Time for a more honest debate on immigration control

by Matt Cavanagh

Today’s report by the Home Affairs Select Committee into the UK Border Agency makes uncomfortable reading for the Government. The report identifies a series of new “backlogs” building up – unsuccessful asylum seekers, visa overstayers, and foreign-national offenders who should be deported at the end of their sentence – in total numbering almost 300,000.

There are continuing management failings at the agency, and in the way it works with other parts of government, and the Committee is right to highlight them.

But the truth is that while in the early 2000s, this was a failing organisation (not “fit for purpose”, if you prefer) by 2010 it had been dragged up to a roughly similar level of competence and morale to the rest of government.

There are worrying signs that it is slipping backwards, in particular due to spending cuts. The coalition’s line is that the staff being made redundant will be replaced by new technology, but the synchronisation is wrong: rather than waiting for the technology to prove itself before taking the dividend in reduced staff numbers, the cuts started at the same time as the technology programme was mired in delays.

Some of the biggest challenges, however, are beyond the control of the agency – and even that of the government as a whole. Take the issue of removing those who have overstayed their visas, or had their asylum claim rejected, or were here legally but then committed a serious crime which should see them deported. This is one of those problems which, in opposition, both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats colluded with the media in presenting as easy to solve.

It is becoming increasingly clear that, in government, their performance has been no better than Labour’s – if anything slightly worse. The number of foreign national offenders removed at the end of their sentence, which rose each year from 2006 to 2009, has fallen each year since.

Today’s report highlights the growing backlog of visa overstayers, which the home office apparently has no strategy for dealing with – and warns that the backlog of unsuccessful asylum cases, recently cleared, may be starting to build up again.

This is an area where the policy and politics of immigration would be greatly improved if all parties decided to join together and be honest with the media and the public about the constraints on what government can realistically achieve.

The first constraint is the non-cooperation of other governments. If we look at the list of top ten nationalities of current asylum claimants, one of the similarities is that most of these countries either refuse to accept their citizens back, or place such bureaucratic restrictions on the process as to render returns impossible on any meaningful scale. Under international law, there is nothing the UK or any other country can do about this.

The second constraint is the high bar set by our courts, in terms of assurances that those being returned will not be mistreated in their home country. Some think the courts’ attitude admirable, others ridiculous – but whatever view you take, it has little to do with the policy choices of successive governments.

The third constraint is cost – and this is a deeper point than the current spending cuts, significant and risky though those are. Britain has a few thousand immigration staff, compared to over a hundred thousand in each of the police and the armed forces. Opinion polls suggest that people often rate immigration a more important issue than law and order or defence: but are they really prepared for what that implies?

This brings us to the fourth constraint, which is the questionable coherence of the public’s views: they do attach a high priority to dealing with illegal immigration (much higher than to reducing legal immigration), but are reluctant to pay more for it, and intolerant of ways of dealing with it which are invasive in their own lives. Of course, this lack of coherence is encouraged precisely by the collusion of the media and opposition parties in presenting this as an easy problem to solve, rather than confronting people with the difficulties and trade-offs involved. If people are told again and again that this is easy to sort out, it isn’t surprising if they resent a massive bill for doing so, or a lot of interference in their own lives.

The government has actually done more than fail to confront voters with this trade-off: they have made deliberate choices which exacerbate it. They talked up expectations of what they would achieve on immigration control, while imposing spending cuts, and scrapping two elements of the enforcement approach of their predecessors: the practice of detaining families prior to deportation, and the proposed national biometric identity scheme.

Many regard these latter government decisions as admirable, but it was another symptom of the unhealthy debate that no one pressed either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats to say whether they accepted that these decisions would make it harder to deal with illegal immigration, but regarded this as a price worth paying; or whether instead they had some alternative solutions which would deliver the same objectives as the measures they were scrapping.

Some measures are coming in which may, belatedly, help improve performance on removals: home office ministers have just introduced changes to limit the rights of offenders to oppose deportation under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the article which guarantees the right to respect for private and family life); and the e-Borders programme, which the Coalition inherited but has been plagued with further delays, should soon enable the border agency to keep closer track on visa overstayers.

In the meantime, is hard to feel any sympathy for ministers as they struggle with the same damaging headlines as their predecessors. In opposition, they opted to collude with the media narrative that controlling immigration is just a matter of “common sense”; and in government, they have displayed a surprising lack of interest in actually managing their department, preferring instead to sit in their offices making announcements, and blaming officials when anything goes wrong (as the report into last summer’s borders fiasco confirmed).

So in one sense, the Labour party cannot be blamed if it goes on the attack today. But in the long term, all the parties face a strategic choice: to take their turn in opposition at exploiting these stories at the expense of the government of the day, or instead to offer to work together to set out a more realistic narrative on the practicalities of immigration policy, one which compels the media and voters to confront the real constraints and trade-offs involved.

Matt Cavanagh is Visiting Fellow at IPPR


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7 Responses to “Time for a more honest debate on immigration control”

  1. swatantra says:

    They’ll probably declare another ‘amnesty’, wipe the slate clean, and claim they’ve solved the problem. But certainly the issues around ‘Asylum’ really do need sorting out internationally, maybe temporary stay given, but a return within 5 years. and the refugees fleeing the Middle East need to be shared equally within the European nations.

  2. vern says:

    You say – But the truth is that while in the early 2000s, this was a failing organisation (not “fit for purpose”, if you prefer) by 2010 it had been dragged up to a roughly similar level of competence and morale to the rest of government.

    A similar level of competnce presumably of the last administration- is this a bragging point from you? Drawing parallels with government or using them as a benchmark for quality is laughable.

    Allowing 5 miillion new entrants in during your administration will have an irreversible outcome on Great Britain and the full impact has not yet been realised. i wonder if you will adopt the same policies next time you are elected?

  3. aragon says:

    ‘Austerity’ is not consistent with many government policies.

    Perhaps the public deserve better than a combined PR initiative by discredited politicians and technocrats who don’t address the public’s concerns.

    It is a political choice to over promise or over deliver, but it is the role of opposition to highlight the failures of government, against their rhetoric.

    A cozy consensus would just increase the public’s contempt for politicians, if that was possible.

  4. BenM says:

    @vern

    “Allowing 5 miillion new entrants in during your administration will have an irreversible outcome on Great Britain”

    …probably for the better.

  5. Govt_passorfail says:

    The first constraint is the non-cooperation of other governments. If we look at the list of top ten nationalities of current asylum claimants, one of the similarities is that most of these countries either refuse to accept their citizens back, or place such bureaucratic restrictions on the process as to render returns impossible on any meaningful scale. Under international law, there is nothing the UK or any other country can do about this.

    Actually, the Govt could do more – forr example linking overseas aid to returns, but neither the previous Government nor this one have the political will to do so!

  6. Govt_passorfail says:

    The third constraint is cost – and this is a deeper point than the current spending cuts, significant and risky though those are. Britain has a few thousand immigration staff, compared to over a hundred thousand in each of the police and the armed forces. Opinion polls suggest that people often rate immigration a more important issue than law and order or defence: but are they really prepared for what that implies?

    Agree on this point – with approx 15,500 staff (mid cuts and excluding Border Force staff – will be around 10-12,000 post cuts) each UKBA officer would need to arrange the removal of 20 individuals each – assuming no other work (visa applications, asylum applications, etc) was conducted by UKBA, and at approx £10,000 per return, this would cost c£3 bn – around £800m more than UKBA’s annual budget.

  7. Robin Thorpe says:

    A timely article in a week that will feature a strike by UKBA on issues including cuts to the staff employed to manage our borders. Of the 8,500 job cuts planned by the Home Office between 2010 and 2014, 5,300 are in the UK Border Agency and border force.

    This does not sit well with a commitment to control illegal immigration. But then slashing the number of tax inspectors doesn’t correlate with collecting more tax. What more proof do we need that the reduction in public service investment is ideological? If it were truly based on a rational assessment of risk and need then UKBA and HMRC would be protected from cuts.

    Unbelievably Jeremy Hunt waded into this discussion implying that some Tory ministers think that strikers should be sacked! Showing that they have no more respect for the law then the bankers that they represent.

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