THE IMMIGRATION SMOKESCREEN IS BEGINNING TO LIFT / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

The immigration smokescreen is beginning to lift

Governments are performatively hostile to asylum seekers to distract voters from economic migrants

Alan Beattie

An immigration officer escorts migrants picked up from the English Channel. Clamp downs on asylum seekers have provided cover for governments to admit more economic migrants © Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Rich countries’ management of immigration has long employed the kind of misdirection of which a stage magician would be proud. 

For decades now, governments in the US and western Europe — particularly the UK — have been performatively hostile to small groups of migrants, usually those seeking asylum. 

But this has provided cover quietly to admit large numbers of economic migrants, giving nativist voters what they want in principle and worker-hungry businesses what they need in practice. 

This organised hypocrisy seems to have held together so far. 

But public patience with the double-dealing may be running short.

As the Dutch academic Hein de Haas explains in an illuminating new book about migration, governments face a trilemma. 

They cannot simultaneously maintain economic openness, respect foreigners’ human rights and fulfil their own citizens’ anti-immigration preferences.

“One of the three has to go,” de Haas says. 

“The most attractive option for politicians is to suggest they will clamp down on immigration through bold acts of political showmanship that conceal the true nature of immigration policies.”

The UK has been pulling this trick for more than 20 years. 

In the early 2000s, with immigration already rising, Tony Blair’s government shifted from the traditional British stance of net zero immigration to “managed migration”, explicitly recognising migrants’ contribution to economic growth.

But that was accompanied by an ostentatious clampdown on asylum seekers and toughening of border controls. 

Government papers released a few weeks ago showed that the Blair government contemplated measures such as opening migrant camps on the Scottish island of Mull or the Falkland Islands and, extraordinarily, potentially over-ruling the European Convention on Human Rights.

In the event, pragmatism and the inept bureaucracy of the UK Home Office, which lost tens of thousands of asylum seekers’ applications, meant many were given a right to stay. 

This mass regularisation exercise was largely continued by Theresa May, the Conservative home secretary from 2010-2016, in her spare time from the inane theatre of despatching migrants “go home” vans to drive aimlessly round the streets of London.

The campaign for Brexit in the 2016 referendum focused on restricting foreigners’ rights to come to Britain. 

Boris Johnson, the Brexiter who became prime minister from 2019, concocted an absurd plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for possible settlement there. 

But this, it transpired, was another smokescreen, as Johnson also relaxed visa restrictions for international students and health workers. 

Immigration to the UK rose, even allowing for the one-off effects of admitting large numbers of Ukrainians and Hongkongers for humanitarian reasons.

Similarly, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the US let in large numbers of people during Donald Trump’s presidency, despite his plans to block migrants from Muslim countries and to build his “beautiful wall” on the Mexican border.

Meanwhile, the EU collectively and Italy individually made deals with Libya in 2017 to return asylum seekers to detention camps in which inmates are raped and tortured — a far more repellent policy than anything the UK or Trump ever implemented. 

And yet total immigration to the bloc continued at elevated levels even after the surge of asylum seekers from Syria and elsewhere in the 2015 migration crisis had subsided.

De Haas says governments serious about deterring irregular immigration would spend less on the theatrics of border security and more on finding and deporting undocumented immigrants in the workforce. 

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, notorious for its tough border policies, spends just one-eighth of its budget on domestic homeland security investigations. 

Since 1986, when employing undocumented immigrants was made a criminal offence, there have generally been only 15-20 prosecutions a year, with derisory fines ranging from $583 to $4,667. 

There’s a similar lack of enforcement in Europe.

But have some voters and legislators finally detected the sleight of hand? 

In the UK, Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s successor as Conservative prime minister, has haplessly continued to try to implement the wildly impractical Rwanda plan. 

Its failure has stoked anti-immigration sentiment among many Conservative MPs.

There was a purge of business-friendly moderate centre-right types in his party after Brexit, leaving too few MPs pushing back against the nativist ideologues. 

Sunak has been forced to appease the latter by taking various economically damaging moves, including raising the salary threshold for family visas and preventing foreign students bringing relatives to the UK despite Britain’s huge export earnings from higher education. 

In the EU, leaders such as Italy’s rightwing populist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who surfed into office in 2022 on a wave of anti-immigration rhetoric, are still playing the old double-dealing game. 

Her government has blocked humanitarian groups from rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean while creating nearly half a million work permits for non-EU immigrants.

The EU collectively, which fears losing the global competition for high-productivity workers, is similarly trying to attract skilled non-EU migrants with a “talent pool” scheme aptly nicknamed “Tinder for jobs”. 

But a wave of fervently anti-immigration candidates are high in the polls ahead of the European parliamentary elections this year. 

If Trump is re-elected in 2024, his repulsive comments about undocumented immigrants poisoning America’s blood will also create expectations of a general clampdown. 

Perhaps, particularly in the UK, the tough-on-refugees, soft-on-workers game is up. 

Audiences have worked out the trick and are heckling the conjuror. 

But if the alternative is taking the risk of actually being honest with voters, governments might think it’s worth trying the well-practised ruse once again.