Abstract
During the 2010 UK general election campaign, David Cameron famously made a promise to cut net migration from ‘hundreds of thousands’ to ‘tens of thousands’ by 2015. In the context of increasingly politicized debates about immigration, the electoral logic of this commitment was not difficult to divine, but its feasibility was always in question. Leaving aside economic or moral justifications, the problem with a promise to reduce net migration is that it is calculated by taking inflows, over which the government has only partial control, and subtracting outflows, over which it has none. On the one hand, the government is unable to control the number of European Union (EU) citizens exercising their free movement rights, who make up a significant proportion of immigrants (though luckily for them this number has been decreasing during the economic crisis); on the other hand, the government is almost wholly unable to influence emigration. Short of persecuting its citizens or running its economy into the ground, no democratic government is able to regulate the number of people who choose to leave.1 Thus the focus on net migration, rather than immigration, is a curious hostage to fortune.
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© 2013 James Hampshire
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Hampshire, J. (2013). An Emigrant Nation without an Emigrant Policy: The Curious Case of Britain. In: Collyer, M. (eds) Emigration Nations. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277107_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277107_13
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