This is a tall order We want selection but omit investment in the transition itself which is way more important. actual transition needs to be planned and implimented. It must support language training in particular. and we also need only a handful of uber drivers.
so far we have seen plenty of badly handled protocols and some that work. Canada got the sweet spot only because selection stayed tight on the professional class who often came as students.
As stated, it is complicated and demands planned experiments in order to predict outcomes.
Make immigration boring
The fiercest political battle of our age needs less moral drama and more hard thinking about numbers and fair tradeoffs
https://aeon.co/essays/more-migration-or-less-migration-the-answer-is-boring?
Whitechapel High Street in London, United Kingdom, December 2025. Photo by Mike Kemp/Getty Images
is professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His latest book is Why Immigration Policy Is Hard: And How to Make It Better (2025).
Edited byCameron Allan McKean
2,900 words
The share of migrants in some high-income countries has roughly doubled in the past 35 years, reaching historic highs. In the United States, migrants made up 14.8 per cent of the population in 2024 – very similar to the previous high around 1910 and more than triple the proportion at the low point in 1970. This is despite most people saying they want a decrease in immigration. For 60 years, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they want higher or lower migration, and in almost every year most people said they wanted the level lowered. Similar results have been found in surveys among residents of European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Denmark. There is a gap between what voters say they want and what they have got.
Surveys also show that people are more concerned about some forms of migration than others. Large flows of unauthorised migrants can quickly reinforce a view that immigration is out of control. In 2024, 77 per cent of Americans considered the situation at the US border with Mexico to be a crisis or a major problem. Residents in other parts of the world – including South Africa, Colombia, and certain European nations – also tend to have negative views about migrants entering their country through irregular means.
It is no surprise, then, that immigration is now prominent in the politics of many countries. Populist Right-wing parties draw much of their support from voters who think that immigration has been too high, and that this has eroded living standards and cultural cohesion. As Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party in the United Kingdom, put it in his manifesto: ‘Record mass immigration has damaged our country … Multiculturalism has imported separate communities that reject our way of life.’
Against these views is another tribe, one that thinks of itself as pro-migration. They often want higher immigration and believe that only racists and bigots (and those opposed to economic growth) could fail to see the benefits that migrants bring to their host nations. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, claimed in a Guardian headline that ‘Migration Is Britain’s Superpower’.
Today, we remain caught in a polarised debate between these two tribes, with one arguing that migration is very good and the other that it is very bad. Each side has cherry-picked, misrepresented, exaggerated and (sometimes) made up evidence to support its position. Each side has been free with its criticisms of the other side but not critical enough of its own arguments. This style of debate serves us badly. Asking whether immigration is good or bad makes about as much sense as asking whether food is good or bad.
The impacts of migration are rarely as concerning as the critics claim but also not as beneficial as supporters say. Consider one major source of concern for those who want a lower level of immigration: the idea that immigrants are negatively impacting the wages of locals. In the US and other high-income countries, immigration has probably not reduced the wages of locals to any great extent, but it hasn’t raised them much either. A thorough review of the evidence by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that ‘the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small.’ Complex issues like these have become flashpoints that deepen the positions of both tribes.
We badly need a better discussion of migration. It’s something I learned the hard way. In 2016, I became chair of the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), an independent, government-appointed body tasked with making recommendations on the details of UK migration policy. As chair, I quickly found that pontificating from on high about whether migration is good or bad (as I had probably been prone to do) was not very helpful for designing actual policies. That experience changed how I think about the debate and gave me an understanding of what we need to do to improve our discussion of immigration. I’m not here to persuade you to join one side or the other. I’m here to set out a clearer, and ultimately more boring, way of thinking about immigration.
First, we need to recognise that, for as long as people can move between countries, we will need policies that limit such movement. Without limits, migration flows would be too large and asymmetric, leading to increasing problems in today’s highly unequal world. So, what is a migration policy? A migration policy essentially says ‘Yes’ to some people who would like to migrate to a country, and ‘No’ to others. For any state, the goal is to be as clear as possible about these decisions. It sounds simple. After all, anyone who has been an employer or has been asked out on a date must do the same thing. However, the polarised migration debate often splits between one side that appears to almost always want to say ‘Yes’, and another that appears to almost always want to say ‘No’. In the realm of policy, these decisions involve difficult, uncomfortable trade-offs about who gets to migrate (and the benefits of migrating). We need to face up to these difficult decisions, not pretend they don’t exist.
Deciding how to respond through policy involves looking particularly closely at populations. Immigration changes the size of a population and its mix, in terms of age, skill, ethnicity, religion or other factors. For any proposed immigration policy, we should all think carefully about how it will affect population growth and also the intended mix of the population. Most countries will want a modest rate of population growth, perhaps around 0.3 to 0.5 per cent a year. Without migration, populations in many high-income countries will decline due to falling fertility rates. Immigration can also help countries address the challenge of ageing populations, but this is much less effective than is widely believed. A European Commission report in 2019 concluded that: ‘Neither higher fertility nor more immigration will stop population ageing.’ Other serious demographic studies have come to the same conclusion. Migrants may be young when they arrive but don’t stay young – they age at the same rate as everyone else.
Few would argue it is the job of government to provide a firm with consumers
Though there are benefits to high rates of population growth supported by high rates of migration, there are also significant costs. Newly arrived people need houses to live in, machines to work with, and roads to travel on. All of these require resources to be diverted. In 2023, very high immigration to the UK meant the population grew by 1.3 per cent, quite possibly the highest rate (outside wars and their aftermaths) for 200 years. That was too high: giving the new residents the same level of capital as the existing residents would have required investment equal to about 6 per cent of GDP, one-third of all investment spending by the UK.
The need to limit population growth inevitably puts limits on the level of immigration. These limits often force countries to choose which type of migrants they want. We can see this in the policies of countries like Canada and Australia, which are explicit about their plans for the level of migration and the mix of migrants.
Accepting that migration policies will likely be with us for the foreseeable future is the first step to improving the discussion. The second point is this: give less power to lobby groups in influencing migration policy.
When I was the MAC chair, much of my time was taken up with meeting lobby groups who wanted fewer restrictions on immigration. As part of its enquiries, the MAC would issue an open call for evidence. In the past, 99 out of 100 responses from business lobby groups argued for a more liberal regime – even as opinion polls suggest the public want more restrictions. Their arguments were normally framed as being in the interests of the country not themselves, but I had my suspicions. They often did not take kindly to my hints that there might be some degree of self-interest in their requests.
Business lobbying is not unique to migration policy. Corporate interests also tend to argue for lower taxes, lower minimum wages and less regulation. Typically, such demands made by business lobbyists are opposed by progressives. But, when business lobby groups push for more liberal rules on work migration, progressives are often supportive for fear of appearing critical of migration. The result is that a lot of the discussion becomes focused on concerns of businesses, particularly the idea that the economy ‘needs’ migrants. If a firm says: ‘I’m struggling to sell my product and I’m short of customers,’ we might respond: ‘Perhaps your product is priced wrongly or is not a very good product’ – few would argue it is the job of government to provide a firm with consumers. But when employers complain of labour shortages and that ‘nobody wants to take my jobs’, they may believe the state should provide them with migrants – a workforce that will work under the terms and conditions employers view as appropriate. Migration policy needs to strike a balance here: what is good for business can be good for the country but not always. The undue influence of lobbies and the reluctance of progressives to criticise is found across most countries and leads to what the political scientist Gary Freeman called the ‘expansionary bias’, which can lead to a situation where migration is generally at higher levels than voters want.
So, if we want to improve the way we think about immigration, we need to accept the necessity of migration policies and find ways of giving less power to lobby groups. The third step involves recognising that immigration policy will be hard in a way that requires us to think far beyond election cycles and national borders.
Our world is so unequal that more people want to migrate to high-income countries than the residents of those countries will want to admit. Migration policy will say ‘No’ to far more people than it says ‘Yes’ to. Refusing to let someone in is hard if you care about others and understand that migration generally has big benefits for the migrants themselves. But allowing people in is also hard because some of the frustrated migrants will use visa rules (normally legally but sometimes not) to achieve ends very likely different from the policy’s intended aims.
Universities in many countries have lobbied for international students to be given the right to work for a period after graduation. But if work rights are too generous, student visas become attractive to people who are not so interested in the education they receive. Instead, they may care more about opportunities to work, especially when the possible earnings can offset or exceed the cost of tuition fees. Part of the problem is that less selective colleges (especially those that are private) will admit large numbers of international students as a means of boosting revenue from fees. This can lead to an unsustainable rise in student immigration, forcing governments to impose restrictions. Canada, the UK and Australia have all followed this pattern, producing an undesirable boom-and-bust cycle in student migration policies.
Where these flows have been stopped it’s always been through agreements between countries
When it comes to designing visas for migrants, we need to think more carefully about how they might be used in practice, instead of how we would ideally like them to be used. This kind of due diligence would help avoid some of the scandals that have undermined people’s confidence in the immigration system as a whole.
It is easy to improve the managed parts of migration that relate to work, study, family, and resettlement programmes. Much harder are the parts that are unmanaged and disorderly, such as when people cross borders without authorisation and claim asylum after arrival. Migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, the Mediterranean or the English Channel in small boats have made many anxious about migration. These flows often attract more media attention than their share in total immigration would warrant but I don’t think we should be surprised that people care about an apparent inability to control borders. It is normal and natural to focus on more controversial issues and, because these flows are not managed, people can be worried that numbers might be growing. Too often, the debate over these flows is dominated by the two tribes with their lazy slogans of ‘detain and deport’ on the one side, and ‘safe and legal routes’ on the other. ‘Detain and deport’ is not as easy to do in practice as it sounds; Donald Trump is probably failing to meet his targets for deportations, even after a massive budget increase for immigration enforcement and disregard for due process. It is not easy to design ‘safe and legal’ routes, with an eligibility wide enough to capture those who come irregularly, without potentially increasing numbers.
There are no easy solutions here and it’s a mistake to pretend that there are, but where these flows have been stopped it’s always been through agreements between countries. Australia ended unauthorised boat arrivals through turnbacks to Indonesia. The EU’s agreement with Turkey in March 2016 reduced sea crossings in the Eastern Mediterranean to Greece from more than 985,000 in the previous 12 months to 26,000 in the following year. The number of encounters at the US southern border fell from 2.5 million in the year to September 2023 to 445,000 in the year to September 2025 – a fall that started under the former president Joe Biden but has continued under Trump. Monthly totals are now about 10,000. While Trump might take all the credit, Biden’s agreement with Mexico to quickly return those who try to cross has been vital to this change. So, international cooperation is required to deal with irregular migration and to manage the asylum and refugee system better.
Part of the difficulty that arises from migration policy is that those creating it are thinking short-term and that the impact of immigration is sometimes more positive on a shorter timescale. Some migrants (those with high earnings and employment rates) always pay more taxes than they receive in welfare and public services. Other groups of migrants have positive initial impacts on public finances but negative effects in the long run. When migrants first arrive, they are often employed, don’t have access to welfare benefits and are young and healthy. But they do not stay that way forever.
Too often, short-sighted governments have used higher immigration to avoid dealing with longer-running problems. One example is the way that some states use migration as a tool to boost the economy and reduce government borrowing. However, the impact on public finances is essentially the same: both approaches seek more resources today at the cost of fewer in the future.
There is no single right way to do migration policy, but one idea I find helpful is what Philip Martin and Martin Ruhs have called the ‘numbers vs rights’ trade-off. This is a way of thinking about the relationship between the number of migrant workers and the rights they receive: more immigration can often lead to fewer economic and social benefits for those who migrate.
This can be seen in two very different approaches taken by states. One approach to migration policy has high levels of immigration but gives those migrants few rights and no path to permanent residence or citizenship. Places like the United Arab Emirates (where migrants make up more than 75 per cent of the population) and other Gulf countries come closest to this model. Locals are supportive of the high levels of migration because the rules that restrict the rights of the migrants enable the locals to benefit from (some might say exploit) the migrants more effectively. The migrants may be treated poorly by the standards of the place where they arrive, but they can be better off than they would have been if they’d stayed in their home countries, so they also accept this deal.
The alternative approach – perhaps exemplified by European social democracy – gives more rights to migrants. They might not have a full set of rights from the first day of arrival but, for many, there is a path to permanent residence and citizenship. In this model, it is harder to ensure locals benefit from migration. If migrants eventually have access to welfare benefits, not all the new arrivals will provide fiscal benefits for locals. So locals will want to be more selective about the migrants they choose to admit. Or, in some cases, migrants from lower-income countries might be prepared to accept lower wages than locals. Labour and immigration laws designed to limit this risk to locals may make it harder for employers to use migrants to undercut wages, but they can also reduce the employers’ incentive to hire migrants.
Our binary, polarised debates on migration ignore the ‘numbers vs rights’ trade-off. Instead, we have ended up with a divide between the pro-migration tribe that want high migration as well as high rights and, on the other side, the anti-migration tribe that want low migration and don’t care much about migrants’ rights. Both sides wrongly pretend there is no trade-off.
We can’t go on as we are now. We can do better. We should aspire to a world in which migration policy is so boring that it no longer figures prominently in our politics and nobody is interested in reading articles like this.
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