Last but not least? – the Lib Dem manifesto

Last out of the stable of the 'big 3' party manifestos is the offering from the Liberal Democrats, released today in the unlikely location of the Bloomberg headquarters in the City of London. Drilling down into the immigration policy provisions in this manifesto there is actually plenty more for immigration campaigners to get excited about than the gloomy offerings outlined in my previous blog. No doubt it is easier for a party with so little chance of forming a majority government to put forward some more progressive ideas on immigration and asylum aimed at the liberal vote. But the possibility of a hung parliament means that the headline policies that the Lib Dems have put forward today might just have a chance of gaining some traction inside Westminster.

Key immigration and asylum policies put forward by the Lib Dems include:

•     ending child detention in the UK. The continued detention of children in immigration centres, often for an unfixed period and at serious cost to their mental and physical health, has come under fire from healthcare experts, lawyers, campaigners, and the UKBA's own inspector John Vine. Lame excuses from current ministers that there is no alternative to child detention belie the fact that other countries, including Australia and Sweden, manage to avoid detaining children. The Lib Dems instead propose "electronic tagging, stringest reporting requirements and residence restrictions" for families considered likely to abscond.

•     introducing a regional points-based system for economic migration. This policy seems aimed at meeting the varied need for migration in regions and countries of the UK – the Scottish authorities, for example, have been open about their need to attract more migrants to come, work, and stay north of the border, complaining that national immigration policies devised in Westminster serve the needs of the South East first and foremost. The impact of a regional points-based scheme would lie in the details of its management and implementation – on what indicators would regional needs be measured and updated? How would it be enforced and at what cost to migrants? Would regional restrictions be time-limited or would they last until a migrant gained citizenship or indefinite leave to remain in the UK? In theory, the idea that the points based system can be used to help immigration to better meet regional needs seems a good one, provided the costs to migrants were minimised.

•     putting in place a one-off 'earned regularisation' of undocumented migrants. Campaigners for a regularisation of the 725,000 undocumented migrants known to the in the UK will no doubt take a mixed stand on the proposal put forward here. Staked out in the liberal thinktank Centre Forum's 'Earned Amnesty' report  in 2008, this one-off measure would doubtless improve the situation of many people. It would, however, fall short of the sort of ongoing regularisation measures that many would like to see put in place in the UK.

•     allowing asylum seekers to work. The Let them Work campaign led by the TUC and Refugee Council has been pushing for asylum seekers to have the right to work sooner than currently – the Lib Dems give little detail about where they would draw the line.

So the overall verdict of these headline proposals for migrants? No doubt the devil would be in the detail, but there is much here that is an improvement on the regressive objectives put forward earlier this week.