UK immigration policy: ‘Firm but fair’, and failing?

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Abstract
This paper investigates the effectiveness of the UK immigration policy. For over two decades UK immigration policy has had clearly stated aims; to limit immigration for permanent settlement to a minimum, subject to the needs of the labour market and to obligations to dependents, genuine refugees and other exceptions. Government sources routinely describe it as firm but fair’. ‘Primary immigration’ is claimed, both by the Home Office and by the Commission for Racial Equality and by immigrant organizations, almost to have ended. The phrasing of the UK immigration policy incorporates certain ‘escape clauses’. Nonetheless if it is intended to reduce, or at least to prevent the increase of immigration defined demographically, then it has not been dramatically successful since its inception and has clearly been failing in that purpose since the mid‐1980s. This is partly because of the increase in asylum claiming since that time, and the failure to remove rejected claimants with no entitlement to remain in the UK. Although outside the ‘immigration policy’ in the strict sense, the 1993 legislation which was intended to curb asylum claiming has demonstrable not succeeded. The more general failure primarily concerns immigrants from the New Commonwealth, most of whom have entered the UK since the imposition of controls, and asylum claimants from the New Commonwealth and from the rest of the Third World.