Policy Legacies, Visa Reform and the Resilience of Immigration Politics

Abstract

Comparative scholarship tacitly assumes immigration politics to be relatively rigid. A state's immigration policy legacy is said to institutionalise policy preferences, thereby making it difficult to implement lasting reforms that are inconsistent with that legacy. This presents difficulties for states with restrictionist legacies wanting to implement liberal reforms in response to the emergence of labour shortages or demographic problems. The supposed rigidity of immigration politics is scrutinised in this article through a systematic process analysis of developments in the United Kingdom over the past decade, where the Blair government confounded the UK's characterisation as a ‘reluctant immigration state’ to implement various liberal work visa reforms. The uncoordinated nature of policymaking and implementation, and the limited involvement of state and societal institutions in the reform process, reflect the UK's historical experience with restrictionist policies, and help to explain the subsequent reintroduction of strict visa controls. The case demonstrates that policy legacies indeed play a significant role in defining the character of the policymaking institutions that shape a state's immigration politics.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Transatlantic Dialogues: Immigration, Citizenship, and Modernity seminar series at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, 17 December 2010. Thanks to Randall Hansen, William Brown, Helen Thompson, Andrew Gamble, Andrew Geddes and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. This contrasts with the compulsory industry-wide training structures in several Western European states, which compel all employers to make defined investments in workforce training in order to help alleviate collective action problems relating to the poaching of skilled workers (a common occurrence in many UK industries) (see McLaughlin 2009).

2. Following Burch and Holliday's definition, the core executive is taken here to mean ‘the small number of agencies at the very centre of the executive branch of government that fulfil essential policy setting and general business coordination and oversight functions above the level of departments’. In the UK, these agencies can be taken to include the PMO, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the FCO (Burch and Holliday 2004: 2–3).

3. Blunkett recounts his frustration with the Home Office and the IND to his biographer: ‘“The people inside the Home Office didn't believe that we would do what we said. And they had a policy of their own. I've never experienced anything quite like the first few months here. We were running parallel policies. There were my policies and there was officials called ‘Home Office policy’, and that was what they worked to. I had to say to them over and over again, ‘There is only one policy and it's what we say it is’” (Pollard 2005: 273–74). Interviews with officials indicate that relations between Blunkett's office and the Home Office were indeed of this ilk (interviews, various Home Office officials/advisers).

4. This dominance can largely be explained by Brown's negotiation of control over virtually all domestic policy matters in exchange for agreeing not to challenge Blair for the Labour Party leadership in 1994 (Burch and Holliday 2004: 18).

5. ‘Policy network’ is defined as an institutionalised pattern of interaction between interested actors and institutions within and outside of government in the making and administration of policy (Richards and Smith 2002: 175–78; cf. Marsh and Rhodes 1992).

6. The Migration Advisory Committee (2008: 5.3–5.4) found that the report's estimation of the total aggregate emigration flows of A8 workers was, at one level, correct. Where the report erred was on the assumption that all EU-15 states would open their labour markets simultaneously, since it did not factor in the possibility of variation in different states' transitional arrangements. One of the authors of the report later told a House of Lords committee inquiry that he was ‘absolutely sure that if Germany had opened its labour market to the accession countries we would have seen lower inflows to the UK’ (House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs 2008: 74).

7. The report for the Home Office received significant media coverage, and senior government figures sought to distance themselves from its findings. As David Blunkett told the House of Commons, ‘the figure of 13,000 has never crossed my lips’ (Hansard 2004: column 27).

8. Such opposition was based largely on the grounds that a lack of sufficient public infrastructure existed to accommodate new arrivals, rather than labour market concerns, most likely because the rising inflows of foreign workers was found to have only a modest negative impact on aggregate unemployment (Gilpin et al.2006).

9. Interviews with various ministers, government advisers and civil servants suggest that these bodies had a reasonably strong influence over the work visa policies of the Labour government of Gordon Brown (in office from June 2007 to May 2010).