Will the coalition government underpin its immigration policies with a commitment to migrants’ rights?

It’s over at last. After a surreal week of wheeling and dealing between the three major parties - none of which had secured an overall majority in the general election last Thursday - the new Lib Dem / Conservative government is now settling around the cabinet table in Number 10.

Over the past few days I’ve had my fingers crossed that, as part of negotiations with Labour and the Tories, the Lib Dems would manage to bring some of their pragmatic proposals on immigration (developing a regional economic migration policy, holding an amnesty, and an end to child detention in particular) to the table… whichever table they ended up at, that is.

The Lib Dem / Conservative coalition agreement, released yesterday and detailing the coalition’s key policy plans for the coming five years, shows that this may have been optimistic. Many of the most interesting Lib Dem immigration and asylum proposals seem to have been shelved - for now? - in the interests of forming the coalition government.

So what has made it into this initial agreement? The Conservatives’ core proposal - to introduce an immigration cap on skilled migrants coming to the UK from outside the European Economic Area - will be going forward after all. We shouldn’t be too surprised that this has proved to be a red line issue for the Tories. Immigration, along with policy on Europe, is likely to touch the rawest of nerves with their hardliners and no doubt care has been taken not to upset the applecart by dropping this proposal.

Hopefully there will be scope for the more sensible elements within the coalition to make the case that caps don’t seem to be a very good idea when what you are capping is likely to be the very high skilled, high added value migrants who will play a role in kicking UK plc into a higher gear during the troubled period to come. We can rest assured that the business lobbies, and probably the trade unions, will be watching this one and will kick-up a fuss when the cap proposal starts to loom large. We know that important business groups like London First and the Confederation of British Industry have already set out their views on this subject

The Institute for Public Policy Research has also critiqued the cap proposal as a likely ‘political own-goal’. The idea overstates the power of government to limit immigration, given that skilled migration under the Points Based System (PBS) makes up just one-fifth of all annual UK immigration (tourism, EU migration, family reunification, foreign students and asylum seekers making up the rest).

Concerns about a skilled migration cap also relate to the problems we can expect it to generate for migrants themselves. The flexibility of the current PBS - which regularly updates the criteria for skilled migration according to an assessment of UK labour market needs - already causes problems for many migrants. In particular, it affects those people applying to renew their stay in the UK, such as a number senior care workers over the past few years, who find that the criteria have changed and they are no longer eligible to stay. An additional limit on skilled migrant workers, changed on an annual basis, would be likely to make life substantially more insecure for migrants applying to enter or renew their stay in the UK. Any decision on how such a cap would be set should try to minimise the negative impacts on migrants.

More widely under the new coalition agreement, Lib Dem proposals to draw economic migrants to the regions and countries of the UK with particular labour shortages (piloting in Scotland), and their call for an amnesty for undocumented migrants, seem to have both disappeared from view. The one policy which has been carried over from the Liberal Democrat manifesto into this agreement is a pledge to end the detention of children in the UK. It is certainly a very welcome commitment, and we can expect the various campaigners on this issue (variously coordinated by the Refugee Council, Children’s Society, ECDN Coalition, and Citizens UK) to keep up the pressure to make sure that this pledge is honoured. There are no wider details on possible changes to improve the detention estate or the asylum system here, but this may change over the coming months. We understand that the various groups working on immigration detention issues are already planning lobbying campaigns to tackle the wider range of problems around immigration detention.

It is also unclear how other projects left unfinished by the former government will pan out under this new government. Will the ‘Simplification Bill’ (the beleaguered Bill to replace all immigration legislation since the 1971 Immigration Act) ever see the light of day? What will become of ‘earned citizenship’ and the noxious proposal that refugees and migrants should do regulated volunteering in order to become citizens? Will the UKBA be renamed/branded/focused? Perhaps moderate Conservative Damien Green, today named as immigration minister, will choose to adopt a more restrained tone on immigration than his predecessor.

We hope that, after the dust has settled in Westminster, the new coalition government will work to underpin its initial policy agenda in this area with firm commitments towards protecting the rights and interests of migrants in the UK.