Parties matter but institutions live on: Labour’s legacy on Conservative immigration policy and the neoliberal consensus

Abstract

The drivers of immigration policy have long been contested. While partisan theory contends that policy is a product of parties’ interests, historical institutionalism places explanatory value on the norms of policymaking and path dependency. Examining Conservative-led immigration policy, I argue that while parties matter for defining policy objectives, institutions explain policy outputs. Despite a shift from Labour’s expansive managed migration regime to the Coalition’s restrictive policy, there was remarkable confluence in policy and policymaking. Challenging the parties matter school of thought, I argue that institutional legacies inherited from New Labour explain policy stability and that these are reflective of an emerging political consensus on neoliberal migration management, including outsourcing and commodifying migration controls, maintaining an indirect corporatist agreement with employers, underpinned by a policy paradigm predicated on economic worthiness. This article demonstrates how inherited institutions persist and how ideational legacies evolved to a political consensus of neoliberal migration management.

Keywords

Conservative Party historical institutionalism immigration neoliberal migration management New Labour outsourcing partisan theory organised interests

Introduction

Few would deny the heightened politicisation of immigration in the last 10 years across Western Europe. In Britain, many scholars claim that public anti-migrant sentiment led to the vote to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016 (Dennison and Geddes, 2018; Portes, 2016; Thompson, 2017: 248), and ending free movement has been a keystone of the Brexit debate. Others maintain that the so-called resurgence of the populist far right has been a response to rising levels of immigration facilitated by multicultural immigration policies (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2017). Past policies can create divisive politics then. Yet there remains contestation about what the determinants of immigration policy are, and ultimately what drives policy.

A key policy decision which some claim contributed to making Brexit ‘an eventual inevitability’ (Thompson, 2017) was the New Labour government’s 2004 decision to grant unfettered access to the newly acceded EU states, otherwise known as the A8 decision. The A8 policy was part of New Labour’s (1997–2010) wider managed migration regime (Home Office, 2002b; 2005), a term used to signify a new approach to immigration regulation based on economic utilitarian arguments (Balch, 2010). The managed migration regime was a Janus-faced policy (Zanfrini, 2019), designed to filter between ‘good’ (labour) and ‘bad’ (humanitarian) migrants based on economic worthiness (Anderson, 2013; Flynn, 2005). Underpinned by a neoliberal logic which placed primacy on labour market flexibility above all else, and a governing Party ideologically committed to globalisation, the managed migration regime sought to facilitate the movement of those deemed economically worthy while restricting so-called unwanted immigration. This rhetorical distinction allowed the Labour government to be tough on asylum while tacitly pursuing an expansive economic immigration policy (Mulvey, 2011: 1478). The managed migration regime involved then both a succession of repressive asylum measures, including extending criminal sanctions and restricting appeal rights and welfare entitlements, while enacting a series of expansive policy reforms designed to embrace labour market flexibility, including expanding work permits, doubling international students, establishing new low- and high-skilled work schemes, the above-mentioned A8 decision, alongside the establishment of a points-based system (PBS). Historically for Britain, and comparatively across Europe, Labour’s expansive economic immigration reforms were unprecedented (Hansen, 2014).

The Conservative Party in partnership with the Liberal Democrats officially abandoned the managed migration policy when they entered Office in 2010 as a Coalition government (2010–2015), retaining an emphasis on ‘attracting the brightest and best’ but nonetheless adopting a highly restrictive policy. Rooted in the Conservative manifesto pledge to ‘reduce net migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands’ (Conservative Party, 2010, 2017: 54), the policy harked back to the Party’s 1970 manifesto pledge of ‘no further large scale permanent immigration’, and their 1974 pledge to bring down ‘new immigration . . . to a small and inescapable minimum’. In an attempt to achieve this ambitious – and unachievable – target, the government adopted a number of draconian measures (Home Office, 2015), including tightening eligibility criterion on all labour migration routes, setting a cap on the main work visas (Tier 2), as well as a mission to create a hostile environment for irregular migrants.

Under the Conservative-led Coalition administration, immigration policy objectives shifted due to a change in partisan administration. Yet does this mean that policy changed? Too often, scholars assume at face value that a shift in policy objectives translates to a paradigmatic policy change. Yet unpacking the black box of policymaking in this case suggests, contrarily, policy stability. Based on document analysis and over 50 elite interviews with civil servants, politicians and interest groups carried out between 2012 and 2016,¹ I argue from a historical institutionalist perspective that while policy objectives changed, policy and policymaking did not, and that there was conversely remarkable confluence between the New Labour and the Conservative-led administrations’ (2010–2015) immigration policies. Challenging the party politics school of thought that contends that policy is a product of partisan interests (Budge, 1994; Imbeau et al., 2001; Schmidt, 1996), and my research demonstrates that while parties may matter, institutions matter more for explaining policy outputs. In turn, an ideational legacy has evolved into an emerging political consensus on the neoliberalisation of migration management a policy paradigm carved under New Labour that frames and regulates immigration in terms of economic worth.

Determinants of immigration policy

What drives immigration policy? This is essentially the question scholars of migration politics have been pondering for 20 years (Massey, 1999; Meyers, 2000). While the ‘politics matters’ school of thought (Budge, 1994; Imbeau et al., 2001; Schmidt, 1996) places primacy on the party composition of government and the preferences and interests of party actors, conversely historical institutionalists place explanatory value on the norms and habits of policymaking as well as path-dependent effects (Hansen, 2000; Sanders, 2006). In short, partisan theory holds that actors have agency to change policy, whereas historical institutionalists contend that policy is a product of inheritance, previous policy decisions and formal and informal institutions. A third approach inspired by political economy contends that policy is determined by the relative power weighing of organised interests (Freeman, 1995). Therefore, some argue that the fault line in the debate remains between the neo-intuitionalist under theorisation of agency against political economy’s insufficient account of structure (Boswell, 2007). Yet given that such power weighting of interest groups is determined by institutional factors including interest group incorporation, party political systems and how the institutions of the state mediate the relative influence of different interests, policy ultimately remains a product conditioned by institutions.

Parties matter

Stemming from a broadly elitist perspective, proponents of the ‘parties matter’ school of thought (Imbeau et al., 2001) argue that the major determinant of variation in policy choices and policy outputs is the party composition of government (Schmidt, 1996: 155). Essentially parties matter in explaining policy outputs because parties control the government. A left versus right theory of party competition implies that the respective parties will promote programmes favourable to their interests ‘while repealing programs of their adversaries’ (Rose and Davies, 1994: 123). The hypothesis of partisan politics models is simple then:

As parties from different ideological backgrounds that represent different constituencies should strive for different policy goals in order to gain re-election, different policy choices across space and time in modern democracies should be attributable to the varying composition of governments and legislatures. (Knill et al., 2010: 303)

The assumption is that there is ‘a law like tendency of partisan differences in public policy’ (Schmidt, 1996: 156) and therefore correlation between partisan variables and policy outputs (Imbeau et al., 2001: 1). Since at least the late 1970s, a large number of political scientists have sought to assess the impact of parties on public policies (Mair, 2008: 217; Rose and Davies, 1994), and the question of whether partisan interests have a systematic influence on policymaking has received considerable scholarly attention since (Knill et al., 2010: 301; Warwick, 2006).

Most acknowledge that the old battles between left and right have declined in range and intensity (Kavanagh et al., 2006: 76) leading to ‘catch-all parties’ (Kirchheimer, 1966). Nonetheless, the conduct of democratic politics is inconceivable without parties and highly centralised states such as Britain are ‘in principle more amenable to partisan influences on public policy than states in which the government is constrained by counter-majoritarian powers such as federalism’ (Schmidt, 1996: 170). Furthermore, the British constitution gives the governing party great flexibility for policy choices (Rose and Davies, 1994: 122).

In terms of immigration policy, a number of studies have shown that partisan politics plays a decisive role in policy outputs (Akkerman and Rooduijn, 2015; Bale et al., 2010; Givens and Luedtke, 2005; Hinnfors et al., 2012; Ireland, 2004; Lahav, 1997; Money, 1999; Odmalm, 2011). In the case under study here, Hampshire and Bale (2015: 146) argued ‘that parties in government have more of an impact on policy outputs’ and that there is ‘evidence of partisan influence on policies’ (Hampshire and Bale, 2015: 161). Immigration is an ideologically divisive issue for established parties of the left and right as it ‘cuts across normal lines of political battle’ (Lahav, 1997: 382). Immigration poses an ideological problem for the centre-right since part of its raison d’être is to defend the socio-economic and cultural status quo which immigration is seen to challenge, yet, at the same time, ‘the business right’ lends itself towards a liberal labour migration policy (Bale, 2008). Nonetheless, centre-right parties are rooted in relatively strong notions of national identity sketched around tradition and historical legacy (Baker et al., 2002: 402), and ‘own’ policy issues akin to law and order; thus, they tend to offer restrictive policies to minimise such apparent threats (Green and Hobolt, 2008).

The period under study here was an unusual moment in Britain’s typically single-party majoritarian system, being the first formal Coalition since 1945. While in principle this makes the role of parties harder to demonstrate given that policy will be a product of negotiation, ‘in the field of immigration it is clear that the Conservatives set the agenda’ (Hampshire and Bale, 2015: 152). While the junior partner – the Liberal Democrats – made some minor gains in the Coalition agreement, such as to end child detention (Liberal Democrats, 2010), ‘in all but name, the Coalition’s immigration policy was a Conservative immigration policy’ (Hampshire and Bale, 2015: 152).

Institutions endure

While the partisan school of thought places primacy on the role of parties in transforming policy outputs, new institutionalism brings the state back in by focusing on how administrations, bureaucracies and previous policy decisions condition and shape policy. Historical institutionalism contends that policy is a product of past political decisions that constrains future action, and thus creates a path-dependent effect on policy. Path dependency conveys how ‘feedback mechanisms affiliated with earlier policy choices can constrain future options because deviating from such paths will have high political and/or institutional costs’ (Levi, 1997: 27). In turn, historical intuitionalism stresses the way in which the actions of individuals exist within the legacies of previous decision-making (Lowndes, 2002), as ‘policymakers are heirs before they are choosers’ (Rose and Davies, 1994: 1).

A number of studies have found path-dependent effects on immigration policy (Hansen and Papademetriou, 2012; Massey and Pren, 2012; Tichenor, 2002), partly because policy decisions can shape socio-demographic populations for generations to come. In Britain, Randall Hansen’s (2000) seminal study found that post-war immigration policy was a product of path dependency. This path-dependent effect stemmed from Canada’s independence in 1946 and the consequential decision to enact the 1948 British Nationality Act − an Act that granted citizenship to all Commonwealth persons but never intended as a migration instrument. This led to a succession of deplorably restrictive immigration acts in an attempt to restrict the rights of New Commonwealth citizens. Hansen (2000) argued that such decision ‘locked British politicians into a series of policy choices resulting in a migration and nationality regime that was not racist in intention, but was racist in effect’. Thus, he claims that such policies were not a failure of policymakers ‘but those of its institutions’.

The power of institutions is in their constraining capacity, as institutional rules are relatively enduring and resilient to idiosyncratic preferences − including partisan influence − making them acquire a highly ‘layered’ quality (March and Olsen, 2006: 3; Pierson and Skocpol, 2002: 14). Institutions tend to generate policy reproduction and stability because they ‘persist in the absence of the forces responsible for their original production’ (Mahoney, 2000: 514). As Hansen’s (2000) study demonstrates, prior decisions can set the institutional framework for future decision makers, delineating certain possibilities in its track that can constrain future policy choices. In US immigration policy, for example, Tichenor (2002: 8) found that advocacy groups who had secured favourable policy outcomes in earlier national struggles ‘enjoyed special structural advantages over their opponents . . . thus often biasing the process in favor of existing policy patterns’. Institutional structures grant divergent interest groups differential access to decision makers that shape policy outputs, and as these institutional structures persist, they become harder to dislodge over time.

Policies and the ideas that underpin them can also create ideational legacies if powerful interests mobilise such ideas. Ideas become embedded in institutions through processes of normalisation and socialisation that then serve as cognitive shortcuts (Berman, 1998: 31; Hay, 2006), and ‘take on a life of their own’ (Berman, 1998: 18), collectively forming a policy frame that defines principles of actions as well as methodological prescriptions for actors (Surel, 2000: 496). In Germany, for example, the ‘no immigration ideology’ following the ‘failure’ of the guestworker programme continued to punctuate policy thinking for decades after the fact (Ellermann, 2015).

Institutions are not, however, immune to change. Policy learning (Hall, 1993) and endogenous institutional change (Thelen, 2004) can prompt incremental but ultimately transformative change. Radical change is rare but possible through favourable conditions and timing or ‘windows of opportunity’ (Kingdon, 1984) also known as critical junctures, which are events or brief moments in which ‘structural influences on political action are significantly relaxed for a relatively short period of time’ (Capoccia and Kelemen, 2007, 343). The New Labour administrations’ ability to overhaul the United Kingdom’s long-standing restrictive policy, for example, was triggered by a critical juncture. A strong economy with labour and skills shortages combined with a governing ideology pinned on globalisation, coupled with institutional reforms associated with joined-up government and created a window of opportunity to break with the previous policy paradigm and establish the managed migration regime (Consterdine and Hampshire, 2014).

State building in the PBS

If parties matter, we would expect a change in government to reflect the partisan interests of the governing party. In the context of the centre-right led administration, we would then anticipate the switch in party control to lead to a restrictive policy that abandoned any flexibility in admission of the inherited PBS instead favouring rigid implementation practices to dovetail a simplistic numerically driven target. We would expect a tightening of policy implementation practices to follow a restrictive policy with any discretion or flex in the system, designed to adapt to labour market demands, to be terminated. The Conservative-led administrations indeed adopted a number of restrictive reforms, including stringent financial and higher language requirements for those joining spouses, terminating Tier 1 general, caps and higher salary requirements for Tier 2 general visas and new additional criterion for international students (language requirements) in tangent with restrictions on working and family rights (Home Office, 2015). Coupled with a bid to make the United Kingdom a hostile environment for irregular migrants by requiring documentation checks in many areas of public life − otherwise known as everyday bordering − there is little denying that the Coalition’s policy was restrictive. Policy objectives changed due to a change in partisan administration and thus clearly parties matter.

Yet the government’s ability to enact these measures in a swift way and with limited parliamentary oversight is by virtue of institutions, in this case the preservation of the PBS and the policy paradigm that predicated it, introduced by the Labour government in 2008. This is because the maintenance of the PBS enhanced the state’s capacity to control migration admission to a far greater extent than previously. This has allowed greater state capacity to control admission policy while claiming a depoliticised policy − or blame avoidance strategy (Weaver, 1986) − by outsourcing the implementation of policy as part of the broader neoliberalisation of migration management inherited from Labour. Such processes suggest that despite the change in policy objectives, a consensus has emerged across parties on neoliberal migration management.

Three months before the 2005 General Election, the Labour government published their 5-year plan for migration in their strategy paper – Controlling Our Borders: Making Migration Work for Britain (Home Office, 2005). The focal point of the paper was the introduction of a five-tiered PBS, which consolidated the previous 80 routes of gaining legal entry to Britain and replaced the previous work permit scheme. The work permit scheme had previously been the main route for admitting labour migrants, a system established in the post-war period as an administrative means to admit relatively small numbers of economic migrants in key sectors. The lack of a transparent eligibility framework on the work permit scheme left wide discretion for immigration officers leading to inconsistent decision-making on applications:

We’ve kind of moved from that [discretionary approach] to the PBS system. And it’s black and white, it’s yes or no and I think we often forget why that was established. It was established because there was a lot of representation from about inconsistent decision-making. (UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) interview, 2015)

The Labour government established the PBS in 2008 in part to simplify this process, as well as to attract skilled migrants, increase transparency and ultimately build a system according to both the supply of skills and the labour market demands of employers. As Labour MP (member of Parliament) Margaret Hodge commented, the work permit system was ‘clearly a complete shamble in terms of administratively dealing with the system. It was inconsistent, and there weren’t any rules, and it took far too long, it was too bureaucratic’ (Interview with Hodge, 2012). The proposed system was met with both bipartisan and stakeholder support at the time. Despite the change in policy objectives, as the Minister of State for Immigration between 2010 and 2012 Damian Green acknowledged, the government chose to ‘keep the framework of the migration system created by the last Government and focus on getting the detail right’ (Green, 2012).

Changing criterion of immigration routes has been at the discretion of the Home Secretary since the 1971 Immigration Act, which bestowed legal authority to grant leave to remain and make immigration rules that are subject to a negative resolution procedure. The layering of immigration rules as underwritten by the 1971 Act and in turn the absence of a simplified consolidation Act created a complex system where the Labour Government conceded that as a result:

It is not always straightforward to know what the law currently provides on a particular issue. [Leading to] inefficiency in decision-making, increasing both delays in dealing with applications and the risk of mistakes . . . This lack of transparency reduces confidence in the effectiveness of the system. (UK Border Agency [UKBA], 2009: 7)

In contrast to the convoluted work permit scheme, the PBS places immigration squarely in the hands of the executive and has enhanced the capacity to enact swift and at times radical policy restrictiveness further, by making changes to different criteria through policy guidance and appendices in immigration rules, where the government can change criteria with limited parliamentary oversight. In this way, policy is transmitted into law easily and becomes layered on top of existing immigration rules, including changing appendices that specify exact criteria and the sponsorship system that necessitates employer’s liability in implementation of policy. Immigration policy takes on a highly layered quality because each new immigration rule is layered on top of the existing body of stature. This means that alternative systems become more costly, as each new rule reinforces the logic of the existing system. In turn, reversing legislation becomes challenging because the rules are embedded in the wider body of stature.

This is significant, as what on the surface appears as minor amendments to eligibility criteria can cumulatively severely restrict specific policy streams. For example, the PBS set language requirements, maintenance requirements and rules on switching between different visas, for the first time. As a former Home Office special advisor (SpAd) commented, ‘It was a system which had been designed deliberately so that you could make adjustments to it’ (Interview with former SpAd, 2012). This flexibility allows governments to pursue an expansive or restrictive labour migration regime accordingly. And this flexibility allowed the final Labour administration to start rowing back on their managed migration programme, as the 2008 financial crisis and a public backlash towards immigration created a ‘migration control crisis’ (Paul, 2016) ‘caused by high entry figures and their felt adverse effects rather than by the financial crisis itself’ (Paul, 2016: 1641):

I think the tide had turned by that time [2007/8]. Certainly there was an increasing anti-migration backlash, and partly it was because New Labour had used EU migrants for low skilled work . . ., combined with the low level market regulation meant it was highly likely that you were going to get migrants on low wages, in terrible conditions and to be seen to be taking the jobs of local workers and there wasn’t proper investment in public services in areas where migrants were concentrated. So put bluntly the anxiety of the working class public weren’t dealt with by New Labour. (Interview with Trade Union Congress (TUC), 2016)

Outsourcing and policy implementation

While the PBS has strengthened state capacity, the most significant legacies of the system have been on outsourcing policy implementation practices to sponsors and other private actors. As one interviewee put it, the PBS represented the ‘big bang moment . . . the biggest change in immigration policy in 40 years’ (Interview with UKVI, 2015). This means employers and educational institutions have the onus, liability and enforcement of immigration controls, representing an extension of outsourcing (Lahav and Guiraudon, 2006). However, the liability and assessment have also shifted from individual applicants to employers in the round:

Under the old work permit days, we would look at individual applications rather than a license of a sponsor and they would apply for a specific sponsorship. You’d be able to look at an application and make a fairly quick judgement on whether it was credible or not. Whereas now you’re looking at an employer rather than an employer sending in an application for an individual. (Interview with UKVI sponsorship manager, 2015)

This represents a significant shift in the sense that UKVI in this function have extended what immigration controls typically mean; assessing whether a business is genuine would not normally seem to be an immigration matter. The sponsorship system effectively acts as an ‘armour of security before it comes to casework operation’ (Interview with UKVI, 2015), as prior to an individual application, sponsors are assessed and accordingly given different ratings which enable or hinder their ability to recruit foreign labour.

The PBS is a non-zero-sum game for political elites in this respect, as it allows the government more control over immigration admission in a highly flexible way, while outsourcing the costs of implementation and liability onto employers and universities:

The Entry Clearance Officer in the past maybe would have looked a little more closely [at credibility of applicant] but we put our faith in the institution now, and that’s the logic behind it. (Interview with UKVI, 2015)

In this sense, migration control by remote control ‘offers the advantage of shifting the financial burden – and also the blame in cases of non-compliance or accidents – to third actors’ (Menz, 2011: 119).

This apparatus of central steering with none of the implementation costs is a system the Conservative administrations have keenly maintained and extended, with outsourcing underwritten in the 2014 Immigration Act. While Conservative Prime Ministers Thatcher and later Major introduced outsourcing immigration controls under first the 1987 Carries Liability Act and later employer sanctions under the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, Labour’s PBS institutionalised outsourcing controls by trading off employers’ (and universities) influence to inform policy through the PBS, for their own liability in enforcing immigration controls. The state regards employers who are compliant in effective migration control as ‘high net sponsors’, ‘those underpinning the UK’s recovery, those that we want on the register and those that play their part in immigration control’ (Interview with UKVI, 2015), tending to be large corporations. In exchange for effective liability and compliance, UKVI will invite these high net sponsors to submit renewal applications for Tier 2 visas earlier than other sponsors do, essentially commodifying migration control.

One such unintended effect of outsourcing has been the 2018 Windrush scandal, which saw thousands of British residents affected by the 2014 Immigration Act − an Act that outsourced immigration enforcement to a range of private actors, purportedly to create a hostile environment to irregular migrants (Simcock, 2017):

[the government] have essentially created a situation where the lazy landlord or lazy employer says well that person has a funny accent or brown skin so I won’t employ them . . . You foster discrimination as an unintended consequence of these policies that are outsourcing the immigration responsibility to private agencies. (Interview with Unison, 2016)

Aside from the 63 identified individuals who may have been wrongly deported (House of Lords, 2018), the outsourcing of immigration controls under the Hostile Environment Policy has led to a series of mistakes in immigration controls (Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), 2016), including wrongful decisions in revoking driving licences (ICIBI, 2016) as well as generating in many areas of public life such as opening up bank accounts, recruitment strategies (House of Lords, 2018) and alarming levels of discrimination in the housing market (ICIBI, 2018; Simcock, 2017).

Outsourcing policy implementation to private actors has long been a process ideologically inspired by the superiority of service provision by private actors accelerated under New Public Management reforms in the 1980s. Britain is not unique in institutionalising remote control policies (Zolberg, 2003); patterns of immigration control have shifted ‘up and out’ (Guiraudon and Lahav, 2000; Lavenex, 2006) across Europe, yet the link between these processes and the neoliberal restructuring which underpins them remain underexplored (see Menz, 2011, for exception). The neoliberalisation of migration management entails this outsourcing on implementation to private actors in a bid to outsource legal liability ‘and the often unpleasant implementation of the most immediate and potentially aggressive forms of direct interaction with migrants. Responsibility and legal burdens can thus be shifted’ (Menz, 2011: 118).

The stark shift to a policy objective to reduce immigration dovetailed with a hostile environment policy, which assumes migrants as culpable, is reflective of the Conservative’s ideology to preserve the socio-economic and cultural status quo of which immigration is seen to challenge (Bale, 2008). In this respect, there is little doubt that parties matter. However, the policymaking apparatus and the feedback effects of the implementation practices of Labour’s PBS demonstrate that institutions matter for how these policy objectives are enacted and their unintended effects. In other words, institutions, not parties, explain the drivers of policy outputs. The persistent outsourcing of implementation practices initiated by Labour’s PBS in 2008 and maintained under the Conservative-led administrations is a reflection of a political consensus on the neoliberalisation of immigration controls, underlined by cost shifting, blame avoidance and the alleged efficiency and flexibility gains associated with private-sector involvement.

An indirect corporatist agreement with organised interest

The PBS has outsourced immigration controls and liability onto employers then and in this sense changed the allocation of political resources, processes which stem from New Labour’s pro-business approach. New Labour’s third way initiated the liberal flexible labour market as the cornerstone of immigration policy creating a hierarchy of immigrant labour, further enhanced by the establishment of the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in 2007. The MAC is a body of independent economists who advise government on migration policy based on quantifiable evidence. If parties matter in explaining policy outputs, we would expect a Conservative-led government with a net migration target to abandon a liberal labour market as the primary policy objective, and in turn employer lobbying and evidence to support such testimonies to be less significant in policy design, prioritising reducing net migration above all else. Yet the establishment of the MAC has made the government dependent on employers for labour market evidence in order to design policies, shifting both the incentives and resources of interest groups and institutionalising the information from employers as critical in policy design. Thus, interventionist policies have had the adverse effect of making policy and therefore the government, dependent on interest groups, in turn creating what Caviedes (2010) calls an ‘indirect corporatist agreement’. The inheritance and institutionalisation of neoliberal migration management have not only relegated the role of employers or more precisely the information they provide as integral to policy design but also shifted lobbying strategies from persuasive testimonies to lobbying with evidence. Institutions, not parties, explain the patterns of organised interest incorporation in current policymaking practices.

Established in 2007, the government originally charged the MAC with looking at the economic impacts of migration, but its remit has expanded over the years. The government can freely ignore the MAC’s recommendations as they have done on limited occasions, such as terminating the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) in 2013 despite the MAC’s forecast of future shortages (MAC, 2013; Interview with SpAd, 2013) and increasing salary thresholds on Tier 2 regardless of the MAC’s cautions that it could limit productivity growth (MAC, 2015). Nonetheless, given that the MAC’s results are publicly available and seized upon by stakeholders and opposition parties, it can be, and usually is, politically difficult to justify ignoring recommendations.

The MAC conducts its research in a two-pronged way: top-down through analysis of the employment and labour market data (mainly Labour Force Survey), and bottom-up through consultations with sponsors. The bottom-up evidence the MAC utilises is collaborated through a series of open consultations, including stakeholder panel meetings with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC), the TUC and the National Health Service (NHS). These run quarterly in conjunction with open stakeholder forum events conducted across the country:

The MAC is one of a diminishing organisations that actually has the tripartite structure that takes on government, union and employer perspectives. When you treat it as a labour market issue that’s how it should be. (Interview with TUC, 2016)

Companies and whole sectors must submit evidence to the MAC to demonstrate that there are significant labour market shortages. The PBS cannot function as effectively without the MAC’s recommendations, because this is the only accurate mechanism for governments to determine demand from employers for foreign labour, creating a functional feedback effect as interest groups have had to adapt their repertoire of activities from persuasive testimonies to lobbying with evidence, which has in turn reinforced the logic of the system (Mahoney, 2000).

Consistent with their broader business-friendly ideology, the Labour governments made concerted efforts to engage stakeholders in policymaking initially through establishing sector-specific panels advising on specific occupational shortages (Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), 1999). The government effectively systematised employers’ role by making policy design contingent on employers’ evidence of labour market shortages. The former UK Border Agency ran no less than 24 stakeholder consultations on a variety of immigration policies, a marked increase in comparison to all previous administrations in Britain. The first major consultation on work-related immigration – Selective admission-making migration work for Britain – distributed to over 1500 stakeholders sought the views of stakeholders on the initial design of the PBS (Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND), 2005). Employers’ responses in particular proved to be critical in the design of the system. As one interviewee commented, they could ‘not have been more integral’ (Interview with CBI, 2012). Indeed, ‘the whole question of getting a skilled-based approach to it [PBS] required consultations with employer organisations’ (Interview with former Home Secretary, 2012).

Labour’s third way ideology informed this stakeholder-led approach, an ideological alignment described by its guru Anthony Giddens as ‘a political approach that sought to reconcile economic competitiveness with social protection’ (Giddens, 2007) or ‘progressive neoliberalism’ (Fraser, 2017). The third way approach expressed in immigration policy entailed prioritising counter-inflationary measures and in turn labour market flexibility. New Labour’s wider belief that economic globalisation was both positive and inevitable – TINA (There Is No Alternative) in fact – underpinned the priority of labour market flexibility:

I worked under both Blair and Brown and they shared a basic view which was that economic immigration was both good for the economy and inevitable, and sort of an inevitable feature of globalisation which was something that needed to be harnessed. (Interview with former SpAd, 2012)

The Labour governments’ ideological commitment to globalisation and in turn labour market flexibility led to an expansive policy becoming ‘unquestioned policy by the early 2000s’ (Interview with former SpAd, 2012). The case for expansive reforms was bolstered and arguably legitimised (Boswell, 2009) by employers’ support, with particularly powerful interest groups such as the CBI supporting the initiatives to plug skill gaps (CBI, 2002), as the Home Secretary at the time commented:

They helped clarify in our minds what we believed we right namely that there were jobs that needed to be filled, there were skills we were short, there was economic growth that would be curtailed, there was inflation that would accelerate it if we didn’t do it. (Interview with David Blunkett, 2012)

Thus, while the New Labour administrations effectively systematised the role of employers, this reflects legitimation and extracting instrumental information on labour shortages as opposed to employers’ power to persuade and change policy (Consterdine, 2015; Freeman, 1998). In short, it was only because employers’ interests and objectives were congruent with the governments’ that they had any influence: ‘if it had been seen as inconsistent with the government’s agenda they [employers] wouldn’t have cut much ice’ (Interview with Home Office Official, 2011). Labour began rowing back on the expansive migration programme in their final term of office leading to an emphasis on substantiating labour shortage claims with evidence:

Rather than employers saying we’re short of x, y and z and us taking a sympathetic view to that, the focus shifted much more from us being sceptical about the need for things to be on the shortage occupation list. And even if they were on it for now, we wanted to say ‘how are we going to chart our way from this point to the point where these things can come off the list because we’ve tightened up?’ . . . The new government has just accelerated that process. (Interview with former SpAd, 2012)

Initially on a register of quangos to be abolished in 2010, a Cabinet Office review concluded that the MAC should be maintained on the grounds that it was ‘performing a function which requires impartiality’ (Cabinet Office, 2011). Ministers, civil servants and stakeholders continue to view the MAC as an essential component of immigration policymaking:

Empirically they’ve made hundreds of recommendations about 90 per cent of which have been accepted, so they’ve had demonstrable impact on policy . . . They’ve clearly gone way beyond their original remit of dry economic analysis and skills shortages, to answer a whole range of difficult political questions. (Interview with former Strategy Unit, 2011)

Employers have also called for the MAC’s role to be more extensive by ‘overseeing the administrative impact of immigration policy’ (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), 2013). By 2018, the MAC had published no fewer than 95 reports, of which the government accepted almost every recommendation, including the MAC’s (2018) recommendations on post–Brexit immigration policy, of which the government look to have adopted almost entirely (Home Office, 2018)

The establishment of the MAC forced stakeholders to adjust their collective repertoire or lobbying strategies. Previously more qualitative demonstrations of sectoral needs had been the norm with ‘deals to score a couple of permits being done in the corridors of Westminster’ (Interview Migrant Rights Network, 2013). In contrast, employers must now legitimise their claims through labour market evidence via the MAC, by submitting evidence to prove shortages, including demonstrating efforts of upskilling the workforce and alternative recruitment methods. This has shifted the resources and options available to interest groups to lobby government, where the exchange of technical information proved to be a bargaining tool (Grant, 2004). While knowledge production as a lobbying strategy is not new, the establishment of the MAC has meant that the only available insider strategy (Grant, 2004) to lobby government on economic immigration is ‘lobbying on the basis of evidence’ (Interview with MAC member, 2012).

The labour market information organised interests supply have become integral to the policymaking process. While arguably this shift reflects a move to client politics (Freeman, 1995), access and influence should not be conflated. The legacies of previous policy decisions have built a system now unable to effectively function in the absence of accurate labour market information, and as a result these institutions have changed lobbying practices forging a path-dependent effect of an indirect corporatist agreement (Caviedes, 2010). The political consensus on neoliberal migration management established by New Labour’s third way managerialist approach to immigration policymaking has cemented organised interests’ role and prescribed lobbying strategies – institutions, not parties, explain organised interests’ incorporation in UK immigration policymaking.

Neoliberal policy paradigm: Economic worthiness

If partisanship were paramount, we would expect a switch to a centre-right government with its raison d’être to defend national security and national communitarian values (Bale, 2008), to enact a policy, which abandons any economic rationale for underpinning immigration policy. Yet while the policy direction of the Conservative-led governments clearly shows that Labour’s TINA approach to the intertwining of globalisation and immigration did not endure, elements of Labour’s policy framing persisted in creating a path-dependent effect on policymaking. While the Conservatives’ policy was undoubtedly restrictive – and arguably economically damaging (Portes, 2016) − policy is made based on ‘economic worth’ (Anderson, 2013) and utilitarian arguments, filtering between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants; the Janus-faced paradigm set by the Labour administrations and a reflection of consensus politics on neoliberal migration management. Immigration controls now serve both to regulate the flow and mould migrant labour (Anderson, 2010: 301), creating a hierarchy of desirability (McDowell et al., 2009: 7) on the basis of economic worth.

Policy throughout the 20th century demonstrates how and why Britain got its reputation for being a ‘country of zero immigration’ (Freeman, 1994). Throughout the 20th century, the bipartisan consensus underpinning policy was to limit colonial immigration on the assumption that good race relations necessitated minimum immigration. Although there were a handful of attempts to recruit foreign labour following the Second World War, the decision governing such entries was ‘quintessentially a political one’ (Hansen, 2000: 10), and there was no autonomous economic immigration policy to speak of. The Labour government changed this, effectively carving out separate policy responses to, on one hand, asylum policy and, on the other hand, labour migration (Mulvey, 2011).

Prior to the Labour administrations of 1997 to 2010, immigration policymaking was primarily dominated by the Home Office, which partly explains the relative consistency of immigration policy before New Labour’s reforms. Like all other long-established Whitehall departments, the Home Office has acquired a certain organisational culture, a ‘culture of caution’ according to one interviewee because enforcement issues, including drug policy, and crime and policing, dominate the Home Office’s remit (Interview with former Senior Official, 2012). Under the early 2000s Labour government, immigration policymaking was partially delegated to other government departments, and with it the objectives and framing of policy were reconstructed.

This reframing was due in large part to the increasing role of the Treasury in public policymaking under Blair (Wright, 2010), in a wider bid to make policymaking more holistic and ‘joined-up’ (Pollitt, 2003). As part of the economic growth plan (HM Treasury, 2000), the Treasury became increasingly involved and invested in labour immigration policy, passing the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (Home Office, 2002a) and the Innovators Scheme. Other business-orientated departments were also more involved in immigration policy under Labour, namely, the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI, 1998: 24) and DfEE through the Prime Ministers Initiative on International Education. As a result, by the early 2000s, the idea that immigration was an economic good had taken on its own unquestioned logic across Whitehall (Balch, 2010; Consterdine, 2018), a policy narrative with utilitarian knowledge claims embedded in cognitive processes (Boswell et al., 2011):

They [Home Office] had spent 40 years thinking their job is to keep the doors totally shut . . . It was a big culture change . . . by 2002/03 it’s beginning to embrace this stuff [from the Treasury]. (Interview with former civil servant, 2012)

While the Treasury’s involvement in migration policy was far more limited from 2010, this utilitarian framing of immigration persisted under the Coalition government, and departmental conflict was rife as a result, particularly between the Department for Business and Innovation led by Liberal Democrat Vince Cable MP and the Home Office regarding international students (Hampshire and Bale, 2015):

When, last week, the number declines, this is a great triumph for immigration control, which is quite absurd and unfortunately is seriously distorting the debate on sensible university policy and, indeed, sensible immigration policy. (Cable, see Adams, 2013)

In post-war Britain, descent and parentage defined citizenship and belonging, which reflected a popular conception of ‘racialized Britishness in which membership of the national community was more about ethnicity than affiliation to a set of civic ideals or values’ (Hampshire, 2005: 12). This has been reconfigured according to a neoliberal framing, where economic values rather than descent or legal status are the measure of worth (Anderson, 2013). The neoliberalisation of migration management has extended desirability as underpinned originally by human capital to economic worth itself, where essentially capital or earning potential buys rights. Embedded in the PBS is a multiplicity of distinctions based on economic worth, with those who are considered as being economically worthy granted quicker settlement rights, meaning that rights are explicitly linked to economic contributions. This has institutionalised a hierarchy of migrants based on economic utility, with differential constructions of migrants as labouring bodies marking certain migrants as more or less desirable (McDowell et al., 2009: 9), with the prize of longer residency rights for those deemed economically worthy.

Both Conservative and Labour have contended that reforms in the economy are needed for an effective immigration policy (Cameron, 2011; Miliband, 2012), grounding their rhetoric in an economic rationalistic framing of immigration. Former Prime Minister David Cameron went so far as to suggest that immigration should be ‘a centrepiece of our economic policy’ (Cameron, 2013). While the government claimed that immigration must be cut to sustainable levels, the arguments for restricting immigration were, in the main, fiscally grounded, such as job displacement and wage depression (May, 2012). Labour leader Corbyn likewise adopted the language of economic utility, stating that ‘Labour would design our immigration policy around the needs of the economy’ (Corbyn, 2018). Aside from assurances to uphold humanitarian commitments and abandon numerical targets, Labour’s policy at the 2017 General Election echoed the language of neoliberal migration management, including sustaining divisions between labour and family migrants, with policy to be made on the basis of labour and skills shortages through consultation with employers, continuing sponsorship system and ultimately ‘management’ of a system that ‘values migrants tax contributions’ (Labour Party, 2017: 28).

Any political rhetoric expressing the aims to reduce immigration was, and is, always counterbalanced with the positive aspects that immigrants bring. The government articulated this via the borrowing of the mantra ‘attracting the brightest and the best’, which, as Bale and Hampshire (2012: 93) note, ‘could have come straight from the New Labour hymnbook’. This does not simply reflect political rhetoric; rather the ideas conveyed in the discourse became part of the common understanding of the issue, ‘such that policy actors cannot act without addressing its concerns, even if they do not agree to the policy’ (Schmidt and Radaelli, 2004: 203). Thus, the mantra of ‘brightest and best’ migrants was not purely a technical term but was ‘bound up with social status’ (Anderson, 2013).

The Coalition’s policy rested on the demarcation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants, defined by their economic utility, creating what former Immigration Minister Damian Green called a ‘contribution-based system’ (Green, 2012). The rights of ‘high-skilled immigrants’, or ‘high value persons’, were maintained and even extended for those who bring wealth and investment into the country. For example, those on a Tier 1 investor visa could apply for settlement after a mere 2 years of residence, reminiscent of broader European debates on buying citizenship (see Henley, 2018). Former Prime Minister Cameron couched this distinction as ‘good immigration, not mass immigration’ (Cameron, 2011). That labour immigration is regulated on the basis of economic worth represents a shift where migrants are envisaged as ‘rational utility maximisers whose skills and earnings can be measured to determine how they benefit Britain’ (Anderson, 2013). As Flynn (2005: 481) observes, ‘under the terms of managed migration, the migrant’s duty is to be useful, first and foremost, to established business, and only after that to him/herself’. This rationale has since prevailed under successive administrations:

I think there has been a shift that has endured, a relatively settled view that migration into high skilled occupations and student migration can be good for the country; that hasn’t changed and I think that has come from that period and that has locked-in. (Interview with former Home Office SpAD, 2014)

In contrast to the post-war period and the successive years of the 20th century, where citizenship and belonging were bestowed according to nationality and race (Hansen, 2000), those who deserve and belong now are quintessentially those who the government deem as economically beneficial. We would expect a right-wing led administration with a policy objective to reduce net migration, rooted in an ideology with strong notions of national identity sketched around tradition and historical legacy, to rescind a policy paradigm predicated on labour market demands. Yet economic values rather than political values are the measure of worth in Britain’s immigration system (Anderson, 2013), a product of institutional legacies and in turn the emerging consensus of neoliberal migration management.

Conclusion

The Conservative-led administration’s immigration policy − with an explicit reduction target and a bid to make a hostile environment for unwanted migrants – was a highly restrictive policy, illustrating how centre-right ideologies rooted in paternalism and minimising apparent threats to preserve a constructed national identity imprint on policy objectives. Parties do matter then. But in many ways, this policy was (and is) an inheritance of Labour’s managed migration regime and the maintenance of such a paradigm is in turn a reflection of the consensus across parties of neoliberal migration management, a paradigm set by Labour to filter and select only those deemed economically worthy as deserving of residing in Britain.

Not all facets of the managed migration regime remained; the Migration Impact Fund was abandoned, in practice joined-up government has rescinded and the emphasis on human capital in the original design of the PBS has dissipated, evolving to a system demarcated by capital and economic worth. Yet how policy is made, how policy is implemented, how government consults with interest groups and how policy is framed are all vestiges of the managed migration paradigm, which continue to punctuate policy. The PBS remained, preserving the executive’s firm hand on immigration policymaking, as well as outsourcing migration controls as part of a broader consensus of neoliberal migration management. Labour’s efforts to increase stakeholder engagement, as well as the wider logic of the PBS, have produced a functional feedback effect on the dependence of government for evidence from employers, creating an indirect corporatist agreement (Caviedes, 2010), and as the system changed, so did employers’ collective action strategies shift. Underpinning these reforms was the ideational legacy left by the Labour administrations that persisted in shaping immigration policy, with immigration regulated on the basis of economic worth. Policy implementation has been outsourced and commodified, reliance on non-state actors’ involvement has become greater, and in contrast to successive post-war policies where geopolitics and heritage demarcated immigrant rights, today economic worth determines the immigrant hierarchy and the right to reside in Britain. While British politics is currently divisive, tribal and fragmented in one important public policy arena, there is an emerging political consensus – neoliberal migration management.

While governing parties ultimately determine policy objectives, institutions typically explain actual outputs. The road between a stated policy objective and the enactment of such a policy is a long and winding one, diverted by entrenched institutional practices that shape the eventual policy. Policy change is of course possible, but usually incrementally or when timing and conditions (and powerful interests supporting such ideas) are ripe for a window of opportunity. Party politics scholars assume that change is a result of elites exercising their agency, placing modes of argument which attribute ‘large outcomes to large causes . . . and the capacity of rational actors to design and implement optimal solutions to problems that confront them’ (Pierson, 2000: 19). Too often scholars assume at face value that a shift in policy objectives and rhetoric is tantamount to a change in policy outputs. Yet the institutions of the policymaking process condition policy outputs and often reveal policy stability. These processes are not simply bureaucratic cogs in the policy wheel but are rather reflective of the wider policy paradigm. Policymakers, consciously or not, are constrained by previous regimes both structurally and ideationally, and while policy reforms are frequent, they are underpinned by a sustained policy paradigm. Party interests and ideologies matter, but they work within a predefined set of ideas that are hard to dislodge, and indeed in this case work favourably for partisan interests. Parties do matter, but in this case, institutions matter more.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: EU FP7 Temper project (Grant number: 613468).

ORCID iD

Erica Consterdine

Notes

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