 Well, hello. My name is Martin Wuss. You're all very welcome to this session on international labor migration Right after lunch isn't often the best time. So I'm very pleased to see so many of you here I'll try to keep it reasonably short to about half an hour or so and maybe just a few words about myself So you know where I'm coming from with this talk. I'm a trained economist but I work really in between economics and politics. I'm a lecturer at this department and Most of my research is on labor immigration policies in different countries and I do a mix of academic research and policy work, which means policy advice both to this government and various different governments in other countries and international organizations so most of my work is informed by some of the key challenges that international labor migration poses and raises for policymakers around the world and what I would like to do today is just really give three snippets of research controversies and debates about migration and the general theme really is that Almost everybody everybody in this room will have a view on immigration. I'm sure People have very strong views and there's a lot of disagreement in research in public policy debate and also in public opinion as we'll see in a second But the theme of this session really is that a lot of the debates and disagreements that we have in migration stem from very fundamental starting points and fundamental disagreements about the assumptions we make and some of the values that inform our views on immigration. So I'll just try to make that point that on most decisions, policy decisions on immigration, there is no one right answer. Actually, I would say on all immigration decisions, there is no one right answer because what kind of migration policy you want to have obviously critically depends on whose interests you want to serve and different people will have different views. So another theme of this talk will be trade-offs. That means that migration benefits some and might in some circumstances create costs for others. So migration is a lot about debating assumptions about debating trade-offs. So I've called the talk controversial. There are three specific questions that I would like to address and spend a little bit of time on. The first one is who counts as a migrant? We often talk about immigration. We have a lot of opinion polling asking people, what do you think about immigration? But we don't really know who the people have in mind when they answer questions about immigrants. When the prime minister or government party makes pronouncements on immigration policy, what group are we exactly talking about and why does this matter? The second question is to do with who needs migrant workers and by that I simply mean that in many countries, including this one, a lot of employers across different sectors and occupations say they need migrant workers. So the farmer says they need migrant workers to pick the strawberry. The IT company says they need more Indian IT specialists. And in a way, it's the task for government then to decide, well, does this company really need migrant workers? How do you do that? And the third question is an equally important one which is, well, how can we think about the question of what rights migrant workers should be granted after admission? Again, there's a wide range of views and I'm going to try to illustrate these by using different pieces of research which involve both the UK but also other countries. Now to start with the first question, I think this is a very important question and very few people think about this. Who counts as a migrant? Well, there's obviously various different ways in which migrants can be defined in data sets, in the data that we get, in law and in public debates. Now, if we start with data sets, one very common definition of a migrant is somebody who was born abroad and moved to a different country. So somebody was born abroad and moved to the UK. Now, if you use that definition, you get between, you know, six and a half to seven million migrants in this country. Now, a different definition is to do with citizenship. Somebody who does not hold British citizenship. Now, if you use that definition, you get few migrants in the country. And a third definition is to do with time of arrival. Sometimes people say, well, when we talk about immigration, the issues that immigration raises, we're really talking about recent immigration. We're not necessarily talking about people who were born abroad but moved to this country 50 years ago. We're talking about people who've come the last five years. So it's recent immigration. Now, you can see how these different definitions have a critical impact on debates and analysis. So if, for example, you're interested in the question, what's the impact of immigration on wages, right? Well, the first question is, okay, how do you find immigrants? Are you going to look at the impact of all foreign-born people in this country? Or are you going to look at only foreign nationals? Or are you going to look at only those who arrived a few years and five years ago? So there's big debates about this going on. And different people will choose different definitions with big implications for analysis and for policy debates. Are we allowed to make I'd like to know the numbers for the other categories. Yes, I think there's about four or so million non-British nationals in these countries. And I don't have the number for the ones who survived fewer than five years ago. But I can give those numbers to you afterwards. I'll be happy to make the slides available and give any numbers. There's, of course, differences migration in law. Policymakers often talk about immigration policy. They often talk about immigrants whose arrival, whose immigration can be controlled, right? So, for example, within the European Union, this government cannot control the scale or composition of immigration from other EU countries. It can control non-EU immigration. So there's a difference there as well. And, of course, there's a difference in definitions in public debates. Are other EU nationals such as myself, I'm from Austria, should we be considered migrants? What about those who were born abroad, but who are now British citizens who have naturalized? Are they still immigrants? So what we did was that in this project, we looked more closely at public opinion. Now, one striking feature about public opinion on immigration in this country is that, generally speaking, the public tends to be much more opposed to immigration than in other countries. So if you ask the question, are there too many immigrants in this country? Is immigration more of a problem than opportunity, the red bar? You will see that in the UK, far higher shares of the adult population will agree with these statements. Over 60% of people in this country say that immigration is more a problem than opportunity, and over half say there's too many immigrants. Higher shares than in other high-income countries. Similarly, in terms of salience, so is how important an issue is immigration to the public? Again, the UK stands out, although in the US you've got a fairly high ranking as well. So if you ask, will immigration influence your vote a lot, again in the UK, over a quarter of the population say that it will? And if you ask, what's the most important problem facing the country? In the UK, almost 25% of people will say it's immigration. So the key question is that we ask is who do people have in mind when they think about immigrants? Because a lot of government policy is made in response to public opinion. Actually, current government's policy of rapidly reducing immigration is very explicitly based on public opinion. So one point I want to make is that if you ask people in this country, are there too many immigrants? Has immigration gone too far? Over time, you get pretty consistent answers, which means the point I'm trying to make is that opposition to immigration in this country has been long standing, is not new. We often hear 60% of public are against immigration. This has been true since at least the early 1960s. So the three results of opinion polls, they're in different colors because the questions are slightly different. So the answers are not directly comparable. So this graph does not suggest necessarily that public opinion on immigration has become more favorable. But a point I'm trying to make is for a long time, most people in this country say in one way or another, they want fewer migrants. There's too many. So what we did was we conducted a survey, a public opinion poll with Ipsos Moray, and we asked, when you think about immigrants coming to and living in Britain, which of the groups would you normally think about? Who do you normally think about in terms of nationality? So what most people think about is citizens of non-EU countries, 60%, followed by citizens of EU countries. Few people think about naturalized British citizens. So these are people who were born abroad, who've now become British nationals. Actually, less than 40% think of those as immigrants, even though technically, in a lot of the analysis, they're foreign born and they would be included in the debate. So there's a difference by where people come from. Now this is quite interesting because we also ask people, when you think about immigrants coming to Britain, which groups would you normally think about by length of stay? Those staying permanently, more than five years, fewer than five years, and very clearly you see that when people think about immigrants overwhelmingly they think about people who stay permanently. It's permanent immigrants that people are thinking about when they answer questions to immigration. Now the most interesting response I think was this one. So we asked, when you think about immigrants, who do you think about in terms of category? So we've got asylum seekers, we've got students, we've got family, we've got workers. Now by far the biggest share of respondents say they think of asylum seekers. Over 60% of people in this country think of asylum seekers when they answer questions about immigration, followed by work, family, and fewer than 30% think of students. Now what's interesting about this is that this is almost completely in inverse correlation to the actual numbers coming in. Okay? By far the biggest group of immigrants in this country are students. Students coming in. EU students and non-EU students. They're the biggest numbers. And by far the smallest group are asylum seekers. The asylum seekers constitute one to two percent, maybe something around that, maybe five percent of all immigration flows. So you can see the problem that creates for interpreting public opinion data that people think about asylum seekers, but actually asylum seekers don't feature in the numbers really in a big way at all anymore. We also asked, if you want immigration reduced, which specific categories do you want reduced? Okay? Now the least popular kinds of immigrants, maybe unsurprisingly, to the right are low-skilled workers. Maybe that's not a surprise. Followed by extended family members, asylum seekers. The most popular types of immigrants who only 30% want reduced are university students, which is good for this university. Fair education colleges, high-skilled workers, and English language students. Okay? Now the problem for government is that low-skilled workers who are at least popular are mostly from other European Union countries, which the government cannot control. Okay? The large numbers. The public really doesn't like them. Public says, we want few of them. Government has no control over them. Okay? Extended family members actually have been reduced to almost nothing in terms of numbers in this country. You cannot do much more in terms of reducing extended family members because there's very few left. Asylum seekers are numerically small, as I said. So this is what the public wants. Reduce those, but the numbers are so small that if government did that, it would make very little impact on overall numbers. Okay? Now these are the ones that government can't control. Non-EU students, high-skilled workers, but those groups, of course, tend to be the most economically beneficial. Right? So the point I'm trying to make is that when you interpret public opinion data, it's very important to ask, who do people have in mind? And there's a real problem for government when it wants to respond to public opinion. Because to some extent, the government does not have the tools to deliver on the demands that the public makes because some, the kinds of migration that the public wants reduced, low-skilled workers are in fact mostly from Eastern Europe, and the government cannot stop them easily, at least. Okay? So I think that's maybe, maybe something to think about on public opinion. Now the second question I want to move on to, as I said, is the following. A lot of labor immigration starts with an employer or various employers saying they need migrant workers. So the typical claim that employers make is that we need migrant workers to fill labor and skills shortages that domestic workers cannot or will not do. Okay? So employers typically say British workers can't do these jobs, either because they don't have the skills or because they're lazy, they're not going to pick the mushrooms, they're not going to work in the food processing factory, they're not going to do the work. We need migrants. So it's then the job of government to evaluate this claim and to decide how to respond to it. So by evaluation, I mean, ideally, we need some analysis that tries to figure out, well, is it true that there is a shortage of workers in this particular job? And if so, is immigration the answer? Do we want to provide this sector with more migrant workers? So this is a question that colleagues and I discussed in this book, which has come out a couple of years ago, who needs migrant workers. So we looked at different sectors of the economy and asked precisely, how can you evaluate claims about shortages? And how can you help government decide how to respond to such claims? Now, one thing which is quite clear, I think, should be clear, some people will disagree, is that, in my view, you know, most countries, many people will argue that immigration policy should be made in a national interest, the national interest. Now, there's a question about how you define national interest, but at a minimum, I would argue, the national interest includes more than just employers' interests. So just because there's employers saying they're desperate for more migrant workers, in my view, that doesn't necessarily make a good case for more immigration. It could be, but I've rarely met an employer who doesn't want to increase the labor supply, who doesn't want skills from abroad, of course. From a business point of view, employers want access to the best possible labor supply to the workers with the best skills. Employers generally don't care, at least the ones I've spoken to. Employers say, well, they don't care where the worker comes from. They just want the best worker for the business. So we're into maximizing profits. So I think the reason why we need to critically interrogate the claim is that employers are saying something, and we need to check whether from the whole economies and society's point of view, this is a good idea, satisfying that claim. And I'll just give you a couple of examples of claims that employers make just to illustrate some of this. So as part of the kind of government advisory work that I do, I get to travel all around the UK to talk to employers, and they say they need migrant workers, and we need to find out what drives those shortages. So I'll just give you one example. There's one employer, a fish processing factory, specializing in exporting macros to Japan. And the shortage was for a worker who could fill it macros from frozen. And the claim that his employer made that there's only one worker in the whole world who can do this job well, only one kind of worker. And that worker is a Chinese worker who was trained in Japan. So this company was making a case to government saying we need more migrant workers, non-EU, but not just anyone. We want Chinese workers trained in Japan. So we go there. I should say I don't know anything about fish at all. So I learn a lot about fish processing. And so my first question is, well, what about British workers? And they say, oh, no, no, no, they wouldn't do the job. They just wouldn't do it. Not suitable. Then I say, well, what about these European workers? Oh, no, no, they can't. Then I say, well, what about training? How long does it take to train somebody to fill a frozen macros? And he says five years. So I say clearly that I don't know anything about fish. Maybe you're right. But it seems a long time. So it was a British employer. So the further argument is that if you don't provide us with these workers, then we become less competitive, because actually, our competitors in Norway, Sweden, who also focus on fishing macros and exporting to Japan, they all employ Chinese workers in Japan. So they've got their good workers. If you don't give us those workers, we can't compete. So I'm saying this because I just want to illustrate the complexity issue. Just to say the question is, well, is it a good idea or a bad idea to satisfy this particular demand for migrant workers? Another example, of course, is there's many examples, but I'll mention one other one, maybe two other ones. One is, of course, with restaurants, ethnic cuisine restaurants, Indian restaurants, Thai restaurants. This is not just from the UK, but in many countries. These restaurants will say that they have a demand for cooks, and many will say also for waiters and waitresses, that are from the country where the food in a way comes from. So the Thai restaurant wants a Thai cook. The Indian restaurant wants an Indian and Bangladeshi cook. And the government says, well, no, you should use the Polish block, because we have so many Europeans around. You cannot have. And restaurants say, well, this is disgraceful because the customer doesn't want European cooks cooking this food. So the question becomes, who can cook the food? And the next question is, well, then restaurants also say, well, when the customer walks into the door in a Thai restaurant, some of them will say people don't want to be served by British people or by Austrian people or by Portuguese people. They want to be served by Thai people. Again, the question is, so is that a good case for immigration? Final example is to do with social care, which of course is a very important issue because the demand for, especially looking after the elderly over time will increase. Now, two thirds of social care assistance in London are migrants and the share is increasing. And if you talk to owners of care homes and ask them why is the share of migrants so high in this sector, I mean, they're pretty upfront about it. It's, well, one big reason is that wages are so low and the work is very tough and the conditions are very irregular. And so then the question is, well, what's wrong with raising wages to try to attract other workers? And one of the answers is, well, we cannot raise wages because we are basically contracted out by local councils. So in this country, a lot of social care is publicly funded, but privately provided. So the local councils would contract to work out to private care homes. Now, because of the chronic under investment in the social care sector in this country for a long time, wages in the sector are rock bottom, a very low. So you have a structural dependence on low cost labour, especially in places like London. As a consequence, the only kinds of people in this country who would do this work are migrant workers. So you've got a situation where, you know, the demand for migrant labour is a result of under investment in the sector. So you've got a trade off. If you want to reduce immigration, as the current government wants, and as many people want, in this particular sector, you probably cannot do it without trying to raise wages and to improve conditions, which will attract more British workers, but that will require more investment, which in turn will probably require more taxpayers' money. So you either need to put more money into it and you will have more British workers employed. And if you don't, if you say no, we're happy to run a social care system that's based on low cost, the implication is you will need a lot of migrant work. So I think it's this kind of trade off that people need to think about and grapple with. So that's what we, in the book, call system effects, that the demand for migrant workers is often determined by a wide range of public policies, which has nothing to do with immigration. So in the social care example, it was the under investment in the sector. In the construction sector, the reason why so many construction companies are turning to East European workers are simply because they're better skilled. There's been a, in contrast to the construction sectors in many other countries, this country, does not have a comprehensive training system. So that means that British, young British people are not trained as well as young Germans or young East Europeans in construction. So when the employer faces a choice between offering an apprenticeship to a young British worker who hasn't been trained properly and a highly motivated young skilled Polish worker, the choice is simple. So again, it's a system effect. The reason the demand for migrant workers is so high because of the lack of training in that sector. So sometimes it's with under investment in the sector, sometimes it's training, other times it's of course housing. Some of the agricultural work that's done is done in very remote rural areas. Some of the farms where people pick strawberries require people to live on site in caravans and to be super flexible. Now who are the kinds of workers who provide that flexibility, but very often it is migrant workers who are most flexible. So it's, it's system effect. It's kind of a whole range of public policies that often create a demand for migrant labour. Now the implication is, I think quite important policy implication is that if you want to reduce immigration for whatever reason, if there's a political imperative to reduce immigration, you will not succeed unless you change the wider public policies that drive the demand for migrant workers in the first place. Okay, I think so immigration is often debated in isolation. I think it's very important to debate immigration in the context of labour market policies, welfare state policies, housing policies, training policies. Okay, again it's a question of trade-offs. So that was the main message of the second project and I'll skip through some of the slides. Again they'll all be up, these are just illustrating the things that I've said just now. Now the final question is slightly different because it takes us to the international arena and the question is what rights should we grant to migrant workers? And I'm going to start by addressing this. This is based on a recent book that I've just published, which is in the back, this is a shameless plug from a book here, which is in the back if you're interested. It's available at Blackwells and there are flyers that you're welcome to take along. Now the starting point of the book is this chart. Now this chart shows you the numbers of ratifications by countries of major international human rights treaties. So we've had about what you know eight to ten or so major international human rights treaties since the 1950s, 1960s. And what I would like to highlight is that in 1990 the UN actually adopted an international treaty on the rights of migrant workers, 1990. And so it shows you the number of ratifications over time. So the UN has roughly about 200 member states. So you see many of the human rights treaties have been ratified. Now the big exception is the migrant rights treaty, which is this chart, which has fewer than 50 ratifications. Fewer than 50 countries have ratified the UN treaty on the rights of migrant workers. None of the major immigration countries are among the countries that have ratified. The countries that have ratified are almost all sending countries, migrant sending countries. And this makes the UN migrant workers treaty the least ratified treaty among all the human rights treaties. So the question, the obvious question that the UN community and many people ask is, so why is that? There's a big literature that discusses the reason and there's all kinds of reasons given, legal complexities, overlaps with existing instruments. But the starting point in a way of my project in this case was that countries don't ratify because they don't think it's the national interest to grant these rights to migrant workers, rights create costs. So in a way, rights don't only have intrinsic value as human rights, as many NGOs and many international organizations point out, but they also play a critical role as an instrument of labor immigration policies. So restrictions of rights are in practice, whether we like it or not, instruments of labor immigration policy. So when countries design a labor immigration program they have to decide on three fundamental questions. One, how do you regulate the numbers coming in? So how many? Do you have an open policy or do you have a quota or how many do you admit? Two, selection. Who do you admit? Is it highly skilled workers only, low skilled workers, or a mix of the two? And three, importantly, what rights do you grant migrants after admission? So these are the three policy decisions that countries need to make and they make them at the same time. So countries have to decide whether or not they admit migrants on a temporary or permanent basis. Do we give migrants free choice of employment or do we limit them to certain sectors? Do we give migrants access to healthcare, access to education, access to social housing? Do you give the right to family reunification? All these decisions are made, I would argue, in many countries based on some sort of cost-benefit calculus. Again, I'm not saying this because I think that's the way it should be like that, but I think in practice countries think about these things in that way. So what I was interested in this project is, well, how are these three things related? Openness, selection, and rights in countries' policies. So I looked at over 100 labor immigration programs in almost 50 countries to analyze the relationship with openness, skills, and rights and here's what I found. I'm not going to kind of go into the details of it, but what basically this shows, this is an indicator of openness measured on the y-axis and as you move from low skill to high skill, you're moving from programs that focus on admitting low skilled workers to higher skilled workers. So it's an upward sloping line. That means that the more skilled the migrant workers are, the more skilled the labor immigration policy, the more open the policy. So countries are much more open to admitting skilled than lower skilled migrant workers. This is very clear across almost all countries, including the UK. There's a preference for admitting skilled over low skilled workers. If you look at the relationship between rights and skills, so in this case the y-axis measures the extent to which countries restrict migrant rights. Zero means restrictions are heavy and one means equality of rights are granted. And again, you move from low skill to higher skilled labor immigration programs. Again, most are upward sloping, political rights, economic rights, social rights. That means that higher skilled workers are given generally more rights than lower skilled workers. The big exception are political rights in red, which are pretty flat and don't vary across skill levels, which makes sense because most liberal democracies would find it very hard to restrict civil and political rights, but they find it much less hard to restrict social rights, for example, access to social housing and things like that. And the third finding, which is probably the most interesting one, but also the most controversial one, is that I find an inverse relationship, so a trade-off between openness to admitting migrant workers and the rights that are granted to migrants after admission. So that means when you look at labor immigration policies in high-income countries, the policies that are most open to admitting migrant workers are also most restrictive with regard to migrant rights. So the key example, of course, are the Gulf states in the Middle East. The Gulf states in the Middle East admit very large numbers of migrant workers. In Kuwait, 99% of the private workforce is made up of migrant workers, the whole private sector. Very large numbers. In most GCC states, the majority of people in the country are migrants. So they admit very large numbers, but they impose very severe restrictions on the rights of migrant workers. At the other extreme, you have countries like Sweden. Sweden, Social Democratic Welfare State, is very strong in equality of rights, but admits very few migrant workers. So if you look at these countries' policies, there's this tension. Now why does this matter? Well, from a global justice point of view, you could argue that both more migration and greater equality of rights are good things, because more migration benefits, sending countries a lot, benefits migrants a lot, and the World Bank, for example, advocates more low-skilled migration as one of the most effective development strategies. So if you take a global point of view, and I said that this project moves the lens from the kind of local to the global, if you take a global point of view, you could say, yeah, there should be more migration. We'll reduce inequality. It's good for migrants, good for sending countries. At the same time, of course, you could say, well, migrants should be given equality of rights. The problem that this project has identified in practice, because labor immigration policies are driven by national interests of receiving countries, in practice there's a tension between these two. So that means that insisting on equality of rights for migrant workers can't come at the price of more restrictive admission policies. So that raises a host of ethical questions of, for example, should you ever restrict the rights of migrant workers in order to encourage high-income countries to admit more of them? Because many sending countries, of course, the first thing they want is admission to high-income countries. Sending countries don't benefit if their migrant workers get a whole lot of rights, but if those countries don't admit them in the first place. So the trade-off between access and rights is also very prevalent in sending countries to labor immigration policies. If you look at Indonesia, Bangladesh, Philippines, for example, sending a lot of workers to the Gulf states where their workers' rights are severely restricted, I mean these countries generally have two objectives in terms of immigration. One, they want to increase the number of immigrants to have more remittances, and two, they try to protect their rights. But a very few of these countries have been insisting on equality of, full equality of rights for fear of reduced access. Countries like, one second, countries like Saudi Arabia, you know, if one sending country becomes very demanding about rights, Saudi Arabia says, well, we'll just stop admitting workers from your country, and we'll ask Nepal, a slightly poorer country, if they want to send their work. So there's real challenges, I think, in the debate about migrant rights from a global point of view. Okay, I'll conclude here by just saying that the state of the obvious immigration is a very contested issue. I think a lot of the disagreements are about disagreements about assumptions and underlying values and starting points. And I think, personally, I think it is very important to always critically reflect, you know, what these starting points are. And my own view certainly is that there is generally no one right answer to some of these policy questions. And unfortunately, a lot of public debate is conducted in a way that suggests that there is one right answer, and we should find the optimal number of migrants and we should find the optimal policy while there isn't, because it all depends on who migration policy is for. Thank you. I'll finish here. We'll have 10 minutes for questions. Thank you.