible for the route and plans were put in place on this basis. As it turns out, 5.8 million people, and counting, have signed up so far.
Not to be outdone, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson allowed himself to be bounced into the creation of the Health and Social Care visa. Again, “expert” Civil Servants in the DHSC told ministers that the numbers using the route would be small — somewhere in the region of 6,000 a year. Again, they were wrong. In 2023, 348,000, predominantly non-European migrants, arrived under this route.
This is not to absolve the last Tory government of any blame. Many were very happy with open borders, and for those claiming to want migration control, it is their fault for being naive, for blindly following advice, and for not following through.
As Milton Friedman said, “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results”. We now have nearly twenty-five years of evidence which shows that the policies being advocated for by migration researchers have been an unmitigated disaster for the country. Whether the current situation is by their design or just incompetence, they have done enough damage and it is time they were put out to pasture.
