Britain has many levers for controlling migration. Which ones should it pull? | Not the one marked “reduce the government wage bill”

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>Labour won power on July 4th after declaring that Britain had too much immigration, and pledging to cut it. The new government promptly ran into the problem that has floored its predecessors. Whatever they may say, ministers have little control over the number of asylum-seekers reaching the country. Those migrants, who are often resented—witness the attacks on hotels used to house them during a wave of racist riots in early August—are driven mostly by wars and geopolitical forces. Nor does the government have much say over the number of arriving Hong Kongers and Ukrainians, to whom it gives special visas.

>But it does wield great power over the workers, students and dependants who make up the bulk of immigrants. Indeed, it has more power over them than it used to. When the previous Labour government left office, in 2010, almost one in three long-term immigrants arrived under eu freedom-of-movement rules. Nothing could be done to prevent Bulgarians and Romanians from gaining full access to the labour market four years later, which pushed the numbers even higher.

>Now that Britain has left the EU, freedom of movement is no more. And the new government has inherited other controls over immigration that it lacked in 2010. Family migration is now subject to a salary threshold, which Labour seems minded to keep. The outgoing Conservative government tried banning some immigrant workers from bringing dependants. It tightened, then liberalised policies towards graduates. Labour has many levers to pull, and some idea of what the effect will be.

>Given all this power, what should the government do? Immigration is a boon, at least at first: the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, estimated in March that higher-than-expected net migration would cut net borrowing by £7.4bn ($9.5bn, or 0.3% of GDP) in four years’ time, thanks to the migrants’ taxes. But Britons are growing more concerned, perhaps because net migration reached a near-record 685,000 last year (see chart 1). With the Conservative and Reform uk parties likely to bang on about immigration, Labour will probably want to demonstrate control, even stinginess.

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>It is worth remembering, though, that immigrants as a whole fare pretty well. A forthcoming research paper for the Migration Observatory finds that migrants from outside Europe who started working in 2021 earned 97% of the median British wage in the second year and 104% in the third year.

!ping IMMIGRATION&UK