POLITICS
Busting the immigration myths
ROS TAYLOR
HOW MIGRATION REALLY WORKS
A factful guide to the most divisive issue in politics
HEIN DE HAAS
464pp. Viking. £25.
THE BOOKS THAT PURPORT to reveal things you didn’t know might fill a small, and rather dull, library. How Migration Really Works is a rarer thing: a book that resolutely trashes the assumptions both the left and the right use to prop up their belief systems. It is a brave venture. Hein de Haas torpedoes the things many of us believe about the vexed topic of migration. He leaves us wondering how to navigate this fast-flowing, dangerous river of a subject, knowing that the theories we try to use to understand it are not just misguided, but often wildly unhelpful.
Take perhaps the most entrenched of the twentytwo “myths” that Haas tackles in his book: “Border restrictions reduce immigration”. Surely making it harder to enter a country will reduce the number of people who try to do so? Many of the assurances made by the Vote Leave campaign in the UK in 2016 may have been tendentious, but the promise that taking away the right of other Europeans to live and work in the country would reduce immigration was difficult to rebut. At the time two-thirds of Conservative voters said it was one of the most important concerns facing the UK; half of Labour voters agreed. Yet in the year ending June 2023 1.18 million people came to live and work in the UK, up from 636,000 in 2015. The Ukraine refugee scheme and Hong Kong British National (Overseas) resettlement programme account for some of that figure; much of the rest came from outside the EU, which accounted for only 129,000 immigrants. For Britain at least, tighter border controls led to more immigration, even as people stopped citing this as one of their top two concerns. It is important to understand why.
Haas argues persuasively that making it harder for people to cross borders to do temporary jobs makes it more likely that they will try to stay permanently, whether legally or illegally. He describes how young North Africans used to go to Spain to work on farms for the harvest, returning when it was over. Only when Spain introduced a visa requirement in the 1990s did they begin to pay fishermen to smuggle them across. The US experienced a similar phenomenon when it tightened border controls with Mexico. In the same way, eastern and central Europeans who had been flitting between the UK and their home countries decided to apply to remain when it was apparent that they would have to choose which country to stay in. On top of that, as inflation and wages in the private sector rose while salaries in health and social care did not, managers had to look further afield to fill job vacancies.
The author urges us to step back and remember who used to do the migrating. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries millions of poorer Brito
