Immigration: Labour inches towards a new approach

Yvette Cooper today gave a practical and sensible speech on immigration.  In the current political climate (where practicality, sense and immigration rarely come together), she deserves credit for this. Migration poses some genuinely difficult policy challenges, and Labour will need many more ideas before they can write their manifesto, but the task of changing the debate is even harder.

As many advocates of rational and workable migration policies have found to their cost, you can’t change this debate by telling people the facts, or by coming up with new policy solutions.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that you shouldn’t try to do those things (and indeed Cooper did a bit of both in her speech), but it won’t be enough.

Labour understand this now, and are engaged in the difficult process of coming up with a new way to talk about migration.  New Labour ministers veered between ‘tough talk’ on some aspects of immigration and liberal economic arguments about growth and labour market flexibility. Towards the end of Labour’s time in office it became clear that tough talk didn’t work in calming public fears (and indeed often made things worse); and while the basic economic case for migration hasn’t changed, those liberal economic arguments sit in a substantially different political context today, when it is widely acknowledged that the UK’s economic model has failed to deliver for large segments of the population.

So the challenge for Labour, and for the Left in general, is to both think and talk about migration in a new way that chimes both with a wider set of values and principles, and with today’s political climate.

That means situating debates about labour migration in a wider conversation about low pay, labour market regulation, and training. Yvette Cooper did quite a lot of this in her speech today, with commitments on minimum wage enforcement and a strong line on tackling employers who exploit their workers, and it’s hard to disagree with proposals to protect the most vulnerable workers. But Labour need to go further in explaining how migration fits into a bigger strategy for economic reform.  That means thinking about inequality, about wage stagnation for low and medium earners, and about the fundamental assumptions that have underpinned labour market policies.

It means facing up to the challenge of how to make our welfare system fair and effective at a time when money is tight, and will remain so. Migration prompts some tough questions about the extent to which the contributory principle has been eroded in the benefits system, but those questions will not be answered by changing the entitlement rules for migrants, although such changes may well be needed, and Cooper put forward some sensible, if tentative, proposals here.

Finally, as Yvette Cooper is no doubt keenly aware, a future Labour Home Secretary will have to deal with the institutional dysfunction that has long plagued the immigration system, which has meant that hard-fought reforms often fail at the point of implementation. Labour must be unapologetic about the need to enforce the rules fairly and consistently, even when that involves difficult decisions, but making the institutions of immigration control work in a time of budget cuts will be a tough task.

The common thread here is fairness – if Labour can shift the debate about migration in this direction, they might, over time, even manage to reverse the situation where immigration is seen as the natural territory of the Right.

The real challenge for Labour in the short term is to achieve ‘cut through’ in a debate that has become polarised, and which still takes place largely on the terrain favoured by the Government. Yvette Cooper’s speech today was admirably sensible and measured. I hope that she succeeds in bringing others in the debate with her in that direction, but I don’t hold out much hope – the likes of Migration Watch are not really interested in having a practical discussion about policy. That means that the task now for Labour is to develop a narrative on migration that can stand its own in a rough, tough debate, and provide the political space for the kind of policy ideas that the party seems now to be developing.

Sarah Mulley is Associate Director at IPPR