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The politics of immigration is deeply contested, and policy-making in this field is no less controversial. In a globalising world in which immigration policy incites debate about identity, citizenship and rights, the consequences of policy are hugely significant. It is difficult to imagine a time when immigration was not a powerful motivating force for the electorate, nor a top priority for parliamentary debates and news bulletins in Britain. After the UK’s 2016 referendum in favour of leaving the EU – a decision which, for many voters, was motivated by concerns about immigration – it has never been more critical to consider the politics of British immigration policy-making within a wider historical context.
While scholars have examined migration flows (‘push-pull’ factors, among others), and there has been some attempt to identify the forces which influence policy-making, few have explained the continuing developments in immigration policy within a critical historical context.1 The policies that determine who is allowed in and who is kept out are designed by governments, which generally comprise of mainstream political actors rather than the extremist politicians or populist media platforms that many researchers choose to focus on.2 To really understand immigration policy, and what drives it in a democracy, the focus needs to be on major – and mainstream – political parties. Until now, political scientists in the comparative tradition have mostly focussed on the impact of extremist parties or the administrative side of the equation (both at the European and at the national levels), possibly because of the lack of collaboration and overlap between researchers working on immigration and those working on mainstream parties.3
European centre-right parties (with the exception of those in Scandinavia) have traditionally enjoyed long periods in power and are therefore in a position to formulate and implement policy. However, they are relatively under-studied compared to their centre-left counterparts. Conservative parties have tended to enjoy a strong electoral lead over the centre-left on immigration and asylum: conservatism, after all, is linked to issues of national identity and upholding the existing ethnic composition of society as well as conserving established ideological traditions.4 Yet immigration is also a source of tension for centre-right parties.5 Traditional conservatives should, in theory, oppose immigration for its impact on established traditions and forms of social cohesion. Neoliberal conservatives should, in theory, welcome immigration as a means of replenishing the labour force, offering greater choice to business, limiting wage inflation and weakening the trade unions. However, in practice different considerations are emphasised as political priorities change.6
Immigration policy needs to be nuanced: a more hard-line stance will satisfy core voters but risks alienating more moderate supporters and undermining party cohesion. It is a difficult balance, and some academics have argued that immigration policy involves dealing with such conflicting dynamics (the benefits to the economy versus the greater costs associated with policing mass immigration) that in practical terms policy is more about ‘managing’ immigration than implementing some of the bolder objectives that parties promise while in opposition.7
Britain has been referred to as Europe’s would-be zero immigration country for its relative success in limiting unwanted migration.8 Partly for this reason, the UK has been labelled a ‘deviant case’ in terms of immigration policy.9 Over the post-war period, the country has undergone a substantial transformation: from a state with a liberal, somewhat extensive notion of citizenship (which was open, at one point, to 600 million people) to a much more restrictive regime with an infrastructure to fine, detain and deport those who enter illegally, or outstay their welcome, while sifting the well-paid high-flyers from the low-paid (and generally) unskilled.
During this time immigration into the UK has been driven by several factors: rapid economic growth, which resulted in labour shortages, with a consequent demand for migrant workers; decolonisation with the end of British rule in overseas territories; serious conflicts around the world, which have generated migration by asylum-seekers; and globalisation as well as greater co-operation between states (especially since the UK joined the European Union or, as it was known in 1973, the European Economic Community), both of which have led to easier travel and greater awareness of conditions in other countries.10 The combination of these factors has resulted in ‘waves’ of immigration, of which each can be characterised by a predominant type, from economic migrant to reunited relative, from asylum-seeker to ‘illegal’ immigrant. Yet it is a puzzle that while Britain has become increasingly open to the free movement of services, goods and capital, it has adopted more restrictive immigration policies, continuing to filter the movement of people and differentiating between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ forms of migration.11 It is by no means clear how this transition has occurred.
In taking as its object of study the centre-right UK Conservative Party, this book focusses on the following question: What has driven the development of post-war Conservative Party immigration and asylum policy?
Generally speaking, research in this field has tended to emphasise economic and social factors, and to privilege institutionalist accounts. While political parties might be regarded as falling under the broad category of institutionalism, parties have rarely been studied as agents of immigration policy change. This book argues that political parties – and more specifically, elite understandings and interpretations of immigration – must be brought in if we are to examine the messy realities of policy-making.
Within the last 20 years or so, scholars of migration policy and politics have sought to emphasise the importance of the interaction between economic, social and political factors. Writing in 1992, James Hollifield said there had been no ‘clear attempt to examine the way in which the interaction of politics and markets affects migration’.12 Instead, scholars had looked at these factors in isolation, concentrating on ‘the economic (push-pull) or the politics (policies) of migration’.13 Hollifield called for a move towards a political economy of international migration. Political economy models generally argue that a country’s system, or ‘type’, of political economy dictates its migration policy.
Since then, scholars such as Georg Menz and Alex Caviedes have argued, respectively, that migration policy is strongly influenced by different systems of political economy and that research in this field must deal with political-economic factors.14 Terms such as ‘managed migration’, in which the economic argument is critical (the focus is on the net economic contribution of immigrants), have become commonplace in the literature. Menz predicts a future in which policy will be ‘less influenced by humanitarian factors and more by economic rationale’, and policy proposals will pay lip service to both populists and pragmatists.15
While many scholars of the political economy tradition concentrate on the tensions that liberal democracies hold for the policy-maker in terms of limiting policy options, this territory is not limited to political economists. In his 2013 text, James Hampshire contends that there are four key features of the liberal state – representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism and nationhood – which produce conflicting imperatives for policy-making.16 The result is policy that is muddled or inconsistent.17
For scholars such as Caviedes and Menz, the system, or type, of political economy is a determining factor in a country’s migration policy.18 In his 2008 text, Menz considers how European countries are seeking to combine more permissive channels for those desirable migrants (the highly skilled and well-paid) with increasingly tough policies for those migrants deemed to be less in demand (the unskilled or asylum-seekers).19 He finds that the relative success of non-state actors, such as employer organisations, in influencing immigration policy depends on the system of political economy and the relative size of elements of the economy which they inhabit.20 However, it is not the case that sectoral preferences lead directly to the sectoral policy outcomes; the state’s type of political economy shapes its immigration policy.
Gary Freeman’s typology of interests finds that immigration policy is a result of both the substance and the relative power dynamics of (economic) interests within society. In his 1995 paper, Freeman looked at the political process in liberal democracies as one major element of self-limited sovereignty.21 Some scholars, such as Joppke, argue that interest groups, or ‘immigration clients’, are responsible for changes to immigration policy.22 Building on his 1995 work, Freeman proposes a typology in which ‘immigration policy can be disaggregated into […] components which are associated with different issues and patterns of benefits and costs that elicit distinctive modes of politics’.23 By bringing together the work on policy of Lowi and Wilson, who argue that there are three categories of polic...
