World Immigration News

Why immigration policy is hard and how to make it better

Release Date: 2026-01-26
Media: UK in a Changing Europe
Summary: Professor Alan Manning (LSE) argues that UK immigration debates have become a polarised “pro-immigration vs anti-immigration” culture war in which both sides use exaggerated rhetoric, undermining good policy. Since the UK will continue to have immigration and also controls, he says the key question is not whether immigration is wholly good or bad, but who the country should say “yes” to and “no” to for entry and long-term stay.

He calls for policy to be grounded in reliable evidence about how different kinds of migration affect jobs, incomes, public finances, public services, and communities. The impacts are usually neither as harmful as critics claim nor as beneficial as supporters suggest, and they vary greatly by migrant characteristics—so treating “immigration as a whole” as one uniform phenomenon is misleading.

To improve policy, Manning recommends focusing on how migration changes the size and composition of the population (skills, age), reducing the automatic influence of powerful lobbies (business, universities, government), and thinking more long-term rather than short-term. He also describes an “infernal circle” in which strong demand to migrate, attempts to evade controls, and public fears of losing control reinforce one another—most visibly in asylum and refugee flows—where simple slogans (“detain and deport,” “leave the ECHR,” “safe and legal routes”) cannot solve the underlying trade-offs.
Tags: United Kingdom

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