Facts and norms in the immigration debate
“New proposals on how to regulate immigration after Brexit are coming thick and fast”, point out Christina Boswell and James Hampshire, but responding to public anxieties is leading to “muddled thinking”. Here’s how we tend to frame the immigration debate, and the kind of policy prescriptions that follow.
- Is anti-immigrant sentiment a legitimate political preference? Then we need tighter controls and more attention to integration measures.
- Is anti-immigrant sentiment ignorant? Then education is needed.
But “such anxieties are not generally caused by immigration”, the authors argue. Certainly, areas with the highest levels of migration counterintuitively tended to vote Remain in a referendum significantly framed around immigration questions. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that the poorest households were more likely to vote Leave, but educational inequality was the strongest motivator. Significantly, this was a community-level driver, not a individual one.
For this reason, we need to consider the impact of political narratives. This is because “every society has a repertoire of background ideas which influence collective narratives about social problems”, on two levels.
- Broad worldviews such as the British idea of fairness, as expressed by the belief in waiting your turn and playing by the rules. This is why immigration anxieties more often find expression around who gets access to goods, not racial or cultural difference.
- Programmatic ideas about what kinds of policy intervention work, such as border control and a quota-driven immigration system.
These background ideas can be shifted and shaped. For a time, the authors suggest, New Labour successfully told a story about a vibrant Britain - with a worldview based on openness and tolerance, and a programmatic idea about the benefits of skilled migration for economic growth. A similar effort by Germany’s Social Democratic Party - Green Party coalition met initial resistance but gradually changed views.
If norms rather than facts drive public understanding of immigration, and these norms are fluid, four consequences follow. We should be cautious about seeing anti-immigrant worldviews as immutable, and prudent about how much we reshape immigration policy in response. We might want to challenge politicians who rely too much on simple narratives about immigration, and do more to open up a conversation about it where both facts and norms can be discussed.
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