Alasdair Palmer and David Wood: Where is the will to enforce laws on immigration?

This has been in short supply in recent years: the rigorous enforcement of immigration law inevitably gives rise to allegations that the enforcement is heartless, brutal, and inhumane – allegations which no government likes to have made against it, and which are often sufficient to make a government abandon the policy.

An example of the reluctance to enforce immigration law is the fate of the poster campaign which Theresa May, as Home Secretary, instigated in October 2013.

Posters encouraging illegal migrants to go home, and threatening them with deportation if they did not, were plastered across vans which were then driven through areas thought to have high concentrations of illegal migrants.

The campaign did not involve actually deporting anyone; it merely involved reminding people who were here illegally that they should leave voluntarily before they were deported forcibly.

The campaign lasted less than a month before the Home Secretary, responding to some very hostile criticism in the media, told Parliament that the vans and their posters were ‘too blunt an instrument’. She insisted she had seen
‘the interim evaluation
of the vans’, and that ‘although some results were achieved’, she had come to the conclusion that ‘the vans were not such a good idea’.

Mrs May did not explain exactly how or why she had
come to that conclusion;
and it inevitably created the impression that the unexpectedly sudden withdrawal of the policy was simply the result of the adverse criticism the pilot had received.

The point here is not
whether the vans and their messages were or were not effective as a means of increasing the number of illegal immigrants who decided to quit Britain; the vans were not in operation for long enough for anyone to be able to come to a secure conclusion on that issue.

It is not even whether it was ethical to attempt to communicate with illegal immigrants by using the sort of language the Home Office plastered on those vans. The point is rather that the speed with which Theresa May withdrew the vans is an indication of the lack of political will to take policy decisions relating to the enforcement of immigration policy that generate heavy criticism.

It is hard to see how the enforcement of immigration policy can be made significantly more effective in such a situation – for there can be no doubt that any enforcement of immigration policy that is more effective will generate intense criticism. It is just not possible to enforce immigration policy effectively without some people thinking that the results are unfair, brutal and inhumane – because in 
some cases, that is inevitably what the enforcement of immigration will indeed be; not because anyone wants it to be that way.

When Michael Howard took over as Home Secretary in 1993, the consensus was that crime could not be reduced by any government policy; the role 
of policy was essentially to manage public expectations about crime rather than to reduce it.

Michael Howard rejected
that consensus, and insisted that by imprisoning more convicted criminals for longer, he could reduce crime.

He instituted a much harsher 
penal policy, which led to a doubling of the prison population. That policy has 
been maintained by successive Home Secretaries ever since:
 the prison population has 
stayed at around 90,000, 
more than double the 43,000 that were incarcerated in 
1993.

Crime fell dramatically over the next two decades – by some estimates, it fell to less than half the level that it had been
in 1993. It is a matter of controversy how much of
that fall can be attributed to Michael Howard’s determination to make greater use of prison,
but at least some of it must
have been the result of that policy, for the simple reason that people who are incapacitated by prison cannot commit offences against the public while locked up.

Is there a parallel with immigration policy? Is reducing immigration only a matter of finding the political will to do it? Political will is certainly important, although it is difficult to think of a single policy on immigration which could have the same effect on reducing immigration as greater use of prison has had on diminishing crime.

Whether or not they would successfully reduce the level
of immigration, the political will to enforce harsh immigration policies is at present lacking.

Alasdair Palmer was a speech writer for Theresa May and David Wood was director general of immigration enforcement at the Home Office. Their policy pamphlet, The Politics of Fantasy: Immigration policy in the UK after Brexit, is published today by Civitas.