253. The truth about immigration - who is coming and who is leaving?

12:35Steph:Well, one of the interesting things is if you have a policy, even when your policy doesn't change, the number of people who take up that policy can actually fluctuate quite dramatically. So you have conditions in countries of origin and for work visas, for example, if conditions get worse in countries of origin or better in countries of origin, that might affect whether people want to leave or not. For international students, which is actually quite a lot of our initial immigration inflows, things like currency really matter. So you had a currency collapse in Nigeria, for example, a couple of years ago, which made it much less affordable for Nigerian students to come to the UK.

13:11Steph:and that had an impact. Then, of course, when talking about refugees, you've got various different conflicts around the world. One of the contributors to the high levels of immigration just after Brexit was the Ukraine war and the government's choice to open up a visa for Ukrainians coming. So all of those things play in different ways and it's actually really difficult because there are so many factors. The government really struggles to predict precisely how many people are going to take up each visa And they give it a shot and they do try and project the numbers. But it is quite difficult, which means that sometimes you sort of overshoot or undershoot compared to what they were expecting.

13:50Madeline Sumption MBE:Yeah. And there's a lot of discussion and headlines around foreign students at the moment and the pressure on universities and the concern that there aren't as many coming here. What's the reality in terms of what's happening with students?

14:04Steph:The number of foreign students to be honest is still pretty high. There was a little bit of a decrease very recently, but the numbers are still double what they were a few years ago. So you had basically a steadily rising numbers of students before Brexit. The UK has always been quite an attractive destination for international students, even before we gave people the option to work after their studies. Then with the post-Brexit immigration system, there was this graduate visa was introduced. So basically, if you study, you might do a one-year master's in the UK and then you would get two years of work rights where you can do any job.

14:40Steph:So that's much more liberal than the other work visas, which would require you to be doing specific types of jobs or have a high enough income. And so that made the UK more attractive, particularly to certain nationalities, to Indian students and Nigerian students who tend to be most interested in work rights. and it also is one of the factors that increased recruitment of students at some of the less selective universities so that you know that most selective universities were already basically recruiting more or less as many students as as they wanted and it was some of the less selective ones that then were able to use the post-study work offer to bring in more people.

15:16Madeline Sumption MBE:So do you think therefore that the universities don't need to worry about still attracting foreign students?

15:21Steph:Well, they do worry about it. I think the challenge for universities is their finances. It varies obviously by institution, but the finances are often quite precarious. And a lot of institutions, the norm really is that they're losing money on teaching domestic students and they're losing money on research. And so they make it up with international students. So and one of the reasons that the post-study work visa I mentioned is one of the factors. But the other factor that led, I think, to increasing number of students was actually a lot of universities were just going out more aggressively recruiting overseas because international students pay much higher fees.

15:56Steph:And so that helps them bring in revenues that subsidizes the rest of their operations.

16:00Madeline Sumption MBE:Yeah. So that's a bit of discussion on, you know, who's coming and going. let's talk a bit about what kind of what impact it has on the economy because that's the other thing that is often talked about in the news is you know is immigration good or bad for the economy you know one side saying you know they take jobs they use our services it puts pressure on things like the NHS on welfare and everything else and then the other side saying actually it's really good for growth for productivity for labour skill shortages and everything else what's the reality

16:32Steph:Right. So obviously the economy is complicated and there are lots of different ways of measuring economic impacts. Immigration obviously does increase GDP. That's not particularly surprising. If you have more people, they're producing more stuff. In fact, it would be really weird if you brought in more people and it didn't increase GDP. They'd have to be sort of, you know, destroying output somehow. So it's not particularly exciting to say that they increase GDP. More interesting is do they increase GDP per capita or productivity or the things that actually determine how wealthy people feel. And there I think the jury is out.

17:08Steph:If you look at average impacts, they tend not to be very big. I think the thing that probably gets lost most in the debate about economic impacts is that actually often it's who is migrating that matters more than how many people are migrating. So people say, OK, well, there'll be a, you know, if we have a decrease in migration, that'll be bad for the economy. I don't think that's right. So if you look at public finances, for example, which is one of the most measurable bits of the economic impact. So basically, are people paying in more in taxes than it costs to provide them with benefits or services like the NHS?

17:43Steph:You're going to have some people who are making huge net contributions, basically, if they're highly paid. So if you've got someone who comes in as an IT director or some kind of highly paid graduate job, over the course of their lifetime, they're going to be paying potentially hundreds of thousands more in tax than it costs to provide them with benefits. If you have someone who comes in who's not working or who works in a very low wage job over the course of their lifetime, they're going to have a negative impact. now the challenge for the government is that the people who the groups of people who are most likely to have a negative impact are not the ones that they're admitting for economic reasons it's the family members and the family members of british citizens and refugees and and so there's a trade off actually between the humanitarian goals the kind of ethical humanitarian goals and protecting family life and the economic impacts of that migration also there's the other argument i guess

18:40Madeline Sumption MBE:to this is, you know, the figures don't necessarily take any nuance of, you know, if you've got someone who comes to this country, works in the care sector, they're low paid, so they're not necessarily contributing enormous amounts of tax, but they're providing a service and care that you can't really monetise, you know, so that it doesn't take into account things like that, does it?

19:05Steph:Yeah, so this is a really big issue and the care sector in particular has been actually a huge part of the immigration story over the last few years because the previous government opened up a new route for people to come in on work visas and work in the care sector. Now, the big challenge there is that the paying conditions in the care sector are really poor. And that is largely a policy issue because it's mostly public money that is paying for that. So the government effectively faces a choice. It can keep the paying conditions really poor and say, actually, we're going to just rely on migrant workers who are willing to do this work at miserable wages and in some cases, you know, if they used to be able to bring kids with them, you would have people who, if they came in with a couple of kids, they could well be pretty close to the official poverty line and obviously not eligible for benefits because they're on a temporary visa.

19:53Steph:Really the choice is, you know, do you want to spend a lot more money to try and make the care sector a more attractive place for British people to work or do you want to bring migrants into work in those jobs? Now the challenge then in the long run as well is if you bring migrant workers in to do those jobs, if and when they get permanent status they're going to move out of the sector for exactly the same reasons that British people move out of the sector and so it's actually not clear how much I think in the short run you get some saving by bringing in migrant workers to work in these you know quite difficult conditions but in the long run it's less clear.

20:27Madeline Sumption MBE:Yes so therefore it's the public finance pressure because in order to make them more attractive to people those jobs more attractive to people here it involves paying more which obviously costs public finances more but inevitably although that's a short term hit in in the longer term that's got to be good for

20:45Steph:the economy though hasn't it obviously you know there is a third option here which is just accept that people are going to have miserable care um and just let the care sector and that you know which you know which and and that's not you know that's about people's dignity in older age rather than about necessarily a boost to the economy if you have better care. I think the way you get the short-run, long-run trade-off is the government brought in a lot of people working in the care sector, working obviously very hard on low wages. Now, over the course of their lifetimes, they would be expected to have a negative impact on public finances because later on, not necessarily initially, but later on, as people get older, they use the NHS more themselves.

21:24Steph:Eventually, they'll draw a pension so you so in some way it's um some types of immigration function a little bit like borrowing in that you have more money now but you're storing up costs for further down the line

21:34Madeline Sumption MBE:yeah so you know when you look at this then as a whole and you're you're trying to you know work out what the actual facts are when you see the headlines and you for example hear politicians talk about migration in terms of you know filling labor shortages it's not as simple as that that's the point and so what is it that frustrates you what's missing from those talks that you think

21:57Steph:you need to see more in the headlines i think it would be good if there was more recognition that we have lots of different types of migration people often tend to talk about migrations as if it's a single thing yeah and it's good or bad and we can have more of it or less of it and actually people are coming for these very different reasons for you know for work for study family members as refugees and the reasons for those policy for those immigration routes are different and the impacts are very different. Similarly, I think there isn't enough of a recognition that this is not all about the labour market.

22:26Steph:The people often talk about as well, what do we need? How many people do we need in these jobs or those jobs? And obviously, that is part of the discussion. But actually, a lot of migration that we have is not people coming because they were the worker selected to come on a work visa. Actually, most migration is people who have the right to work in the UK, but they're either coming as a family member of a work visa as a holder of a student or of a British citizen or as a refugee.

22:52Madeline Sumption MBE:So then talk to me then about ages of people then, if that's the difference in terms of the type of visa and things they're coming on. What are the ages of the people who are coming here?

23:02Steph:Migrants tend to be young and that's generally across the world. Migration is a young person's game. People are less, people have fewer ties. It's just easier in your 20s or early 30s to move around before having children and getting married and so forth. So that's the case in the UK as well. We see some variations. Obviously, international students tend to be among the youngest. And then you do get some people who come at an older age, people coming maybe for a few years on a work visa. Particularly, you know, a lot of people transfer from maybe an overseas employer to the UK. And so sometimes you'll get older people in those categories.

23:43Steph:But broadly speaking, we're looking at people who are in their 20s and 30s.

23:47Madeline Sumption MBE:OK. And so if there is, for example, you know, I know you're saying we're not going to go to net zero, but if we did go to net zero, what would happen to the economy? Not that much, to be honest.

23:59Steph:I think that, well, firstly, I think if we go to net zero, it will be temporary. And I suspect at the time that people won't really recognise this as much as perhaps they should. but I think you know broadly speaking we had this period of you know very high immigration or net migration by historical standards a couple of years ago we'll have a period of much lower migration if you average them together we'll probably you know it's probably still going to be a high rather than than low number and so I think and a lot of the people who are leaving if they if we see more people leaving this year a lot of them will be people like international students coming to the end of their courses or maybe coming to the end of their post-study work visa having done a couple of years in the hospitality sector you know this is not the kind of thing that's going to have major impacts on on the economy overall you know you may see some impacts in industries like hospitality that have relied on on some of those those workers um but broadly speaking i think that it will you know there will have been a blip upwards a blip downwards and then we'll go back

24:59Madeline Sumption MBE:to something pretty standard so say we get to a point where in you know the next government um It is, you know, for example, if reform get in and they're very kind of anti-immigration. And let's say we get to a point where whatever policies they bring in takes us below net zero. So there are more people leaving than coming into the country. What impact would that have on the economy?

25:21Steph:So if you have a much longer period of low migration, you might expect that to have more impact. But I think the key question is who is no longer coming. It's not so much about the numbers themselves. So in theory, and I don't think this is a likely scenario, but in theory, if you had high levels of emigration that were driven by people who were not working or people on low incomes, then that would actually have a positive impact on public finances. If you have lower migration that's driven by fewer people coming in and highly paid graduate jobs, then that's going to have a negative impact. I should say one other thing is that there is the short run, long run is really important here, particularly for public finances.

26:01Steph:So I mentioned you've got some groups of people who over the course of their lifetimes, it will cost more for them to use the NHS and receive any benefits they're entitled to and so forth than they're going to pay in tax. But that's only over the course of their lifetimes, which is obviously we're looking at 50 years that people might live here if they stay permanently. In the short run, newly arrived migrants tend to have a positive fiscal impact. So you could end up with a situation where actually if you're living budget to budget, which I understand obviously is the case for many politicians, then lower migration can be a challenge in the short run, even if in the long run, actually there would be benefits of certain types of migration being lower over the course of the decades.

26:47Madeline Sumption MBE:Yeah. And that's where it's so complicated because it all depends on who is moving. So let's say then, I'm going to just throw a couple of scenarios at you. Let's say if we have a policy which is, you know, stops as many people coming to this country, but doesn't really change the number of people leaving it. How will that impact things? Will that, because, you know, for example, if you look at unemployment at the moment, it's rising, isn't it? We're at 5.2%. It's particularly high with young people. You know, it's the highest level it's been for 11 years. And there is a real problem with youth unemployment and even people who are economically inactive.

27:28Madeline Sumption MBE:Now, in terms of young people, we often talk about this million young people who are not in education training or employment. Is there an argument that if we had fewer people migrating to this country and they are, as you say, lots of young people, could it be a case that therefore the people in this country, the young people here, would then have more employment opportunities? Because that is the argument, essentially, that parties like reform are making.

27:53Steph:Right. So there's been quite a few studies trying to look at, well, what is the actual impact on people's ability to get a job or their wages, local workers as a result of migration? And one of the general themes in these studies has been that the impacts are much smaller than people expect. And the reason for that is that there isn't a fixed number of jobs in the economy. So what happens is if you have migrants come to the country and they will occupy jobs, but they also increase demand, right? They're out there, they're buying stuff. And so the UK produces more and that obviously requires someone to produce it.

28:35Steph:And so in the long run, really what immigration does is increase the size of the population. And that's not necessarily good or bad economically. Obviously, if you have very fast population growth or if you have negative population growth, then that can be a problem. But broadly speaking, we don't become wealthier. China is not wealthier than the UK simply because it's bigger. So that's in the long run. In the short run, there is a little bit of evidence that some people will see, people particularly with lower earnings. There are studies that have been able to identify negative impact on their earnings.

29:08Steph:The negative impact tends to be very small compared to other things. you know one study I think found you know an impact of sort of like in pennies on the pound in terms of hourly wages but I suspect there may be groups where we're just not fully measuring it the one group actually where we do see a larger impact is actually previous migrants are seem to be most likely to lose out in the labour market as a result of new immigration and that actually makes sense because they're more likely to be in similar jobs they may they're more concentrated in jobs that don't require very high levels of language ability and so forth.

29:41Madeline Sumption MBE:It's so complicated, isn't it? And that's the point. But it often, you know, I live up in the northeast. There's a real problem with deprivation in the area, as there are in other parts of the country as well. It's not just specific to us. And there's, you know, a lot of momentum at the moment, popularism around immigration being the problem. And that's what's going to make their life better is if we have fewer immigrants taking jobs, putting pressure on services. What do I need to say to them about what the reality is in lay terms? How do I explain it to the people around me who all think that that is the problem?

30:20Steph:So I think most of the evidence suggests that the economic impacts of migration are relatively small. I think one of the challenges here actually is we all spend a lot of time talking about the economics of migration. The research suggests that that's not actually the thing that people care most about. People tend to care more about the social and cultural impacts of migration. but for various reasons economics is a little bit more comfortable for people to to talk about they're less likely to be accused of being racist for example if they're talking about these kind of more concrete economic impacts but I think when you get into the social and cultural impacts of migration this is obviously incredibly difficult to measure it's really in the eye of the beholder it's people's personal experiences that that matter not just what the

30:59Madeline Sumption MBE:data so can I say to them from what you're saying and I know you're probably going to say no that's too simplistic. But can I say that it's not really going to have much of an impact if we massively change the immigration policy?

31:11Steph:Well, an impact on the economy? Yeah, on economics. No, I think immigration policies do matter. It's very easy for immigration policies to make immigration higher, as we saw in the last few years. It tends to be harder to make immigration lower, particularly if there are people who are currently eligible for visas who will then stop being eligible. That tends to be more controversial for various reasons and all sorts of reasons that the government sometimes struggles to do that. So I wouldn't say that the immigration policy doesn't make any difference or that it's not very important. I think it's not a very effective way to influence the labour market.

31:56Steph:Even a medium-sized change in immigration policy is not going to have huge impacts. There can be some slightly bigger impacts sometimes on public finances. But I think, yeah, it's just really complicated. And often the impacts are smaller than people expect on both sides, right? So we get the sort of, you know, immigration is going to destroy the economy argument. And then we get the, you know, we massively rely on, we can only survive, the economy can only survive because of immigration. And I think that both of those really are exaggerations.

32:22Madeline Sumption MBE:Yeah. There's loads more I want to ask you in terms of the impact on businesses, There's also the potential brain drain and the wealth drain and all these other fancy buzz terms that are coming out for it. But let's go to a quick break.

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34:15Madeline Sumption MBE:Search Vanguard Investor to find out more. Now, when investing your capital is at risk, tax rules apply. So looking at this from the kind of business perspective and the sectors that are impacted by change in immigration policy, what's going on there? Like which sectors are the ones that are seeing fewer people coming into the country or more people leaving that type of thing?

34:41Steph:Yeah, so this has changed quite a lot over the last few years. Obviously, pre-Brexit, when we had free movement, a lot of EU citizens were coming to the UK and they worked obviously across the whole labour market. But they were particularly concentrated in lower wage sectors. So, for example, hospitality, some kind of logistics, transportation, some of those industries. Now, what's interesting is then when we brought free movement to an end, when the government ended free movement, And the expectation was actually that sectors like hospitality, lots of different kinds of manufacturing, construction, that they would be hit by that because they would not be able to recruit as many people.

35:21Steph:Because we were going to have this more selective system where people had to be in graduate jobs or earning a certain amount. That experiment in sort of radically cutting off the supply of migrant workers in lower wage jobs never happened because we had so many people coming as family members of workers, as family members of international students. That actually the growth in some of those sectors, the sectors that we expected to be hit, like hospitality, in fact, just continued merrily recruiting very substantial numbers of people. It was non-EU workers instead of EU workers.

35:56Madeline Sumption MBE:That's really interesting. So it was people coming here through a visa with these kind of tighter requirements, but along with them is their family members who then took on the jobs that didn't have the same visas that they would have done in the past. Exactly.

36:11Steph:And so what we've seen is, well, so all of the projections before the government knew that there was going to be this big increase in non-EU migration, the projections suggested that certain industries would see much tighter recruitment of migrant workers. That basically didn't happen. We then, in addition, there were a few sectors where there were people coming specifically on work visas to work in those sectors. The most dramatic example here is the care sector, where having gone from a situation where they relied to some extent on free movement, but it wasn't a major source of recruitment in the care sector.

36:47Steph:Then a visa opened up that allowed care employers to bring in very motivated people working in poor conditions on low wages from non-EU countries. And the demand for that was huge. A lot of people wanted to come to the UK. A lot of employers, because they'd been facing shortages for years, wanted to hire them. So there was this boom in recruitment in the care sector. Many people going into the care sector. There was also actually a lot of abuse and exploitation of that route. And so you had people who came in thinking that they had a job lined up in the care sector and actually they didn't. It was chaos.

37:21Steph:There was a huge mess in that sector in terms of exploitation. Then the government cracked down starting sort of late 2023 or so. And then under the current government, the route was actually the care route was closed to overseas recruitment entirely. So then so you had, again, sort of roller coaster where you have, you know, the massive increase in the availability of visas and then a crackdown. And so that will start, there are still quite a few people who've been displaced in the care sector, these people who thought they had a job lined up and didn't, and they can still move into new care jobs.

37:57Steph:But over the next few years, we'll start, in theory, we'll start to see tighter situation for employers trying to recruit migrant workers in the care sector.

38:04Madeline Sumption MBE:So are they here, those people who were promised a job and then it didn't materialise, are they here legitimately? Yes.

38:11Steph:So there are various different kinds of compliance problems. There were some people who, you know, there were some issues. We don't really know what the scale of this is. People who came in, for example, were as dependents of, you know, partner, for example, of a worker, but they weren't actually the partner of the person. And so there was some of that type of abuse where people, the workers themselves knew that it wasn't legitimate. But there was a lot of cases where people thought that they had a legitimate visa and job lined up. And in fact, the visa was issued to them. But when they got there, it turned out that the employer didn't in fact have jobs.

38:49Steph:Sometimes there were cases where employers would bid on contracts with local authorities and they would bring in the workers to do that. But then they didn't get the contract. And so they had no hours to offer the workers. You had so many employers entering this system that a lot of them, either through incompetence or malice, they weren't complying with the rules. You're not allowed to offer a zero hours contract to someone who's on a work visa. You tell the employer, the employer will tell the home office, I'm going to guarantee pay of this amount. These are going to be the hours. This is going to be their pay.

39:19Steph:And people just weren't doing it. And so what happened to those people? Well, they were in big trouble. And so, you know, in many cases, they might have been in debt from having so that, you know, perhaps they sold their house at home. and they might have paid legal recruitment fees or paid to various middlemen along the way. And so some of them ended up working without permission in other sectors, hospitality or service stations, these types of things. So there have been cases of people being picked up in immigration enforcement operations who turned out to have a visa. It was just that their employer wasn't offering them the work.

40:00Steph:Some people were homeless. Some people will have left the country. So that has been really difficult, obviously, for those individuals, for the government to manage. And I think it was partly just the scale of the recruitment that happened meant that oversight was incredibly difficult. Yeah. And do we know how many of those people there are? We don't have recent numbers. The government estimated a little while back that it was a number in the low tens of thousands of people have been displaced from there. So, you know, we're not currently working with their employer. But then there are also people who would like to leave their employer who, you know, they're in a job and they're being paid maybe not as much as they should be, that they're with an exploitative employer.

40:40Steph:And so those people would not be in any of those statistics because their sort of employers are partially compliant.

40:46Madeline Sumption MBE:Right. So, I mean, it sounds impossible to police them, but surely the employers could be found out who they were given that they'd brought in these people and there must be a peer portrayal. So did the employers get in any trouble here?

41:00Steph:Yeah. So if they get found out, then the employers get in trouble and their licence can be revoked. And there has been a spike in revocation of employers' licences to sponsor workers from overseas. Some of them then just come back in. So they get struck off for 12 months and then they can just reapply and do it again. In some cases, you know, the degree of exploitation would sort of amount to modern slavery and then they might be, you know, they could potentially be prosecuted in other ways. But I think the challenge for the government, this system, it was what, you know, for decades, this was a system that was mostly aimed at graduate jobs where the enforcement was relatively light touch.

41:42Steph:There were problems here and there, but most employers tended to be reasonably legitimate, bringing people in, paying the wages and so forth. And then when it opened up to the care sector in particular, because it's already a high risk sector for exploitation and you've got a lot of smaller employers who don't necessarily know how to comply with the rules and others who don't care to comply with the rules. That's really, I think, where you started getting these. But it was not a sector that was necessarily particularly well suited to having the responsibilities of sponsoring and complying with immigration and employment law.

42:18Madeline Sumption MBE:That's interesting that you're suggesting that some of the businesses wouldn't necessarily have known they were doing something wrong then, like the small businesses.

42:25Steph:Yeah, I think I mean, I think there's a spectrum of noncompliance. There are people who absolutely know that they're doing things wrong and doing things like threatening their employees. You know, if you go to the police, then I can get you deported. Those types of things, you know, they know that that's not legitimate. And then I think you have a spectrum all the way down to sort of smaller noncompliance. You know, they don't necessarily realise that they need to pay, you know, exactly what they've said if the person is working less. I mean, they should, you know, they have a responsibility and the law says, I'm not saying it's OK if they didn't know, right?

42:55Madeline Sumption MBE:Because the law says you need to be on top of this and make sure that you're following the rules. They're not paying taxes. Do we know how many there are of these employers then where they've brought people in who've then been displaced? Are there any stats around that?

43:09Steph:There are some stats suggesting you've got hundreds of licences that were revoked, but there will be other forms of non-compliance that have just never been picked up. If it's never come to the attention of the Home Office, then that won't be in any statistics.

43:25Madeline Sumption MBE:Can I talk to you about something else that's, you know, doing the rounds at the minute, the brain drain. So this idea that we've, you know, ONS figures are showing that three quarters, I think, of the UK nationals who are emigrating are under 35. And there's this suggestion that they're going off to sunnier climates in terms of, you know, greater wealth elsewhere and everything else. Is that true? You know, is there a danger of us having a brain drain?

43:53Steph:So it's always been the case that we have net emigration of British citizens. You have more people leaving than coming back. And that makes sense. This is a country that produces British citizens. So on average, you would expect more people to be leaving in any given year than coming back. The big problem here is we just don't have good enough data to know how that's changed over time. The reason that we're all talking about it now is that last year, the Office for National Statistics changed its methodology. Right. So it has a new way of measuring them, of measuring people leaving that picks up a lot more people.

44:29Steph:I suspect that their methodology is picking up people who have not actually left. Basically, if you're not engaging with the tax and benefit system for a long enough period, then you will be assumed to have emigrated. And so I think the numbers are probably, the most recent numbers suggested more than, there was a net emigration of more than 100 ,000. That's not totally off the charts compared to historical period. So we have much more accurate data for the 2010s, which suggested that the figure was more around the net figure of maybe 80 ,000 leaving. I think it could well be when we eventually get to the bottom of the data that actually nothing's really changed.

45:08Steph:This is pretty stable, somewhere around 80 ,000 over time. But we just don't know. And we don't know very much about the characteristics of people who are leaving. Are they people who would have been tremendously successful high earners here who would be contributing to public finances? Are they people without jobs? In general, it's often those people with more resources who are better able to migrate. And so probably on that, I would imagine that that immigration is going to be negative for public finances because it will be more likely to be kind of higher paid people who have the opportunity.

45:47Madeline Sumption MBE:So it could be a case that things haven't changed. It's just the way that we measure those people has changed, which is suggesting that it looks like there are more. Yes. Yeah. And I mean, it's a shame we don't do like an exit interview, isn't it? When people go and just say, well, can you fill out all the reasons why you're leaving? And then that'll be helpful.

46:05Steph:Well, we used to do that. Did we? Yes, that's the reason for the new methodology. I mean, it wasn't so, you know, it wasn't really a, we didn't kind of give them the opportunity to grumble about whether it was tax policy or, you know, they didn't like the government or that kind of thing. But we did ask, there was a data collection that would ask, you know, what's the reason for leaving? And so people would say if they were going to study or going to work and we would know some stuff about them. But that data collection then ended and the challenge is that there hasn't been anything sufficient to replace it.

46:35Madeline Sumption MBE:So when people do leave, the only way that you know they've left is because they just stop paying taxes or are not part of the benefits or whatever the system is. And that's the only way you know they've gone.

46:49Steph:That is currently the method that the government uses. The Office for National Statistics is exploring other options as well. In the long run, if you have a census, you can then reconcile it, right? You can say, okay, well, this is how many people we had in 2011, how many people in 2021. And so you can work out from that how many people must have emigrated if you know how many people were born and died in the meantime. And that will presumably happen again when we get the next census in 2031. But obviously, we've got quite a few years until then.

47:18Madeline Sumption MBE:So we don't necessarily think there's a brain drain. What about the wealth drain? So there's the idea that there's lots of, I don't know, millionaires who are leaving because of whether it's to do with tax policy or whatever it is. Is that happening? Are we seeing more rich people leaving?

47:33Steph:Yeah, this again, we just don't have the data, unfortunately. So we have bad enough data just on the overall how many people are leaving. But we know even less about who it is who's leaving and how wealthy they are. Yeah.

47:45Madeline Sumption MBE:Do you think I mean, because anecdotally, lots of people are talking. I know you don't deal in anecdotes in your job. But what do you think looking ahead to immigration? Do you think we're going to see more people leaving who are, you know, who are richer? Are we going to see more people leaving in the brain drain sense? Or is it just impossible to predict?

48:02Steph:I think it is basically impossible to predict. There is some research on why people leave. And in general, as I mentioned, it tends to be younger people who leave. Very wealthy people. Yes, in theory, you know, there are these stories about people going to live in tax havens or what have you. there's actually quite big barriers to very wealthy people moving which is that it's their networks and their social capital and everything they know about the place where they are that has enabled them in many cases to become rich in the first place and so you can't necessarily just uproot yourself and be just as successful in some other country plus by the time people are very rich often they're 50 plus at which point they may have children in school they've got lives as well as just money.

48:49Steph:And so in practice, it's often the case that people find it more difficult to move than you would expect, even if they can get a more beneficial tax policy somewhere else.

48:59Madeline Sumption MBE:So I can see next year you've got your book, which is coming out soon. What is immigration policy for? What is immigration policy for then?

49:09Steph:Well, one of the challenges is it's for many different things. So the government is trying to achieve all sorts of objectives. They've got economic objectives. There's social and cultural impacts. There's humanitarian and ethical considerations. And basically in the book, what I argue is that because they're trying to achieve quite a lot of things with a set of tools that don't always work and that are quite limited and their goals conflict. So, you know, you might often get a conflict between the humanitarian objective of forbidding refugees and the fact that actually refugees need a lot of support.

49:43Steph:So they're not going to be positive from an economic perspective. So what I'm trying to do in this, but I'm trying to basically just be as fair as possible to the arguments on each side of the debate and sort of explain, you know, what can we genuinely say we know? What are we less sure about? Why is it so difficult to come up with a policy that people are happy with?

50:02Madeline Sumption MBE:Yeah, because I mean, part of your job is to make migration debates more evidence based, aren't there? So what I guess is your biggest beef in terms of misconceptions about immigration frustrations and things? What's your, you know, in terms of what it's used for and what it isn't used for, what's your biggest beef?

50:22Steph:I think probably the biggest challenge is that quite naturally people find it very difficult to recognise the trade-offs, that the evidence rarely unambiguously supports a particular position. Every policy has pros and cons and it has winners and losers. And I think that we see on both sides of debate, both the sort of skeptical side and the pro-migration side, that people are anxious about accepting any counter arguments to their policies. And I understand this, right? Especially politicians, they have to sell their policies. And okay, there's some chat about, well, there are difficult choices.

51:01So you do sometimes get that recognition.

51:04Steph:But I think it's genuinely quite difficult to admit, you know, this policy is not perfect. It does have some drawbacks. But I think the public debate more broadly can do that. And that we could all do more, I think, to be honest about the trade-offs. That there's never a perfect answer and you're going to have pros and cons in either direction.

51:21Madeline Sumption MBE:Which feels it always gets left out of debate, doesn't it? It's always, it feels like it's quite binary at the moment. And that's not the reality is what you're saying. Madeleine, thank you so much. It's been lovely to chat to you. and your book is out in March, isn't it? It is. It's called What Is Immigration Policy For? Exactly. And you can pre-order it now. Pre-ordering always helps authors. So do pre-order it if you can. There's lots of good deals on at the minute with the booksellers too. So have a look, see if you can get it. But thank you very much, Radley. Lovely to see you. Thank you.

51:50Madeline Sumption MBE:That's it. And the rest is money. Bye-bye.

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