| Synopsis: |
Concerns about immigration seem to have been a major factor behind the Brexit vote. Theresa May has taken the referendum verdict as an instruction to the government to end freedom of movement with the rest of the EU and impose immigration controls. 'We are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration again,' the Prime Minister told the 2016 Conservative Party conference. The 2017 General Election campaign has seen her reaffirm her party's commitment to reducing net migration to the tens of thousands each year.But just how much control over immigration will the government really have? In this pamphlet, two former Home Office civil servants warn that closing the door is not going to be as easy as opening it was. Alasdair Palmer, Mrs May's former speechwriter, and David Wood, former director-general of immigration enforcement, point out that successive governments have already tried and failed to reduce substantially the official numbers of legal immigrants coming to the UK. What is worse, however, is that those figures do not even include the large numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country without permission.These are likely to be upwards of 100,000 a year, representing a major failing in the country's immigration enforcement. Yet precisely how many illegal immigrants are in the UK and are coming here each year is simply not known, as there is no official attempt to count them. This not only presents a major barrier to assessing the true scale of current immigration, it will also prevent a thorough evaluation of the effectiveness of any policies to reduce immigration levels in the future, especially given that Brexit is likely to create a whole new class of illegal immigrants from the EU.These failures spring from a lack of political will to embrace the kind of measures, and commit the kind of resources, that would be needed to effectively remove existing illegal immigrants and deter future ones. But, at the same time, ministers continue to promise that immigration will be reduced. As Palmer and Wood argue here, if the government is to formulate a rational immigration policy it must recognise what is feasible. If it doesn't, and voters realise they have been deceived, then the popular reaction after Brexit is likely to be extremely unpleasant. |