Britain's dangerous migration fixation

CAMBRIDGE :After 14 long years of Tory rule, the United Kingdom’s general election on July 4 could determine the political fate of the Conservative Party. While Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may have hoped to capitalise on declining inflation and improved economic performance, polls show the Conservatives trailing far behind Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, with Sunak poised to lose his own parliamentary seat.

A more ominous development is that prominent Brexiteer Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, is running for a seat as the leader of Reform UK. Declaring this “the immigration election,” Farage – the country’s most popular politician, according to YouGov – launched his campaign by calling for a freeze on “non-essential” immigration.

Britain’s political discourse in recent years has placed immigration at the top of voters’ minds. British tabloids warn of an “intensifying immigration crisis” without explaining that long-term net migration reaching an all-time high in 2022 was largely driven by health-care workers and asylum seekers from Ukraine and Hong Kong. While Farage aims to further fan the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment and exploit divisions within the Conservative Party over this issue, Sunak, too, has pledged to tighten immigration rules and “stop the boats.”

Sunak has also staked his political capital on a highly controversial and possibly illegal immigration policy that seeks to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. According to Conservatives, the so-called “Rwanda Bill” will ultimately save lives by deterring migrants from making the perilous journey across the English Channel. But international observers, including the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, have warned that the bill could run afoul of human-rights legislation.

Sunak’s policies highlight a core inconsistency in Conservative thinking. Since the days of the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, deference to the free market’s superior wisdom has been the central tenet of British conservatism. Thatcher, a disciple of Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek and a lifelong admirer of his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, believed that government interference in markets would inevitably lead to inefficiency, if not societal collapse.

This was the basis of Thatcher’s attacks on trade unions – the “enemy within” – and her suppression of the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Despite it accelerating the deindustrialisation of northern England, to this day, the Tories admire the Iron Lady’s ruthlessness and disregard for “soft,” supposedly “emotional” considerations like social impact – reflected in the miners’ slogan, “Close a pit, kill a community” – in favor of “hard” economic reasoning.

So, why do Sunak and other Thatcherite Conservatives suffer a sudden loss of faith in market competition when it comes to economic migration? In nearly every other context, Conservatives view lower prices as an economic cure-all and omit no opportunity to weaken worker protections at home and advise developing countries to make their labour markets more “flexible,” arguing that labour should be treated as a “commodity” like any other. Yet, when immigrants increase the labour supply, in theory exerting downward pressure on wages by outcompeting native-born workers, the otherwise unassailable logic of markets is deemed to fail, and the free marketeers’ “night-watchman state” starts acting like a nanny.

The explanation cannot be found in economic reasoning. Contrary to Conservative fearmongering, empirical evidence shows that the economic effects of immigration are overwhelmingly positive. Studies show that instead of substituting native workers, who typically retain preferential access to higher-paying jobs, immigrants complement the existing workforce, with lower-skill migrant workers helping to mitigate the effects of demographic shifts. They also boost demand, thereby creating more jobs and increasing wages, and fuel GDP growth by stimulating innovation among high-skill workers – all outcomes that Conservatives normally champion.

Like the free trade Conservatives advocate, immigration is not zero sum. A recent analysis by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford notes that, contrary to the “lump of labour” fallacy, the number of jobs in the UK is not fixed. New migration waves, the authors note, are most likely to affect migrants already employed in the UK. In fact, migration has had only a small impact on native-born workers’ wages and employment prospects.

The UK’s obsession with immigration is driven more by emotional and cultural anxieties than economic realities. In hindsight, it is clear that the anti-immigration sentiment that drove the 2016 Brexit vote was an act of “economic self-harm,” as former Prime Minister David Cameron put it. But it helped Conservatives evade accountability for the impact of their disastrous austerity policies by vilifying immigrants as opportunistic “welfare shoppers” overburdening public services and causing housing shortages.

This collective desire to externalise blame for the UK’s problems helps explain the Tories’ newfound interest in sociocultural issues. It turns out that when it suits their political needs, Conservatives are willing to admit that, pace Thatcher, there is such a thing as society.

The UK’s migration fixation is either a genuine lapse of reason for Conservatives as they indulge a deep, if dark, psychological need, or it exposes their economic policies as fundamentally disingenuous, whether in northern England or the Global South. By scapegoating migrants, Conservative politicians are trying to postpone the UK’s long-overdue reckoning with its post-imperial decline.

Ironically, British fears about diminished global standing have become a self-fulfilling prophecy under Tory rule. Eight years after the vote to leave the European Union, which polls suggest most Britons now regret, the UK economy is smaller than that of India, its former colony.

Consequently, the real question facing the UK on July 4 is not whether Sunak, the child of African-born Indian immigrants, should be allowed to inflict needless cruelty on asylum seekers. Instead, what native-born Britons must confront this week is their post-imperial identity crisis, which Conservatives have exacerbated. They do not need to be protected from migrants but rather from something far more dangerous: the Tories’ economic policies. To paraphrase Thatcher, the enemy is indeed coming from within.

Antara Haldar, Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, is a visiting faculty member at Harvard University and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant on law and cognition.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.

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