Immigration. Pick and mix

Date: 11/03/06

The British government tries to calm fears over immigration

WHEN it comes to managing immigration, there is nothing like distance. Canada and New Zealand are a long way from the world's poor, and can therefore be finicky about who they let in. Britain is not so isolated, although (in this as in some other respects) it thinks it is. On March 7th, the government unveiled a system for screening would-be settlers that, it promises, will be the most precise in Europe.

The new immigration system will be more "structured"--which, in practice, means more rigid--than the current one. Foreigners wanting to settle in Britain will henceforth be placed in one of five tiers, depending on their skills and on whether or not they have a job offer or a university place. To get in, they will have to meet the criteria for each tier, measured in points.

Those who have a job offer in hand, and therefore fall into Tier 2, must, for example, amass 50 points before packing their bags. To them, a salary offer of between pounds 18,000 ($31,000) and pounds 19,500 will be worth 10 points, and a PhD another 15 points. They will earn more points if they fill a job where there is a labour shortage--as identified by a new "skills advisory body", which will draw up a list of such occupations twice a year. Yet more points will be awarded if their employer has been approved by the Home Office.

Aside from a likely increase in the number of bureaucrats, though, little will change. The new system will work so closely with the grain of current practice that it seems less a revolution than a mere re-labelling. The new system's Tier 1, for instance, duplicates a programme for highly skilled migrants that has been around for four years. Even the points system is largely a way of putting numbers on existing methods of judging would-be immigrants. As before, the system will be driven by the needs of employers. The only significant reform is a gradual phasing-out of two schemes that imported people to work in hotels and fields, and even this change is less radical than it at first appears. Most of the grunts who joined those schemes were central Europeans, who, since May 2004, have been free to work in Britain anyway.

If the new system will change so little, why has such fanfare attended its unveiling? The answer has to do with public perceptions. Opinion polls consistently show that Britons are concerned about immigration, which they think is running out of control. That view took hold in 2000, thanks to a surge in the number of people seeking asylum in Britain (see chart). Television images of Afghans pouring into the Channel Tunnel particularly offended the island mentality.

For the last three years, fewer would-be refugees have made it to Britain, thanks to better border security and the overthrowing of offensive regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The number of asylum-seekers is now the lowest it has been for more than a decade. Oddly, though, public disquiet is as strong as ever. Danny Sriskandarajah, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, believes that anger over a broken asylum system has mutated into mistrust of the immigration system as a whole. Woeful official underestimates in the past of the numbers of central Europeans likely to come to Britain after 2004 have not helped.

By subjecting the huddled masses to a more rigorous-seeming system, the government hopes to calm Britons' nerves. In the short term, it is likely to succeed: many newspapers welcomed this week's announcement. The trouble is that, as Damian Green, the Conservative Party's immigration spokesman, has noticed, a points-based system makes it easier to stem the immigrant tide: to reduce the flow, simply change the maths. The Tories would like to have a debate about immigrant numbers--something the government wants to avoid.