Examination of Witnesses (Questions 600
- 610)
TUESDAY 22 JANUARY 2008
Professor John Salt
Q600 Lord Turner of Ecchinswell:
Although it does have the consequence, if you do that, that people
assume you are going to do it again; it is presumably an incentive
for illegal entry because they assume it is going to be legalised.
Professor Salt: That is another matter. One
should add that there are different sorts of amnesties. You can
have what is called backlog clearance, and the Home Office has
done some backlog clearances, or you can have a full-blown amnesty.
In other countries, amnesties have never tried to cover all of
the illegal population; there has always been some kind of selection
in there, you must have lived here for so long, you must be working,
you must have come in legally and become illegal. There are problems
of eligibility conditions. Who do you include? Do you include
family members? And there is also a common problem of what I call
recycling. There is an amnesty. I apply, I am accepted, I am given
a year's temporary status, I stay on and I work quite openly for
a year, and after a year what happens? I do not go home. I stay
on and by definition I become illegal again. Then another amnesty
comes along, so I put myself forward and I get amnestied again.
So there is a problem. The debate about amnesties will go on and
on and on. Again, I come to the fact that there are practical
difficulties which need to be addressed by anybody who is actually
saying "yes, we must have these", and I know there is
greater transparency, human rights are better looked after and
it prevents abuse, and they are all very valid arguments, but
there are also difficulties down the line in coming up with something
that is appropriate.
Q601 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
Would identity cards help, in your view?
Professor Salt: Not if they are capable of being
forged, and that is probably likely to happen. They have identity
cards in France and there are probably as many illegal migrants
in France as there are in the UK.
Q602 Lord Layard:
In your paper on international migration in the UK you focus on
foreign nationals rather than the larger group of foreign-born
persons. Why do you make that choice and how do you think we should
define migrants for our basic debate on these issues about the
scale and impacts of immigration?
Professor Salt: We have actually used both.
In Home Office Occasional Paper 75, which was published in 2001,
we used foreign-born for part of the analysis, because that gave
us a larger sample; we were asked by the Home Office to do that.
There are three reasons why we use nationality. The first is that
rules of entry and regulation tend to be based on nationality
and not on where you were born, and if you are looking at a managed
policy that is quite important. Secondly, comparative international
studies tend to use foreign nationality for similar reasons; and,
thirdly, in quite a lot of past work, particularly at the European
level, we have used nationality as the basis for differentiating.
We need to be aware of the differences across national groups
in terms of rates of naturalisation. For example, if we look at
LFS data for 2007, of those who were born in Europe 81% still
have the nationality of European countries; of those who were
born in Africa and Asia, only 49% had nationalities of those countries.
So you are looking at quite different populations which will vary
across the world. For the European population, you are much more
likely to be looking at similar sorts of people if you look at
foreign-born and look at nationality. If you look at Africa, you
are probably looking at rather different sets of people if you
look at foreign-born and if you look at nationality. I am afraid—it
is always good to double the work, I suppose—you actually
need both because they are telling you different things. If you
are working on sample data, as we often are in this country, then
country of birth gives you about twice the size of the sample
of nationality and you can do a bit more with it than if you have
nationality only. But ultimately we come down to the fact that
as long as rules of entry are based on nationality, then that
should, I think, be the principal thing that we look at as far
as possible.
Q603 Lord Moonie:
Do you have any comments on the written submissions received from
the Government and from the ONS on the scale and impacts of immigration
in the UK?
Professor Salt: How long have you got?
Q604 Lord Moonie:
As long as you like.
Professor Salt: First of all, it is good to
see this engagement with what is going on as far as migration
is concerned and attempts to estimate the advantages and disadvantages,
but I think at the end of the day I look back and reflect that
we have still got a long way to go in reaching a balanced view.
The Government paper is, if anything, rather too aggregate-based,
it is focused on the advantages to the national economy without
paying sufficient attention to the distribution effects. I did
some work for the OECD back in the early 1990s which involved
quite a good familiarity with the literature and one thing that
kept coming through there was that it is the distribution effect
that counts, and I think that is very much still the case, my
mind has not been changed since then. There is not much research
on the distribution effects across different sorts of people,
across different regions, across different sectors of the economy,
across different occupations. More attention should be paid to
the change in GDP per capita rather than GDP total, especially
in light of such factors as female activity rates, which vary
across populations, particularly across immigrant population,
and also how we treat children in the various calculations. I
know that in some of the literature there was a bit of a spat
about what constitutes a child and do you treat a child up to
the age of 16 the same as a child after the age of 16 and so on.
There are uncosted externalities that need some thought. I have
worked for a long time on the basis that migration is a business
and there are institutions which want to foster the business,
and if you look at business there are all the externalities as
well. Some of these are very difficult to cost and we need to
spend a bit of time on those.
Q605 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
Which are the most important externalities?
Professor Salt: The provision of services specifically
for migrants, for migrant integration, and to help migrants become
more absorbed into the workforce and so on. I do not think we
have sufficient idea of how these costs actually work out. One
of the principal things that I would like to see in the paper
that is not there is more on the perspectives of employers. At
the moment the arguments in the paper are too focused—perhaps
for obvious reasons—on the UK and do not show an appreciation
perhaps as they might on how migration relates to the global economy
and particularly the globalisation of corporate labour markets.
There is global competition for skills. We are in competition
for skills. I can go to a whole series of pieces of work and reports
from different countries and find that, yes, we want skilled workers,
we want skilled workers, we want skilled workers. There is also
nothing on the loss through emigration of British skills. It is
a debate about immigration and we need to balance that out with
who is going, what sort of holes are they creating and is it perhaps
a bit easier to try and stop them going or at least bring them
back rather than bring in new people. Those are some of the comments
that I would make on the Government paper. As far as the ONS is
concerned, it does its professional best. It has got first-rate
statisticians but there are issues beyond their control in sample
size, emigration and short term moves. I get quite frustrated
sometimes when people talk about the need for better data and
why does the Government not provide data and why does the ONS
not give us better data—that is what the local authorities
say. I think we have pushed existing data as far as we can. There
has been quite a lot of good statistical effort in trying to massage
what are predominantly sample surveys as far as we are able. E-borders
will give us some improvement, although it is not clear by any
means yet what data will come from the e-borders system. They
will rely on the quality of documentation in the other countries
so it is quite like the slowest ship in the economy. The least
good passport system of one of the EEA states will probably determine
what happens. But we have got quite a long time to go yet, we
are not going to get the data until perhaps 2013 to 2014. Ultimately,
and I suppose this is a bit of a plea, we need to begin seriously
thinking about a step change in data availability, and there is
only one direction that takes us and it is into the form of a
population register, which would probably have to be divided into
a register for the domestic population and a register for the
non-domestic population, some kind of aliens register. Registers
are not perfect: they always over-estimate stocks because everybody
registers when they come in but they do not always register when
they go out. But I do not think we are going to get better data
on international migration without something really very seriously
changing and that means serious money.
Q606 Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market:
You said that the Government paper focuses on national effects
and not on distribution effects and I understand you mean regional
and local et cetera. Do you think that leads to misleading conclusions
or perceptions?
Professor Salt: Yes, I think it does, and this
is where I begin to move away from my territory. As I said, I
am not an economist but the advantages of immigration to the national
economy always seem to come somewhere between plus one and minus
one—it is there or thereabouts—and of course if you
increase the labour resources you make the economy bigger and
of course the economy grows. So it is how the benefits are spread
around the population, who is there to gain and who is not, they
have to be spread around everyone in the domestic population and
the immigrant population as well.
Q607 Lord Layard:
You have looked at these trends for so many years and one of the
big issues is how we expect the net migration to develop over
the future, because it sets the context, with so much for the
housing market and so on. Some people say it is a pool that is
beginning to run dry and we can expect it to level off and would
come down in terms of net migration; other people think of it
as a snowball that is still building up. What is your general
line on it, how is it likely to go?
Professor Salt: We have first of all to look
beyond the EEA and one of the more interesting countries at the
moment is Ukraine which is a big population and it is filling
in gaps all over the place. Even if the European Union does not
expand beyond its present limits for some time, then I think there
are countries which are just beyond, which are going to become
part of the system anyway. "There is nothing so permanent
as a temporary migrant: discuss", is an examination question
I have been setting for a long time. Every bit of migration literature
and all migration theory does indicate that some proportion of
the population is going to stay. At the moment the flows from
the A8 countries are coming to the UK because they cannot go to
many other countries freely to work—they can go to Sweden,
but not very many of them are and they can go to Ireland, a lot
of them go to Ireland. Ireland has probably had relatively more
than we have. What will happen when the transitional arrangements
run out in other countries I do not know, but I would expect that
once chain migration has already begun between Poland, Lithuania,
Latvia and so on and the UK it is going to be difficult to break
because you have got an established network, you have got trans-national
populations already growing. The key to my mind is what happens
to the demography of the flow. If we go back to the 1960s, to
the European guest workers, you had young, unattached people coming
in first, temporarily, and 90% of those went home as far as we
can gather. Later you had older people, married people, people
bringing their families, people bringing their children, people
having children and 90% of those stayed. One thing I would like
to see is fairly close monitoring of the demography of the migration
flows from those regions because it will give us a reasonable
idea how many of them will stay. So, as far as future temporary
migrants are concerned, we will probably have to look beyond the
immediate boundaries of the European Union to see what is actually
going on there and how countries are interacting with the EU,
particularly with the Eastern European states, and then in the
longer term it is the demography. May I add just a rider to the
point about the Olympics? I was talking to a Polish colleague
just before Christmas and she said "Of course, with Poland
having the European football championship in 2012 we are about
to embark on a large programme of new stadium building."
That did sort of chime in with certain things happening in this
country. Where are the workers going to come from to build Poland's
new stadia as well as to build ours?
Q608 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Could I just push you a little bit more on distribution because
you say in your paper that around two-thirds of foreign workers
are in South East England by comparison to around 30% of UK nationals,
and of course the concentration in the capital is even greater.
Can you expand a little on what bearing does that level of concentration
have on framing an immigration policy for the UK as a whole?
Professor Salt: Let us separate out what was
being said there from what has been happening since with the flow
of people from the A8 countries who have distributed themselves
much more widely. For a long time, 25 years or maybe more—but
that is the length of time for which we have data—the distribution
of foreign nationals coming to the UK has been concentrated on
London and the South East, it has been a constant. When immigration
went up, the proportion of people coming to London and the South
East stayed the same; when immigration went down, the proportion
of people going to London and the South East stayed the same.
It has been something that is fairly constant. If you increase
migration into the UK, then inevitably, particularly if it is
skilled workers, which has tended to be the case, then you are
increasing the economic benefits to the South East and not to
the other regions. The stickability of labour—a lot of it
seems to refuse to want to move internally—means that it
is often much easier to get the right skills into London and the
South East from abroad because the links have been set up for
people to come. Other things then begin to come into operation,
like if you are highly skilled and come with your company you
have probably got subsidised housing; if you are coming in and
you are willing to share, then three or four people sharing a
house can always outbid the family of a fire worker coming down
from the North East.
Q609 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
Whether there are 500,000 irregular or illegal immigrants—and
there may be more or there may be less—surely what is true
is that of the relatively few of those who are identified, even
fewer are then deported from the country, so is it worth all this
great cost and effort to identify even more immigrants who are
already here who might be irregular or illegal, because the number
that eventually go, would you accept, will be marginal? Is this
therefore just a political gesture rather than any effect of intervention
in the market?
Professor Salt: We do not know how many people
who are here illegally actually leave voluntarily. We do not know
how many people who have been told to leave actually leave voluntarily.
So there is an unknown as far as that is concerned. Deporting
people is terribly difficult and there was an interesting paper
some years ago asking why do we find it so difficult to send home
those people who have no right to be here. There is an enormous
emotional thing as well as a resource thing involved. The same
newspaper will demand that illegal migrants are deported and then
demand that a single individual who is illegal but, for whatever
reason, whether it is health or education or something else, should
stay. I do not think that sufficient resources are ever going
to be available to find and then deport all those who have no
right to be here. But I come back to the point I mentioned earlier,
and that is that there are a lot of countries which will refuse
to readmit people who you do not want here, and for many years
now that has been the case. They say: "we do not believe
that these people are our nationals, they have not got any papers.
It will take us six months to check up, we do not have the resources
to do that, we cannot promise you an answer even after six months".
So where you try to send them is also a problem. There is a whole
network of issues that is in there which makes it difficult to
send people back home.
Q610 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
Yet we are spending a great deal of money on it.
Professor Salt: I do not know how much we are
spending on it. I have not checked that up. There are a lot of
people who know that better than me. What I do know is that if
we are to do the job properly then it would cost a darn sight
more than it does now.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
We are most grateful to you for the information and your skill
in answering our questions by posing other questions to us as
you were making your points indicated something which I found
very interesting. Thank you very much indeed, we are very grateful
to you.
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