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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Welcome, everybody. I love to see you all here. Welcome to the 2026 Robbins Lectures. I checked up this is the 42nd year of these lectures. They started very soon after Band Robbins died. The first speaker was Rudy Dornbush and we've had since then a whole series of fascinating lectures on issues of profound importance to the way that we live. And what could be more important today than the issue of immigration? I mean, it is top, as you know, of the political agenda in, I think, almost every advanced country. It generates huge emotion. But of course, these issues can only be resolved by reason and evidence. And who better to present us with that than Alan? So Alan is one of the leading Labour economists in the world and one of the most interesting. Until 2016, he was best known for his work on minimum wages because he'd shown that the effect they have on jobs is a lot less than people like myself had thought it was. And the reason he gave for this, and it was the reason is the power of employers in the labour market, otherwise known as the monopsony. So he wrote a book called Monopsony In Motion, which was one of the most important economics books written in this century, and of course had a huge influence on minimum wage policy in Britain, which has actually been a pretty successful activity. So that was up till 2016, when he was grabbed into the new field of immigration. He was appointed chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, Real hot seat job. He was appointed the day before the British people voted to leave the European Union, which didn't make the job any easier. And he stayed at that job until 2020. And he's now written on the basis of that experience and subsequently this wonderful book, incredibly full of really good evidence, beautifully analyzed, but also presented the whole thing in a wonderfully readable, rational, common sense way through a very, very difficult issue. So we're really thrilled that Alan, that you've agreed to give us these lectures. So this is the first of three. Each Monday, next Monday and the Monday after that, same time. This lecture, Alan will talk for about 50 minutes, then we'll have time for questions and comment and then we'll have time for a drink. So you're all invited after this. Don't disappear, stay for a drink outside while Alan will be doing a book signing for his book that's in the atrium out here. So, enough of preliminaries, Alan, tell us what we should think.
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Thank you, Richard, for that very kind introduction. I guess I should start by thanking you as well. This project was very much a sort of stop start project and I stopped working on it many times and whenever I stopped, it was always Richard who told me, no, you have to start it again. So I have to thank him for that eventually coming to completion. Whether you, the audience, want to thank him for coming to conclusion, I guess we'll have to wait until you've heard me talking. So, as Richard said, this is based on the book that I've written that was just published. And you might have noticed that immigration is a very prominent and a very divisive issue in the politics of many countries.
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Now.
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It figured prominently in the debates around Brexit, connected to the rise of reform in the uk. Donald Trump's two campaigns in the US Populist parties, which are now in pretty much every other high income country, draw much of their support from voters who are anxious about migration. And those populists are increasingly close to or even, even in government and even more mainstream parties, their policies have been influenced as they attempt to address that voter anxiety about immigration. And if we just take the UK at the moment, more Brits name immigration as an important issue than anything else. So this is survey that's done every month. This is December 2025. You can see that 46% of people in Britain said that they thought immigration was one of the important issues facing the country. These figures add up to more than 100% because people can give multiple answers. I'm not saying they're right to say that, but that's what they're saying right now. Now we've got data on that question more or less going back 50, 50 years. So this is essentially the same question, except that this is, if you asked us, just name one, what is the most important issue facing Britain? This is the fraction of people who said immigration. So if we go back to the late 1970s, there was a sort of spike of concern about immigration. And then there was a long period of sort of 20 years from 1980 to 2000, when it really didn't figure politics at all. And if you're old enough to remember that, it just nobody talked about it at all really. And then roundabout, the late 90s, early 2000s becomes a more salient part of our politics. At various points in the last 25 years, it's been more salient than others. Sometimes there's something else going on, the financial crisis, the pandemic, which mean that, you know, immigration isn't seen as the single most important. But we're currently in a period when concern about immigration is not the highest level it's ever been, but one of the higher levels. And in these lectures, what I'm going to try to explain is, well, why we are where we are with immigration being such a salient issue, why actually immigration policy is hard, but also why we make it harder than it needs to be. And then to try and be a little bit more constructive, how to make it better. And I think you should think that we're actually trying to go back to a situation where immigration is not so salient and a part of our politics. And so, as Richard said, this is the first of three lectures and they've sort of got different themes. So today's lecture is about why immigration policy is hard, but we make it much harder than, than it needs to be. The second lecture is going to be how migration affects destination countries. Like how is the UK affected by migration to the uk? And we're going to sort of be looking, talking about what is the evidence of the impacts of migration on demography, on aging, on the economy, on the labor market, prices, profits, public finances, public services, community crime, all the myriad, myriad ways in which immigration affects, affects the economy and society. Ultimately it's all about trying to think about how migration affects people's lives. And then in the third lecture I'm going to say, well, okay, with all that information, what should our migration policy be? How can we make it better than it is at the moment? So I'm going to start with just a little bit of background. Housekeeping. So who is a migrant? Well, this is a sort of standard OECD UN definition. The immigrant population consists of persons residing in a country but born in another country. So that sounds very simple. Born in, you know, most people know the country they were born in. Where you were born doesn't change. Sometimes which country you were born in does change because borders move around, but for most people they don't. The only bit of this definition I think you might say, well, what does residing mean? And in practice the standard definition is someone who will be described as a long term migrant is someone who moves to another country for more than a year. And a short term migrant is someone between three months and a year. And a visitor would be someone who goes to another country for less than three months. And when people talk about migration, really it's just a shorthand for long term migration. So I'm going to just talk about migration. But this is sort of normally kind of Long term migration. So what's been happening to the share of migrants in the population? So this shows you what's been happening going back sort of 35 years to 1990, first of all, in the world. What was the share of migrants in the world's population? And you can see that in 1990 it was a bit under 33% of the world's population were migrants. And that's gone up. It's gone up a little bit. Really. It's about 3.6% by 2025, 2024 here. So it's gone up, but it's pretty low. It's gone up a bit, not very much. But if we start looking at different countries in the world, you begin to get, as you know, that isn't true of absolutely everywhere. So if you look at say high income countries like the UK, you would see that in 1990 the migrant share was about, you know, seven and half percent of the population and today it would be over 15% of the population. So actually in high income countries the share of the migrants in the population is higher, always has been higher than the world average and it's risen by more and more. You know, there's a lot of variation within those high income countries. So if you look at the countries with the highest migrant share in the population, this would be the UAE, Dubai, where population 75% of the population would be migrant Singapore, almost 50%. Then you get sort of Switzerland, Australia, about 30%. And then there are a lot of countries in the sort of 15 to 25% range. Not always the countries that you think of as having lots of migrants are the ones. So for example, the US often styles itself as a country of immigrants, but actually has a relatively low share of migrants in its population, lower than most countries in Western Europe. But there are also, there are some high income countries with relatively low shares of migrants in their population. Eastern Europe, so Poland in this example here, but also the rich economies of South Korea and Japan, rich Asian economies, although even in these countries we would see the share of migrants rising, although from a very low base. So that's a sort of picture of what is happening now. How well is this all understood? And the answer to that question is not at all well. So people often have not really a very good understanding of, of how many migrants there actually are. So this is the response to a question in a number of European countries about what do you think the share of migrants in the population in your country is? It's a bit old, this data, but I think you get the same results today. So the blue columns here are the perceived share, the average across people's views and the red shares are the actual. And what you notice is basically everywhere in all countries, though in some countries much more than others, people overestimate the share of migrants in the population. So in the UK 10 years ago, people thought the share was actually double what it actually was. And they're also not very well informed about the mix of migration. They tend to overestimate the numbers of, of unauthorized migrants, what I would call unauthorized migrants, these people not having, who do not have a legal status in the country, and asylums and asylum seekers. So this is actually from an opinion poll last year in a number of European countries. Do you think there are more immigrants staying in your country legally or illegally? And in all of these countries, the most common answer that there are many more staying illegally than legally illegally. Now, it's hard to measure the size of the illegal or unauthorized population, but there are no credible estimates that are anywhere, anywhere near this. I mean, the country which is thought to have the highest share of migrants who are unauthorized would be the US where it's about before the latest sort of chaos, there was about a quarter of migrants in the US were, did not have, were not legally there. So this is completely at variance with reality. And so that's one important thing to understand which is going to inform the way possibly that people think about migration. But there's also a tendency to go, I think to go too far in the other direction and actually to underplay the changes that have occurred. So these are two quotes from two very well respected experts and deservedly well respected. So almost everything that they write I sort of agree with, except I'm not so sure about these quotes. I haven't put their names on here. That's, you know, because it's sort of a bit invidious. You have to go and buy the book. I do have book names. So the first one is current levels of international migration are neither exceptionally high nor income increasing. And then the second one, why the panic? The fraction of international migrants in the world population in 2017 was roughly what it was in 1960. Now, I've shown you that both of those statements are more or less true about the world as a whole. But if you're talking to someone who's anxious about immigration into Britain, they might be inclined to say, I don't care about the world as a whole, I care what's happening in Britain. And in Britain, these statements would not be a good description of what has actually happened in the last 35 years. And in fact in almost all high income countries, the share of migrants is at or close to an all time high. As far back as we have statistics and it's still rising. So those are sort of five countries. The red dotted line here is the United States. We have statistics going back to 1850 for the US. The share of migrants in the US population peaked around 1900 when it was about 15% of the population. That is sort of where it is today. Actually. That was the historic peak. You might notice that actually the share of migrants in the US population then fell to be about 5% in 1970. You might think, well, why did that happen? Well, that's because the US introduced a very restrictive immigration policy in the 19. If we look up here, other countries, you may think of traditional countries of migration, Australia and Canada, again, their migrant shares today are at very close to historic highs from 100, 150 years ago and still going up. And then if you take countries like the two examples I've just put in here, UK and Sweden, which after the Second World War had a migrant share of the population, perhaps 5%, under 5%. In the UK in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the migrant share went from about 5% to about 7.5%. In the 25 years since 2000, it went from 7.5% to 15% and it's still going up. So I don't think it's right to look at this and say that nothing has happened, that this is all a fuss about nothing. This is different from what historically has been happening in these countries. If we talk specifically about the uk, it's gone through in the last few years an extraordinary boom and now bust in the level of net migration. So this shows you the level of numbers net migration in the UK going back to the 60 years to the mid-1960s. Now, until about 1990, the UK had negative net migration. So that meant that more people were leaving than were coming. It wasn't. We did have immigration, of course, but there were more people leaving than were coming. And then round about the late 1990s, we began to move into a period of positive net migration. Actually that's about the period in which immigration began to become more salient in our politics, as I showed you a while ago, saying it's necessarily connected, but it's not totally unconnected. And then we moved into a period in which net migration was between sort of 2 and 300,000 a year. And then a couple of years ago we had Net migration of over 900,000 in a single year. Now, just that sort of population growth, growth of about 1 1/2% in a single year. Now, just to give you some idea of how unusual that is, that's quite possibly the fastest percentage annual rate of population growth for 200 for 200 years. And we actually have data. I'm not saying how good it is on population in the UK going back almost 1,000 years. This theory starts in 1086. And in only no more than 30 of those years, out of almost 1,000, did we have population growth in percentage terms as high as we had a couple of years ago. So to say, I think it's wrong to say this is nothing was happening. This is quite, really quite unusual. And for the most part, these rises in migration that I've talked about have not had public consent. Most people, when asked, say they think migration is too high. This is again, another opinion poll, sort of from a year or so ago. You know, selection of countries. The red bars are the fraction of people who say they think migration is too high. Green, about right. Blue, too low. And you can see that in pretty much all of these countries. Well, in all of these countries, again, some more than others, there are many more people saying that they think migration is too high, certainly than too low, but even many more saying that it's too high than about right now. Again, that's just about the overall level of migration. People, you know, I think for good reason, don't think of all migrants in exactly the same way. So this is, you know, what migrant groups do. Europeans have more negative or more positive views about. So the numbers, if you're to the right, that's a more negative view of that particular type of migrant. So people here say they're not very keen on migrants who come to the country to claim benefits, on people who enter the country without authorization, who are working but without a valid visa. And then we sort of go down until, by the time we get to doctors, migrant doctors, nobody's particularly worried about them. Skilled workers who've gone through, you know, the proper visa process, nobody's worried about them. International students and so on. So people, you know, have more positive views about some sorts of migrants than others. But, you know, overall, they tend to have thought that migration has been too high. And that's not really a new thing. I mean, the country where we've got the most data from on this is the US being asked this question. Do you think you want immigration to be increased, decreased, or the present level going back to the 1960s. And there's only one year in those 60 years in which there were more people who said they wanted the level increased rather than decreased. And most of the time the most popular answer has been by quite a considerable margin to say they want lower levels of immigration. For 60 years, Americans have been saying, now you can also see on this right at the end, like coming up to the present, the sort of wild gyrations in public opinion that we've got in the US moment. So you can see that in 2024, there was a big spike up in the fraction of Americans saying they wanted to immigration decreased. That was one of the two issues which American voters, why American voters preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris. So that's a big reason for why Donald Trump got elected for his second term. You can also see the big fall in 2025 in this, which is when Americans look at what Donald Trump is actually doing on migration and are much less influential, enthusiastic about that. So a simple explanation for why immigration has ended up so prominent in our politics is that there's been this gap for a long time between what people want and what they've got. And that's why there's discontent around migration. And if you want to make migration into a much less salient issue, you've got to close that gap, you've got to reduce that gap. And very simplistic way. There are two ways you could do that. You can say we're going to change what people want to make them want what they're getting, or we're going to change what people get to bring that in line with what they want. And that's a sort of very binary way of thinking. And that leads to what I think of as the sort of two main groups talking about immigration in our politics is that broadly the people who want to change what people get. Sorry, change what people want, they're the people who tend to think of themselves as pro migration. So their story would be to say migration has big benefits that most people don't understand. The things that migrants get blamed for, you know, they're not responsible for those things. Instead, it would be kind of inequality or billionaires or austerity or neoliberalism or low productivity growth, you know, delete as appropriate according to what you think. And a lot of what why people, you know, want lower migration is just whipped up by the media. So that's sort of pro migration side. On the other side, you've got the people who tend to be the sort of anti migration group that want to change what people get. Their story is basically, in a democracy, policy is supposed to reflect public opinion, the balance of public opinion. And in immigration, that isn't what has been happening. And, you know, if they say, well, what's the story there? The story there is that the countries end up being. Being run by elites who are out of touch. Perhaps they're incompetent or perhaps they at best don't care about ordinary people. Or worse, they strongly prefer, they prefer migrants to local people. And what really needs to change is the politics so that people get what they want. And so you can see, I hope, how this leads to a very binary way of thinking about migration. And I think this is where our discussion of migration begins to go wrong, where we begin to make more of a mess of it than we need to. So the debates about migration end up as basically too binary and too polarised. So what do I mean by that? Well, first of all, what do I mean by saying the immigration discussion is too binary? Binary is basically saying that, you know, saying immigration is good. No, it's not. Immigration is bad. And so we divide quite easily into tribes of two tribes, people who think of themselves as pro immigration, those of them who think of themselves as anti. Down here is an opinion poll. When you say, would you say yourself permanently, personally, are you pro immigration or anti immigration? You can see people don't find it hard. Most people don't find it hard to answer that question, kind of question. I don't know how your audience would answer that question. See, 28% say they're pro immigration, 41% anti immigration. Of course, the more saying anti the pro reflects the opinion polls that I've shown you earlier. And as I've said before, the people who are pro immigration tend to think we need to change what people want. People just don't understand really what is the impact of migration. And the people who are anti want to change what people get saying the politics. We just need the people to have power and then we'll get what we want. But also in this, once we have this sort of binary divide, we tend to get polarization as well. So polarization is sort of immigration very good versus immigration very bad, basically. And, you know, we have polarization in a lot of parts of our sort of political discourse these days, not just immigration, but immigration is a pretty prominent place where we do that. And I think we see, for me, we see both pro and anti tribes, sort of dehumanising migrants. So David Cameron, when he was prime minister, talked about a swarm of Migrants. Suella Braverman, when she was Home Secretary, talked about an invasion of migrants crossing the channel in small growth. And so obviously that's sort of dehumanizing migrants in a not very nice way. But the pros tribe also tend to do this a little bit. So Zach Polanski, a newly elected leader of the Greens, his first article in the Guardian, not really about green issues, it's about migration. It says migration is Britain's superpower. And you know, and well, you know, that's sort of. What does that mean? That means sort of migrants are what, superheroes and superheroines with some hip. Some kind of superpower. I don't think that's terribly helpful either. Now, of course, one is much nicer than the other. Most of us would rather be called a superhero or superheroine than we would an insect sect. I've always had a sneaking regard for Beatles, but that's put that to one side for the moment. But migrants are just people. They're just ordinary people. They're not really superheroes, most of them. And then you get very dramatic claims about the costs and benefits of migration. I've just sort of cut a couple of articles here. So one saying the left can no longer hide from the terrible costs of mass migration. Migration. It's not just migration, it's mass migration. It's not just the costs of migration, it's the terrible costs of migration. So you can see this very polarizing, apocalyptic kind of language that comes in on the other side. Low migration risks an economic doom loop, which sounds pretty bad for the uk. So we get these sort of polarizing arguments on both these two tribes kind of polarizing. And I think that adversarial style of debate really serves us very badly. Both sides in this can't really understand why the arguments they find so convincing don't persuade people on the other side. Both sides very free with their criticisms of the other side, but perhaps not looking at their own arguments quite as much as they should. Probably includes me. And you sort of end up thinking at the other side of just beyond reason. There's no, you know, that's your only explanation for why they don't accept your arguments. And as we'll see more on this in sort of next week's lecture, I've got to advertise that a little bit to get some of you to come back. I think both sides are guilty of sort of cherry picking evidence, exaggerating it, misrepresenting sometimes, sometimes just simply making up evidence. And if you're someone who's Sort of in the middle it becomes very hard to know actually who or what to believe. And I'll just give a couple of examples of this kind of thing of how people end up talking to themselves and not really trying to persuade people on the other side who ultimately are the people that you've got to talk to if you want to your views to become more popular. So here are a couple of T shirts you can buy. So the first T shirt is just people move. Some of you may be familiar with this. So the argument here is basically people have always moved in search of a better life and so that's natural. And so putting obstacles in the way of people seeking out a better life, that's unnatural. And so that's a sort of pro migration argument. Now is that argument particularly convincing to someone on the other side? I suspect it isn't. They probably would think. Well I can think of lots of examples. I mean there's an element of truth in it because obviously if people hadn't migrated in search of a better life, we'd have ended up, you know, stuck in some tiny corner of East Africa where we evolved and we probably have gone extinct by, by now. But you know, what would someone anxious about migration think about this? Well, they might say, I can think of lots of bits of history where one group of people moving into a space where there are already some other group of people. It wasn't the other group of people welcomed them with open arms, they resisted it. And to describe the moving as natural and the resistance as unnatural, well that isn't really. That's a rather one sided look at me. So I don't think this slogan is particularly convincing to someone on the other side. If you wear this T shirt you're probably signalling you're part of the pro migration tribe. But I don't think you're doing very much to convince anyone else who's more skeptical I should say this comes from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. You can buy it on there, part of their merchandise. Who I actually think do, I don't agree with everything they do but they do a fantastic job. But what I would suggest is that give them £20 and don't bother with a T shirt. That would be my suggestion. But you can find things that are far worse than that. So here's another one. Stop ignorance, not immigrants. How is that going to be seen by somebody who's on the other side? Well first of all you come across as saying you don't think you should have any controls on immigration at all you should be in favour of completely open borders. I don't know if that is what you think, but that's, you know, you can understand how someone would think that and then anyone who doesn't believe in that is totally ignorant. I don't think that's going to convert many people to your way of thinking. So I think this is just signalling that I'm part of this group, separate from another group. But obviously it's not only this side, it's the other side as well. So in the 2015 election, the Labour Party had five main election pledges and one of them was controls on immigration. And they had that because, and I think they were probably right to think this, that voters thought they were a bit soft on immigration and so they, they wanted to send out a strong message that they weren't. And they had all of their pledges on mugs. This is the only one of them that anyone ever remembers. Now, the trouble with this is how this is received by someone on the pro side. Now, at one level, you think, okay, I'm going to have a mug about immigration controls on immigration, or I mean, I can understand why they didn't have a mug saying, no controls on immigration, that wouldn't be a very good idea. But controls on immigration. The problem is it's a bit vague, like, what controls do you have in mind? And immediately people get a bit suspicious and you might say, well, we're going to put some detail in here, but the UK's immigration laws are over a thousand pages long. So that's either a very big mug or some very small writing, if you put all of that on here. But it also, what comes across, I think, as many people wrong. It seems to be reveling in the idea of controlling migration, that you're actually going to enjoy it. And so this again is not. This just turns off one set of people at the same time as it is meant to address things. So both sides sort of end up just talking to each other. So at this point I think I'm sounding like what I probably am, which is a sort of grumpy, grumpy old man and complaining about everybody. So I'm going to try and be a bit more positive. So before I do that, actually I forgot this slide as well. So I think we're probably all quite susceptible to what's called motivated reasoning, that we have a particular worldview, we're very quick to believe anything that aligns with that. If we read an article that's aligned with it, we're very Quick to criticize, ignore sort of downplay claims that they, and I think for I like, actually Tim Harford is a sort of journalist, economic journalist, advice that, you know, when you're asked to believe something, stop for a moment and notice your own feelings. And if you're feeling, you know, are you feeling, you know, because a lot of us have included, myself included, read an article about migration, have very strong emotional response straight away and you know, to actually just pause and think and notice that and think about how that may actually be affecting how you react to that. Okay, so now I'm going to try and be a bit less sort of grumpy, a bit more positive and constructive. So migration policy in a nutshell, my view is we're going to have immigration, no question about that. But I also think there's no doubt we're going to have controls on immigration. So open borders. Now, I don't think it's a realistic policy and I'll explain why that is in a minute. And a migration policy just means saying yes to some people who want to come to a country like the UK means saying no to others. That's it basically means saying yes to some people who want to stay means saying no to others. And so migration policy inevitably involves selection. We're saying yes to one person, no to somebody else. And we're familiar with selection in many parts of our lives. When students apply to the lse, we say yes to some applicants, we say no to others. People apply to jobs, we say yes, you've got the job, no to the other people, choose life partners, say yes to some people, no to others. So we're familiar with this idea of, you know, having to make these choices. So why does migration policy end up so hard? And I think the fundamental reason for that is that our world is very unequal. And so where you live or where you live is the most important determinant of your quality of life. And where you were born is the most important determinant of where, where you live. And the consequence of this is that more people are going to want to move to high income countries like the UK than are realistically going to be admitted. And in economist jargon, we're sort of in a permanent state of excess supply of potential migrants. And that sets up the underlying sort of tension. And I'll give an example of the extreme differences in life chances. So last year, about 66,000 people across the central Mediterranean, from North Africa to Europe, each of them probably paid more than a business class airfare to make that journey it's dangerous. There's like almost last year, I think approximately 1% of those people died making that journey previous years. Actually, in the book I say 2%, but I think last year the figure was 1%. So on the coast of North Africa, thinking about getting in a boat. Boat, there's a 1% chance of dying in the next few hours. Nonetheless, your life expectancy almost certainly goes up if you get in the boat. Why is that? Because if you're say, age 25 and you remained in sort of West Africa, where many of these people are originating from, you can expect to live another 42 years. So if you didn't make the journey, you could have had 42 years back home. And so you risk losing 1% of 40, 42 years, that's five months of life. On average. In Western Europe, life expectancy is much higher. You can expect to live another 55 years if you're 25, and so that's 13 years more. And these migrants are probably not getting all of those extra 13 years, but I think they're probably getting a lot more than those five months. And so your life expectancy gets up by getting in the boat, even though you might die in the next few hours. So these are not irrational decisions, they're perfectly rational. And, you know, that's basically the bottom line is that migrants and their children typically gain from migration. Even though migrants often end up towards the bottom of the income distribution in their destination countries, world inequality is so high they'd be better still going to be better off than if they had not migrated. And, you know, some of these gaps are very large. So, for example, Michael Clemens, he says, you know, his work is quite sort of careful on this. He says that the average low skill Indian working in the uae, in Dubai or whatever is better off in material terms than the average university graduate back home in India. So, you know, that again comes from the fact that the world is so. And you know, the evidence, you know, suggests that perhaps not surprisingly, given that level of inequality, many people, though not most, would like to move. So just give you some examples of this. So the US sort of had, until it was recently suspended by Donald Trump, something called the diversity visa. This offered 50,000 green cards. So permanent residents offered through a lottery every year. 20, 20, 15 million applications, 23 million people. In some countries in the world, over 10% of the adult population is applying to move to the US every year. The UK has a young professionals visa for Indians. Indian Young professionals visa offers 1500 places every six months. One round of that had over 300,000 applications for people who wanted to move to the UK. There are other visas in which we see kind of wait time. So it's like you apply for the visa and then you have to wait to get to the head of the line. So the Australia has a visa for elderly parents. Wait time is 30 years. That's for elderly parents, you know, and then we have things like, you know, the Gallup World poll asks people whether you would like to migrate permanently. 20, 23, 16% of the adults worldwide said yes. I mean that's just, it's easy to say that. It's easy to say on a February in London, yes, I'd like to move to the Caribbean. So, you know, it's that kind of thing. 80% of those want to move to a high income country. We've got some evidence on how many people actually move when they are free to do so. So for example, you look at Puerto Rico and the United States. Puerto Rico is not exactly a country, but it's also not a state. But there's free movement between Puerto Rico, Puerto rico in the U.S. gDP per capita in Puerto Rico, about $40,000 a year, which actually makes it a high income country. On the definition I showed you earlier, it's not a country, sorry, but high income territory and the US but a lot higher. 84,000 and roughly. So there's a sizable income differential. About 40% of the people born in Puerto Rico move to the continental US and that doesn't cause problems because Puerto Rico is small. It's got a population of 3 million. So it's 40% of 3 million. That's nothing relative to the US population of 340 million as a whole. But if you were to think about this in the world as a whole, you're talking about a lot more people in poorer countries and those countries are a lot poorer than Puerto Rico. And that's why I don't think open borders as now is remotely a feasible policy. Just the numbers of people who would move would just be, would be fairly chaotic fairly quickly. And the difficulties in migration policy arise because the number of people who want to migrate to high end contractories is going to be greater than the numbers who are going to be admitted. So our migration policy is going to basically say no to far more people than we're going to say say yes to. And you know, for the most part those people we're saying no to have done nothing wrong. I mean, we do that all the time when students apply to the LSE and we Say no to them. It's not that we say they've done something wrong. We just say we haven't got enough places to say yes to everybody. And I think that fact, that imbalance, is what makes migration policy hard for two reasons. The first is that saying no is hard, hard for some people. And then the second is what I call the infernal circle of migration policy. I'll try and talk about that a bit more a bit later. Okay. So first of all, saying no is hard. And I think this is a problem that particularly afflicts people who think of themselves as pro migration. So as I've said, migration can transform the lives of migrants and nobody really wants to say no. The benefit to migrants from migration. Migration is a strong reason to try to be open to migration. And then choosing who to say yes to and who to say no to involves very difficult, uncomfortable trade offs. You're sort of deciding whose life am I going to transform and whose life I'm not going to transform. That's really uncomfortable. And as a result of that, it's so uncomfortable, there's an understandable tendency to pretend we don't have to make that choice at all. You know, you know, just to gloss over it. But unfortunately, I think we do have to make what are very hard decisions. Now, you might think the saying no is not hard to people who think of themselves as anti migration. They don't really care about people in the rest of the world. But migration policy is hard for them as well. And the reason for that is that as I've said, there are people who would like to migrate but find barriers put in their own way, and they try and find ways around those barriers. And that means sometimes that breaking immigration laws, but often it's just actually trying to make the laws work for them differently from what was intended. So I'll just give a few examples of those. This is just a few among many. So breaking migration laws will be things like overstaying visas, entering without authorization, that we've seen fraud in language testing, we've seen bogus colleges in a number of countries. And the article down here is from the Economist is about the American new visa, which gives you permanent residence if you've been a victim of crime, or if you've. Or if you witness to crime and you help the authorities convict somebody of a serious crime. That all sounds very, very sensible, except then, and this is a couple of years ago, it turned out there were people who were paying to be the victims of crime and so that they were. And as A result of that, they could then apply for this visa and so on. And that was illegal. But actually, as a way of getting us permanent residents, that was, you know, quite a cheap way. But more common probably is people just trying to use migration laws. So, for example, if you're student visas, and this has been relevant in the UK recently, have generous post study work rights, people will come who want to work. They don't really, they're not that interested in the education, they just come in for the work rights. And that isn't what the visa was designed for. You might claim asylum even if you haven't got a strong claim. The little article down here is from 10 years ago. So this is the border between Russia and Norway, which is sort of way, way up in the Arctic and the. And so it's kind of cold, cold up there. And what happened in 10 years ago was that on the Russian side of the border, they wouldn't let through anyone who was on foot. And on the Norwegian side, they wouldn't let anyone in who was in a car without documents, a vehicle without documents. But no one had thought about people on bicycles. It's the Arctic, basically. That's why. And so what happened was that 5,000, over 5,000 Syrian refugees got on bicycles on the Russian side. The Russians let them through. They're not on foot, that's fine by us. Got to the Norwegian side at the other end, the Norwegians said, well, you're not in the vehicles. So we let through people on this. And so they were making the rules work for them. But that's not what was the intent. You know, the intention wasn't to let people cycle around the Arctic sort of freely entering countries. And Norway, not surprisingly, then eventually closed that route. But that would be a sort of fairly extreme example. So we end up to what I would call the infernal circle of migration policy. That's a circle, so you can start, start it anywhere. So we start off, there are controls on immigration that leads to frustrated people who'd like to migrate, but they can't, you know, they can't find a way to do that. So they then make attempts to avoid and evade those immigration controls as migrants do that. That leads to perception and fear of loss of control of immigration by the residents. That means they want to put more controls on them, there's more frustrated migrants. And so we go round and round and when we end up in a mess of migration policy, that's sort of where we end up. So I think immigration policy is hard, but I think we can make migration policy better. I think we've got to escape the way we talk about it normally, which is this binary, polarized discussion. We've got to sort of escape the internal circle in a way. And I don't think that means pretending it doesn't exist, that there are no difficulties. It just means recognizing it and sort of managing it. And we need to focus more on basically what migration policy actually is, which is who we should say yes to, who we should say no to. And to do that, we need to understand the impact of migration on receiving countries. And that's basically going to be the subject of next week's lectures. So if you want to hear more, you'll have to come back then. Thank you. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [49:59]
B
Well, Alan, that was wonderful. Thank you so much. Whetting our appetite for more. I wanted to ask you, I mean, you start off in a rather challenging way by saying that what's happening is happening without consent. And you seem to imply that the happy mean that you're going to strike in your third lecture will get us towards a policy to which people do consent. I assume that's kind of criterion of a sensible policy. So does that mean that we should only accept people who are of benefit to the existing residents?
- [50:52]
A
I think not entirely. So I think if you. So there are going to be some sorts of migration where you think this is economically beneficial for British residents and so on. But I think people also, and the opinion poll say this, they also want to have what one might call more rights based migration. So this would be rights to family, you know, family migration and also humanitarian migration. So most people, you know, in opinion polls say they kind of, they support the principle of, you know, providing protection or safe haven for people in need of protection who are being persecuted in the world, which is basically our asylum system. But they also say they want to have controls over how many people they help and who they help in the world. I think, you know, people would have the view, most people would have the view that, you know, Britain on its own can't help everybody in the world. And therefore we want to choose who we help rather as we do with the overseas development budget. You know, we have a certain budget and we then we have to decide, well, we're going to provide help here and there, but I'm going to talk more about that in the third lecture. So it's not just about economic benefit because that's not actually what people want. But I think it is the case that and I'll say more about this, that there's a question about whether some of the migrants integration that's been argued to have economic benefits. Actually the benefits have been as big as has been claimed.
- [52:29]
B
So would your ideal be to find a policy to which at least as many people consented as didn't consent?
- [52:44]
A
I'm not sure I would express it in just such a way. I mean I think if we could go back and you know, it's happened before and I don't actually see a reason why it can't happen again where immigration is not a particularly salient part of our politics. And in a broad sense I think that probably is saying there's a general level of consent or on, you know, the list of things that people are complaining about, it's not high on that list and so on. And I do and I think we've done that before. I think we can do that again.
- [53:15]
B
Let's have some questions questions from okay gentleman there.
- [53:19]
A
Yeah, thank you very much.
- [53:22]
B
Tell us who you are.
- [53:22]
A
Yes, indeed. EWAN grant, UK DEFENCE Forum I'm a former law enforcement intelligence analyst and I've worked in quite a lot of European Union programs on the eastern border of the EU when we were members, and particularly in Ukraine where I worked with the State Security Service, the successor to the kgb. And it was very, very obvious that there was weaponization of immigration by Russia. Are you going to this is obviously a very, very sensitive issue and I saw it not just in Ukraine. Are you going to do you see any signs that this is being taken into account? The problem of course being it's another factor in as you said, it's difficult. I'm thinking particularly of continental Europe because obviously for geographic reasons, but also very, very much for the UK as we're going to hear in a few months time. Thank you. I mean, I think, I'm not sure I always use the word weaponizing, but certainly people can use migration to use to obtain leverage. I mean they're kind of lots of examples of that. I mean even the agreement sort of 10 years ago the EU had with Turkey to sort of which sort of greatly reduced asylum flows that when Turkey sort of wants something from the EU they're sort of enforcing this a Little bit less. You know, you would find British popul, you know, when say Britain would be trying to return someone who hasn't got legal status, you would find that this gets tangled up in other diplomatic issues, you know, so it becomes part of the mix. I mean, this is part of making it hard, you know, I mean it's sort of countries have different, different interests and even if we talk about, you know, small boats crossing the Channel, people in Britain actually tend to think of, often talk about this as if it's only Britain that has interests. Whereas actually you've got to understand the French and you know, when everyone here is coming up with great ideas, well, not so great about what to do about it, which just pay attention to the British side of things. But you've actually got the French on the other side have got to basically be on board as well. So all of this makes it all difficult, basically. Yeah. I'm Jess. I'm a PhD student in the econ geography department here. Also doing some research on migration, mostly in Australia though. And I mean we can to some extent calculate the number, the optimal number of migrants from, from a labor market perspective. I mean there are different perceptions on this. But yeah, let's say we could nail this down to a number. Isn't the big issue that this number would strongly differ from the number what people perceive on a more emotional level of what is the level of migration? So that the issue is so multilayered that finding the right balance is the main issue here? I mean, I mean, I think that is a challenge. But I actually tend on the whole to be. To think that it's, it's possible. I mean, I think, I think one of the things is actually that the costs of both the costs and the benefits of migration have been, are routinely exaggerated. This is this polarization here. So it's not a difference between a terrible cost and an economic doom loop. That's not. We're not on a narrow, you know, path along a cliff with these two things on either side of us. There's a much broader range of space in which you can sort of try and navigate, navigate this. But yeah, I mean, I could, I could be wrong in my optimism about how we can do things better.
- [57:37]
B
Hello, Bernard Casey, I wanted to ask the difference between the general and the particular. At one stage you showed us a graph which said people seem to be opposed to this and tended to be not opposed to that. You also, that was at a point in time. You also showed graphs of general views across long periods. Is there any difference in do we get waves with respect to particular views as opposed to the general view? In other words, are we all is quite happy to, let's say, have doctors or care workers? And is that sort of constant? Is the difference the something else makes up the general, but it's made up of particular components?
- [58:28]
A
Yes. I don't think we have those detailed opinion polls over time to really answer that. But I don't think there's any great mystery to this that, you know, people are not going to be so positive towards migrants that they think, and we'll come back to whether they're right to think this, are going to be a burden on the welfare state, are going to receive more in benefit. Not. That's not a mystery. I don't think it's a mystery that people are not terribly keen on people who cross borders without authorization or break immigration laws and things like that. My guess is that those would be fairly constant things and they've generally been pretty relaxed about migrant doctors or internationals. Thank you. Hi, I'm Shelley. I attended top because it was of relevance to. To me. So thank you for the talk. It seems like there is broad consensus on the kinds of immigrants that people are willing to say yes or likely to say no to. So I was wondering if you could expound a little bit on like the additional complexities that you have seen in your work around, like maybe things like proportion, volume or even like access to different levels of immigration, like right to remain versus like citizenship. And if you could talk more about the complexities on those. Thank you. Yeah, so I think first of all, I mean, I think there's some dispute when I said, you know, for example, that people don't like the idea of migrants who are going to be a burden on the welfare state. I mean, then there's a question, well, what sort of migrants who are burden on the welfare state? And there's a lot of disagreement around that, that we'll talk about that kind of more next week. So even though I think it's very easy to say, well, people don't want this sort of migrant about who. That what that type of migrant is in practice is much harder and much more contested. I mean, I focus much more today on people entering a country rather than being able to stay, which is around sort of settlement, which is, you know, very much in the news in the UK at the moment. I mean, I am. Now I'm going to make you come to the third lecture because I'm going to say that I'm going to talk about that More in the third lecture. And I've got to leave something to the third lecture. So I'm sorry, I'm not going to quite answer that now.
- [60:52]
B
We've got lots of people listening online and we haven't even said hello to them. Hello. They have been sending in their questions and Martin has been making a judicious selection. Are you going to give us a couple?
- [61:11]
A
Okay. Antonio Santo Spirito asks, what about investing in the countries where migrants are as a way of alleviating that pressure in terms of wave migration? Sham Mir asks whether you fit the current reason from a binary dynamic. Okay, so on the first question, yeah, I mean, I've said that these, you know, migration flows are potentially large and asymmetric because of the level of, you know, inequality in the world. And that's what basically causes, Makes it hard. And so it's natural then to think if we reduce inequality in the world, that would reduce those pressures. But unfortunately, and I think if the world was sort of equal, you know, like. Or you might just think about the EU, certainly, you know, before 2004, you can have freedom of movement because the flows are relatively low and they're relatively symmetric, and no one gets very wound up about it. But I think given the income gaps at the moment, there's an argument that actually when people get richer over some range, they become more likely to migrate rather than less. And I think one, just one reason why that might be the case. If you take Those people paying $1,500 to cross from North Africa to Europe, people, you know, those people, smugglers, are not interested in people who are totally destitute because they can't make any money off them. So you have to have that fifteen hundred dollars. So it's, you know, there's quite a lot of evidence that until you get to a certain level, quite high level of income, that actually the pressures to migration pressures don't go down, may actually go up over some range. And then the second question was around this sort of government. I mean, I think they're trying to navigate a path between, you know, these two tribes that I described to the right and to the, to the left. And yeah, I mean, they're trying to craft both the policies and the measure and the messaging to try and not lose too many people to the reform on one side, too many people to the Greens on the other. We'll see whether they manage to do that, but I think they understand that's what they're trying to do. But we'll see.
- [63:36]
B
At the end here.
- [63:40]
A
Hi, I Have two. Sorry, my name is Sakina Haida, I'm, I work at nesta. I'm currently working on migration. Two questions, one on unpacking the numbers. So you showed us the chart of net migration in the UK with a huge peak in 2023 and then now we're sort of at pre pandemic level levels of debt migration. So there's just a sort of question on was 2023 a quirk and are we sort of fine actually over a longer term trend? And then my second question is given that return to pre pandemic numbers now that we have not, we haven't seen a return to the issue being less politically salient, is there actually a connection between numbers and political salience or not? And how do we bridge that? I mean, so firstly on the numbers, I mean my view is the 900,000 we got to through a series of policy decisions and I think this comes to a point that I was sort of making that there are some hard decisions to make whether you do this or you do that. And the government for whatever reason at that time did not make those decisions. It made a whole load of decisions that added up to something that was totally unsustainable. And so most of those, quite a few of those policy measures have subsequently been reversed. Now what we're seeing now is very low levels of net migration. But that is in part the inevitable echo of that boom because most emigration is of people who immigrated a few years ago leaving, you know, think of international students. So emigration is very high at the moment because it, immigration was so high two or three years ago. So that makes the net migration figures artificially low. Now we've got lower immigration. That means that in a few years time immigration will also go down and that pushes net migration up. So I think the thing we absolutely should not do at the moment, which is you do hear people saying this is to say oh my goodness, we're heading to net zero migration. Put our footage back on the accelerator and, and then doing that I would just say we're going to have a pit, we should have a period of stability on the managed migration and that will bring number, let's just see how, how it goes. And this sort of boom bust cycle which comes from not understanding the dynamics in migration is one of the policy mistakes that's been made again and again. Now on the issue with this reduced salience. I mean I think, think that's a good question. I think on the managed part of migration the answer to that is I think it will Actually, but there's also the unmanaged part, which is essentially the asylum at refugee and then small boats. And so we're heading this year for record levels of asylum claims, you know, over a hundred, over 100,000. And we got that's probably going to be a bit higher than the previous peak, which was 20 years ago. And I think unless the governments can get, you know, do something about those numbers as well and also it's mixed in with small boats, it will also struggle to get, you know, reduce the sailings on migration. But if those numbers, you know, if the public perceived that situation was more under control and with the managed migration numbers coming down, I think you would find that the salient would go down on students.
- [67:03]
B
A lot of people said that there should be a basic migration figure which doesn't include students. What's your view on that?
- [67:14]
A
Well, a lot of people are wrong. Yeah. I mean the thing is, I mean the first thing to say about that is really the net migration statistics are to produce estimates of, of the population of the uk, which is necessary for all sorts of other planning purposes. And so people who are here are here, they have to be in the numbers somewhere. And the second thing is because students who come and then study and then leave, they have zero effect on net migration eventually. And if they stay permanently, well, you have to count them in as at some point. So I always thought that was sort of a bad argument. Universities just used it when they thought it would be to their advantage and then they go quiet, then they use it again and so on. Actually the figures that are published by ONS now allow you to take students out if you want. Nobody does that at all. Nobody's got any interest in it.
- [68:16]
B
At the back.
- [68:21]
A
Hi, my name's Liam, I'm just visiting. When you take into like, if you look at like the Syrian civil war, like non linear spikes in migration, if you look at certain papers that are looking at extreme weather rises in average global temperature, some papers look at 15% of the world being not habitable within a decade, maybe two, that's a billion people that are going to be displaced. Should policy take this into account? Is it taken into account? And if you do accept that a massive amount of people are going to be displaced in the next decade, what, what should we be doing about it? So I think the first thing is to say, I think on climate, I mean the question is sort of about climate migration. I think this or not just, I mean, conflict. Yeah. So I think the migrant, you know, if the migrant we thought the migration price pressures were going to go away. We might be inclined just to muddle on and not address all these things and then things go away. But I think the main reason not to think that is actually not conflict and is not climate change, which is just simple demographics that if you look at the population is growing in different parts of the world there from, you know, it's growing faster in countries that are countries of emigration. And so that on its own, even if a constant fraction of 25 year olds want to migrate, migrate, they're more going to be more 25 year olds. So there's going to be more migration. On the sort of specifically the conflicts obviously are very hard to predict and can, you know, emerge and then, you know, and so on. On climate migration, I think there's actually still a lot of uncertainty around whether that's going to happen. I don't think that's really happening the next 10 years. I feel a bit uneasy about actually people using that argument because what they're doing is they want to get people to address climate change and then they're trying to scare people by saying, oh, because if you don't address it, there's going to be all this migration. And that is almost buying into oh, and the migration is bad. And so I actually really, actually don't like that the way in which migration is weaponized to try and get people to worry about climate change, which I think there's a little bit of that.
- [70:53]
B
Goes on in the middle there.
- [70:57]
A
Hi, my name is Wallace, I'm a civil servant in the Ministry for Housing Community Local Government. I was just wondering, I guess all these polls that show immigration such a high issue, I was just wondering what the dynamics are of what causes people to say this. So is it their own lived experience? Experience. You know, they go around the, you know, streets, you know, the high streets where they live, they just see all these migrants, you know, they're like, oh, I'm feeling anxious about this. Or is it something else? Like it's just negative media portrayal, for example, you know, because a bad story sells better than a good story. And yeah, that was what I was wondering. And whether any of these polls that show how, how important immigration is as an issue for voters, to what extent do you actually, should you toss that as a way to guide your policies? Yeah, so I think that's a very good question. And there's two. I mean, you may be referring to a poll which sort of says, as I've shown, you know, high numbers of people describe immigration as issue and Then if you ask this, this an issue, what are the important issues in your personal life? The fraction saying immigration is actually very small. And there are two interpretations of that. One is that that shows that the whole fuss about immigration is all entirely confected and that actually people are not bothered about it at all. And there's a path to make people want what they're getting, as I put it. But the other interpretation is when people are worrying about the costs of migration, they're not really things that are in their personal life. I mean, you could say I'm worried about the war in Ukraine, but that isn't really in my personal, you know, life. And some of these things, like the burden on the public finances on, you know, even people might say, well, I don't like the idea, idea of people, asylum seekers being put up in hotels, but actually for most people, there isn't an asylum hotel in their neighborhood, so it doesn't affect their personal life. So I kind of worry that some people say, take that 4% figure and say, oh, that shows beyond all doubt that this is just a media confection. And I'm not really totally convinced by that. But, you know, I think there are multiple interpretations. You can have. Hello, my name is Isabella. I graduated with an MPA in 2023 from LSC and I also founded a charity and we provide online English education to adults in refugee camps online. My question is more from a foreign policy perspective. What? Could you speak a little bit more to the role that migration policy plays as a bargaining chip in foreign policy? And obviously for my accent, American, this is something that's really big in the US right now. And then to piggyback off of our friend, the visitor's question, with these arguments of asylum seeker numbers raising in the future, will this foreign policy question be even bigger? Thank you. Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, I think this. Yeah, I mean, I'm not quite sure exactly. I mean, countries use this, you know, all the time. It's a kind of a low level levers around my migration and negotiations around migration and also cooperation around my migration, you know. So, I mean, that's sort of going on at a low level, you know, all the time. Then there's the sort of the bigger level. Like I'm a little bit surprised that, for example, when people discussing Trump's intervention in Venezuela, nobody is really mentioning that he really wants large numbers of Venezuelans in the US to go back to Venezuela. This all about oil and not about migration. Was. I think actually he Might be thinking a bit about migration as well, but I think that's a fairly sort of extreme use of these things. But you are going to see, you know, if, for example, there's concern about, you know, flows of asylum seekers, I think the solution to that is through international cooperation. So foreign policy doesn't have to be conflict, it can be cooperation as well. And if you look at big episodes in the past with humanitarian flows, the classic one would be Vietnamese in the late 70s and early 80s. You know, that was absolutely massive at the time and actually much bigger than, you know, the estimates are hundreds of thousands of people died on those journeys. And, you know, that was sort of resolved through an international agreement, which wasn't perfect, but it was sort of a lot better than what we've got at the moment with everybody going their own way. I'm not sure that answered your questions at all. Hi, Chris Crowe, I'm a former LSE student. I had a question about, you know.
- [76:25]
B
You talked about demographics, source countries, but what about the demographics of destination countries? What role does the fact that the.
- [76:32]
A
UK is an aging society with a very low natural rate of population growth, what role does that play in this situation? Yeah, so that's a very good question because in the UK at the moment, births approximately equal to deaths, all population growth is coming through net migration. Many other countries are all already in the point where deaths are greater than births. So, yeah, that's a very important effect. That's going to be the first thing I talk about next week. So I don't know, I feel I've got a. You know, all TV shows have got to end with a cliffhanger, haven't they, really? So I'm going to be really awkward and not answer. Okay, but I will talk about it next week.
- [77:17]
B
We'll have one more online question. Let's take three, three to wrap it up, shall we? One online, then this lady here and then that gentleman there.
- [77:29]
A
Okay. Alejandro Hutton Palacios is from Hertfordshire version lse. He's got a question for Alan and he asks about the way you demonstrated the difficulty people have about saying yes and no to migrants. They're asking whether there are any examples of governments that have been managed to successfully apply policy to that question about taking in high and low skilled workers. I mean, I think there are countries that have managed these things sort of better than others at various times. I wouldn't say. I would think there's anywhere that has got this right pretty much all, all the time. But, for example, you know, I think one way of looking at this is to look for countries which these populist parties, which are sort of often, you know, living off anxiety about immigration, haven't actually emerged. And, you know, Canada basically held out for a pretty long time, but perhaps not so much right now. But you can sort of see the Liberal government there trying to sort of shut down populist party. Australia as well was not so bad. Although I think just at the moment, their populist party, the One Nation Party, is actually essentially displacing the traditional Conservative party in perhaps the same way that reform is here. And again, immigration is a big issue. So I don't think there's anyone, you know, because I think it is hard. I don't think there is, you know, it's ever going to be something you can completely deal with. But there are places that have done it better and have done it worse, and I think probably we've done it particularly badly. Hi, my name is Deesha and I'm currently in year 12. And my question was is that if global inequality creates a permanent excess demand for migration, what do you think successful immigration policy realistically looks like? Especially. Especially in democratic societies where most voters want lower immigration? So that's a good. Yeah, no, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, I think at the end it's basically going to say that most people think we're going to have immigration. They just want to feel it's controlled and it's, you know, that there's a compelling case that it's sort of in their interest. So, I mean, I think it is. I think that is possible that you can do that. I think you have to pay attention to what I call the infernal circle. So one of the things I'll talk about more in the third lecture, I'm trying to now advertise even that one is that a big failing when designing visas has been not to do due diligence, not to ask what could go wrong with this. Normally people would say, well, well, I want a visa to do this, so let's have a visa to do this. And then they're not thinking about, well, how might this come to be used, which is different. And that has often led to sort of scandals and crises, you know, undermines public confidence and things. So I think there's just a whole, you know, also just basic competence in visa design that also can improve things.
- [80:41]
B
David Goodhart's my name. I'm a journalist who. Who has also written about immigration. Thanks for writing such a good book, Alan. I want to Ask about your time at the Migration Advisory Committee. Do you think if you had stayed on, you might have been able to help the government reduce what we now call the Boris wave? Or was that was part of, part of the problem there that they didn't actually know? They'd liberalized various routes, but they didn't actually know what was happening because the ONS was not giving them accurate figures until kind of the end of 21, beginning of 22. So they didn't have much of a clue. A second question which I should really ask after the third lecture, but I can't come to that lecture so I want to ask it now, which is what chances do you think that we are going to move, not just us, but much of Europe or high income countries in general into a kind of American style immigration pause, in effect, and not with no immigration. There will still be students, there will still be sort of, you know, a few highly skilled kind of entrepreneurs and people like that, but essentially a kind of, you know, pretty very low, below 100,000 a year net immigration. And also we're going to stop, essentially stop asylum and refugee flows. It's already happening in the rest of Europe. The ECHR is being ignored, the Geneva Convention is being ignored. We're essentially going to move into a period when we will select the refugees from UNHCR hubs or other kinds of migration hubs and there will be no, essentially no illegal entry into Europe and very low legal immigration for at least a kind of 20 year period.
- [82:36]
A
So I mean, you're asking me to say something I was going to talk about in the third lecture, but basically I don't see us going below into the tens of thousands net migration longer term. I mean, I, you know, we're going to go into this dip now and then it will, there'll be a bounce back because, you know, given I don't think it's as easy as you say that. You can just say we're not going to have, you know, asylum flows, unmanaged asylum flows. I mean, you were describing we're going to move to manage the silent flows. The basic problem is that once people are on your territory physically, they become your responsibility really, whether you like them, want them there or not. And it's not so easy to just say, oh, we don't want you and we're going to. Yeah, I don't think offshore. I mean, I've got to talk. You're making me talk about it. I'm not. I don't think when you think through offshoring like in Australia would be an example. I don't think in Australia, offshoring is what worked. In fact, Australia in offshoring in Australia did not work, you know, so, anyway, I'll go back to the other question. Would I have, you know, if I'd stayed on, Would I. It was no, because, you know, I mean, the classic example was we wrote this report on international students. It wasn't that we said, don't have something like the graduate visa. We just said, be very careful in designing it. And I had a meeting after we wrote that report. Department for Education. In which detail? Well, this is the things you need to check through. And then they just, you know, the lobby groups, the universities just wrote totally roughshod and ignored that. And, you know, my last meeting with the Home Secretary was on sort of salary thresholds. And then he said, and we recommended there used to be this thing called the shortage occupation list that you got priority. There was a cap on work visas and you got a priority if your job was on this. And we recommended removing the cap, which I don't feel. I feel was a good decision. And we said, well, this shortage occupation serves no purpose. And the government decided, well, if a job is in shortage, what we need to do is to allow migrant employers to hire migrants at lower wages. And like the economist goes, wait a minute, there's a shortage of labour and you're recommending lower wages as the solution to this? That's exactly what they did. They started to, you know, have, you know, work permits in some jobs that were barely above minimum wage. No, I mean, not just in care. So, no, they would have, you know, they. I didn't have that much influence over what happened. I mean, you know, so it's an interesting question why it happened. I have sort of views on that. But we're going to stop now, are we? I'm trying to tempt people to come.
- [85:20]
B
Well, we're stopping there and we're going on again and exactly we time. This has been a fantastic event, I must say, your presentation, so exciting. And what is actually amazing about you in the presentation and the book and your questions is a range of issues that you've had to think about and the extraordinary amount of information you've collected around what's going on in the world in all the different dimensions. Just hugely impressive. So we are about to have a reception to which you're all invited. Alan is about to sign the copies of the books you buy, which he'll do out in the reception. And just. Thank you so much, Alan. Really lovely experience for us. Thank you.
- [86:17]
A
Okay, thank you. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events Podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lseac.ukforward/events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.