How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas review – home truths

A powerful debunking of myths about global migration, and an indictment of the political dishonesty that generates them

Daniel Trilling
Fri 3 Nov 2023 03.30 EDT

Here’s a question for you: since the last general election, has the British government been tough or soft on immigration? Depending on your political inclination, the answer might seem obvious – but the reality is more complicated. On the one hand, the Johnson and Sunak governments have brought an end to EU free movement and promised to deport unwanted asylum seekers to Rwanda. On the other, net migration – the difference between the number of people coming to live in the UK and the number of people leaving – reached a record high of more than 600,000 last year.

Depending on your political inclination, this might seem like typical Tory hypocrisy, but the distinguished migration scholar Hein de Haas says it’s a contradiction that runs through governments across the west, no matter who is in charge. Since the second world war, according to a long-term study of data from 45 countries by de Haas and colleagues, immigration policies have tended to become more liberal. At the same time, border defences – in the form of walls and surveillance, or crackdowns on people-smuggling – have gone up. Between 2012 and 2022, for instance, the budget of the EU border agency Frontex rose from €85m to €754m.

The paradox arises, argues de Haas, because governments in the west – committed, as they are, to forms of economic liberalism – are constantly trying to balance three competing demands. One is to remain open to global markets, which requires a degree of immigration to fill domestic skills shortages. Another is to protect the rights of those immigrants who do arrive to work, study or settle. A third is to respect the wishes of citizens who wish to see immigration limited or even reduced.

The problem is that only two of the three can be fulfilled at any one time. Reduce people’s rights to work or settle and you disrupt the smooth running of the economy. (Think, for instance, of the trouble Britain found itself in when there weren’t enough lorry drivers to deliver goods the Christmas before last.) Advocating open borders, on the other hand, is widely regarded as political suicide. So what most governments opt for instead are symbolic crackdowns – often harmful and counterproductive – on certain types of immigration. Or as De Haas puts it: “bold acts of political showmanship that conceal the true nature of immigration policies”.

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