UK Election 2024: Manifesto Comparison – Migration Observatory

Ben Brindle and Peter William Walsh

This commentary assesses the immigration policies that the Conservatives and Labour parties say they will implement if they win the next election. Originally featured in the analysis of the UK’s Changing Europe and Full Facts 2024 manifestos, it looks at both legal immigration and asylum policies.

Legal Migration Issues

Both the Conservatives and Labour have said they want to reduce legal immigration from historically high levels. Net migration, the number of people arriving minus the number of people leaving, has risen sharply since Brexit, peaking at 764,000 in 2022. Despite a 10% drop to around 685,000 in 2023, net migration remains well above pre-pandemic levels of around 250,000.

That said, regardless of who forms the next government, net migration levels are expected to decline sharply from 2024 for two main reasons. First, the immigration of former international students is increasing, with student arrivals booming between 2021 and 2023. Second, the Conservative government has introduced a range of measures to limit migration between January and April 2024, which can reasonably be expected to reduce numbers. The number of work visas is already falling sharply. However, it is unclear how large the decline will be.

Research evidence cannot tell us what the appropriate level of net migration is for a number of reasons. Migration affects a wide range of policy areas, from tax and spending to the labour market and housing, so there are inevitably trade-offs between different policy objectives. Moreover, these trade-offs change over time, depending on economic conditions and other factors. And the impact of migration varies not just in how many people come to the UK, but also who comes. The impact of policies to reduce net migration will therefore vary significantly depending on which groups are more subject to restrictive policies.

What the Declaration Says

Both major parties say they want to reduce migration further than the policies already introduced by the current government – most of which Labor does not oppose. But they will take different approaches to do this. One analysis suggests that the Conservatives want to limit the supply of migrants while Labor wants to reduce demand. Labor also places greater emphasis on tackling the exploitation of people who migrate on work visas.

The Conservatives want to introduce annual caps on work and family visa subsidies, capping them at a certain level through a vote in parliament, based on recommendations from the Immigration Advisory Committee (MAC). In contrast, Labor seeks to address the skills gap in the UK economy. According to their proposals, sectors requesting large numbers of work visas should establish training schemes and the MAC should be linked to bodies that set industrial strategies. The declaration mentions appropriate restrictions on visas but does not provide further details.

Smaller parties are surrounding Labour and the Conservatives on both sides. The Greens propose more liberal policies. For example, they would lift recent restrictions on family members of students and carers. The main parties say they will maintain these policies. Reform UK, on ​​the other hand, says net immigration should be zero.

evaluation

There are trade-offs in every policy choice on immigration. If the next government wants to reduce net migration, the most important challenge will be to do so in a way that mitigates any unintended economic or social impacts, including the impact on growth and tax revenues, university funding, social welfare provision and families.

The Conservatives' visa subsidy cap proposal would require the MAC to determine a single optimal migration level. However, migration has a variety of costs and benefits, some of which are social rather than economic, and which depend heavily on policies in other areas such as health and social care or education. Furthermore, if the MAC takes the view that an increase is appropriate, it is unclear how its view of the optimal level would be reconciled with its commitment to annual reductions.

Under the cap proposals, the government would have to decide what happens once the cap is reached (e.g. waiting lists, lotteries or criteria to prioritize certain applications over others). Although cap policies have the potential to reduce migration, caps can create uncertainty for employers as well as applicants. This is because employers cannot go through the hiring process knowing the rules and which jobs they are eligible for. If the caps were set sector-by-sector, as the Conservatives have proposed, this system would require the MAC to make detailed forecasts of labor demand, a very tricky task in a relatively flexible and dynamic labor market like the UK.

The potential impact of Labour's plans to train British workers is unclear. Education itself has its advantages, but it does not necessarily reduce job mobility. This is because the level of jobs in the labor market is not fixed. For example, if the number of engineers increases through training, UK employers may simply decide to hire more engineers. Nor will training solve the high vacancy rates in the care sector. The root cause of the shortage here is low wages and poor working conditions, as limited government funding makes it difficult for care providers to retain workers. However, more effective training could help mitigate the impact of more restrictive job mobility policies. But again, this proposal requires a certain level of labor market planning that may be difficult to deliver in the UK context.

Moreover, the desire by both parties to significantly reduce migration from current levels will have wider macroeconomic and fiscal implications. The OBR estimates that a net reduction in migration will have fiscal costs, particularly in the short term (i.e. over five years), but the magnitude of these will depend on which types of migration are affected by the reduction.

Small boats and asylum issues

Labour and Conservatives are not very different on the core immigration system, but when it comes to small boat arrivals and the asylum system, the situation is quite different. This is the most difficult immigration issue facing the incoming government. All parties want to tackle the small boat arrival problem, which stood at 29,000 last year. Almost all of those arriving by small boat claim asylum (although many asylum seekers arrive by other routes, legal or illegal). Despite significant progress in reducing the number of pending asylum claims in 2023, the total pending asylum remains at around 86,000 at the end of March 2024 (more than 118,000 including families).

What the Declaration Says

On small boat arrivals and asylum, three pledges are shared throughout the manifesto: reduce small boat arrivals, address the asylum backlog, and sign a new agreement to help eliminate people without immigration status. On this last point, Labor went further and pledged to create a new Returns and Enforcement Department with a thousand additional staff.

But between the lines of the manifesto, Labor and the Conservatives are setting out very different visions of how the asylum system will work. The main border is Rwanda and the Illegal Migration Act (IMA). The Conservatives say they will fully enforce illegal immigration laws, meaning the government will no longer be able to process most asylum claims and will instead focus on deporting most people who seek asylum in other countries. In practice, this means Rwanda.

Labour will scrap the Rwanda plan and redirect the money to a new Border Security Command staffed with specialist investigators with counter-terrorism powers. The manifesto does not explicitly say it will repeal the Illegal Immigration Act, but Labour’s commitment to process claims and clear backlogs means abandoning or substantially altering the processes the IMA expects. Labour plans to recruit extra social workers to process asylum claims (it already has more than 2,000). Both parties pledge various forms of international cooperation. The Conservatives want to work with other countries to reform global asylum rules, while Labour is seeking a new security deal with the EU. The two parties will strike a new return deal.

evaluation

The Conservatives promise to process all claims within six months, which appears to be at odds with their plans to fully implement the IMA, as it would prevent the government from processing most asylum seekers’ applications. Labour’s plan to tackle the backlog is slightly clearer, as it does not commit to maintaining the IMA.

For the Conservatives, the biggest unanswered question is what will happen to asylum seekers who are not transferred to Rwanda. This group of people, already numbering in the tens of thousands, can receive asylum accommodation and remain in the UK indefinitely, supporting what Labor's manifesto calls a permanent residue.

Both parties want to reduce small boat arrivals, but there is no simple solution to achieve this. The Conservative approach relies on the idea that the Rwanda policy and the illegal migration law will act as a deterrent. In reality, the size of the deterrent effect is very uncertain. Past research has shown that deterrence policies often have relatively small effects. However, if very large numbers of people are sent to Rwanda, the plan could have a significant deterrent effect, but it is unclear whether this scenario is feasible.

Likewise, Labor's plan focuses primarily on enforcement. Given the level of enforcement activity already underway, it is unclear how much impact additional enforcement will have.

It is highly unlikely that either plan will reduce small boat arrivals to zero over the next term of government. So a Conservatives’ blanket commitment to stop boats is harder to achieve than a Labours’ vague promise to stop the chaos. Both sides are interested in a return agreement, but its success depends on how the return agreement is implemented. Past research has shown that such an agreement does not necessarily lead to more removals.

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