Let the Right One In

Immigration policy has always served multiple, and often conflicting, purposes. The 1905 Aliens Act was partly a response to an antisemitic campaign, partly the scapegoating of immigrants for poor housing and health conditions, and partly a moral panic about "foreign criminals". It would prove typical of later immigration policy in its inadequacy and the incompetence of its associated bureaucracy. In the postwar era, immigration policy took a conscious turn towards the needs of the national economy in the form of the 1948 Nationality Act. Subsequent immigration acts - in 1962, 1968 and 1971 - attempted to strike a balance between the economic and the xenophobic. From 1973 onwards, policy was driven by a simultaneous tightening of UK citizenship rules and a loosening of restrictions on movement for EU nationals. The consequence was a new focus in the 1990s on "bogus asylum-seekers", a group that lacked popular support and which was routinely demonised in the tabloid press as criminal, echoing the arguments of a century ago.

In this historical context, the Conservative government's proposed points-based system is a continuation of the technocratic and economistic approach in which immigrants are judged on their potential contribution, but it also marks a departure from a policy preference for privileged national groups, whether they be Commonwealth or EU citizens. Of course, privilege remains central to the policy, but it is now the privilege of wealth or proxies for class, such as PhDs. This is an oddly post-national approach for a supposedly nationalist government, which prompts the thought that the contradictions between the policy and the expectations of Conservative party members and supporters will lead to problems down the road. You don't have to be a full-on racist bigot of the type that BBC's Question Time now seems to specialise in to wonder whether there will be any noticeable change on the ground. Insisting that all immigrants must speak English looks like a distraction from the abandonment of a numerical target for net migration.

Much of the proposed system is gestural. The use of multiples of 10 for the points scale is less about furture-proofing flexibility, as some commentators have suggested (you could always use fractions, after all), than in suggesting a mountain to climb. The points for a PhD rule doesn't make a great deal of sense as it is unlikely to be decisive for a job outside low-end academia. For most professional roles you would probably hit the 70 points target through a combination of a sponsor, appropriate skills, English language competence and pay-grade. Having a doctorate would be a nice-to-have. This, and the bias towards STEM subjects, looks like a propaganda gloss to keep Dominic Cummings happy, but that in turn points to the potential conflict of interests between the technocrats and free-traders on the one hand and the nationalists and small town-botherers on the other. The system has succeeded politically by tangibly "taking control", but the likely tinkering over shortage occupations suggests a future of uncertainty.

Liberal opinion on the matter has oscillated between a critique of virtue, centring on the economic vandalism and social spite of government ministers, and an instrumental reduction of immigrants to factors of production. The former is largely noise. That Tory ministers are callous weasels is hardly news. That they are prepared to risk damaging the economy in pursuit of its restructuring - towards greater investment in automation or the redeployment of the "inactive" - should hardly come as a surprise. In comparison to the wider project of Brexit, or indeed the policies they pursued in the early 1980s, this gamble is trivial. The latter argument, that we need low-skilled immigrants as well as skilled ones because apples have to be picked and arses wiped, reveals a logic that is no less utilitarian than the government's. The only point of difference is that the Tories additionally want to satisfy the xenophobic vote.

To point out that Priti Patel's or Sajid Javid's own parents would have been barred from entry to the UK if the proposed rules were in place in the 1960s is not evidence of those politicians' hypocrisy. Immigration rules change over time. Theoretically applying the rules of one era to the cases of another is literally anachronistic. Nesrine Malik, in a typically hot and bothered opinion piece in the Guardian, went so far as to imagine a symbolic erasure: "Javid and Patel should be grateful that the world doesn’t work like the picture of Marty McFly’s family in Back to the Future, or they would currently be fading from existence, having eliminated the conditions of their own birth". Immgration policy generally doesn't have retrospective effect (the "hostile environment" introduced by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government was a change in operational practice, not a change in the statutory rules, and one that echoed previous "clamp-downs" during the New Labour years).

As an ideological artefact, the government's proposal suggests that the free-traders in government have the upper hand over the nationalists. Though Priti Patel will do her best to give the policy an authoritarian and populist spin, it should be remembered that she was a co-author of the Britannia Unchained tract that demanded a smaller state, deregulation and lower taxes, and even went so far as to lambast British workers as "idlers". Her comments about the 8 million inactive filling the roles vacated by unskilled migrant labour can be read as evidence of her shallow understanding of the UK's society and economy, but they are also indicative of radical ambition. The question is whether the new immigration policy is a harbinger of "Thatcherism 2.0" or whether it will prove emblematic of a policy of fudge, unable to reconcile the competing demands of free trade and nationalism. The upcoming budget will give us a clue as to the answer.