“The Way Labour Talks About Immigration is a Big Mistake”: Interview with James Hampshire

Anya Pearson interviews James Hampshire, Professor of Politics in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex. Hampshire has been awarded the 2025 Bernard Crick Prize for his article ‘“Full-Fat, Semi-Skimmed or Skimmed?” The Political Economy of Immigration Policy since Brexit’. He is currently the Deputy Editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and is currently researching how models of post-Fordist capitalism shape immigration policy.

Congratulations to you for winning the Crick prize! How do you feel?

Surprised! It completely came out of the blue – I could have accidentally deleted the email, as I initially thought it was a circular! I've been working on immigration for 20 years, and in mostly unfortunate ways, it's become more and more relevant. I'm delighted that issue is now being given the attention that it needs and deserves in a journal like PQ.

In your article, you write that net migration to the UK almost tripled from 249,000 since the referendum in 2016 to 2022. Can you talk to us about this?

It's obviously surprising. I think everybody now agrees that Brexit was, to a large extent, driven by concerns about, if not, opposition to immigration. The campaign slogan of ‘taking back control’ was interpreted by many as implying control of immigration. So there was a paradox when it significantly increased immigration. That's the puzzle. And that's one reason why Reform is doing so well; the promise implied has not been delivered.

So why was that? Well, there are a number of reasons. The first is to note that most migration to the UK is for work and for study. And what's amazing and really quite counter intuitive, is that in many ways the post-Brexit conservative governments created a more open immigration system than the pre-existing one.

You've got two different stories. In terms of skilled workers, the private sector and the government were very concerned about the potential for the labour supply shock of Brexit to cause significant damage to the UK economy. In terms of public sector migration, in the context of a pandemic, the care sector and the healthcare sector were pushing very hard for an Adult Social Care exception, which resulted in a very substantial increase in migrant workers.

A little over a third of migration in the immediate years after Brexit was for work, about third was to study. Universities have become financially dependent upon international student fees to subsidise the teaching of home students. And then, of course, there was the Ukraine scheme and the Hong Kong scheme. I think it was fairly quickly realised by the Conservative government that their policy was enabling higher levels of immigration than they would have wanted, but they initially tried to deflect attention through the ‘Stop the Boats’ rhetoric By the end of 2023 they did reverse course, but it was too late.

How does your article define immigration policy in the last 25 years or so?

You have to go back to the early 2000s to understand the trajectory. Over the last 25 years or so, immigration policy has become extremely unstable; lurching between open policies and closed policies. The government opens up, then deals with a political backlash and closes again. The EU referendum can’t be understood without these dynamics.

It is a complex story, but simplistically, Labour opened up both through its policies on students and work visas, and importantly, through its decision to not impose labour market controls on the new EU citizens from the 10 countries who joined the EU in 2004. This increased net migration and resulted in David Cameron promising to lower net migration in 2010. But numbers didn't go down, and that directly leads us to Brexit. The failure to meet the net migration target by the next election in 2015 was a major reason why Farage did well with UKIP. Yet Cameron in the 2015 manifesto doubled down on the net migration target, which was crazy – they were failing to meet it. After Brexit, the government then liberalised immigration policy compared to what had come before. And now under Labour, policy is lurching back to closure. The same mistakes are being made again and again.

Your article was a scathing criticism of the then Conservative government. How would you summarise the Labour party’s vision on immigration?

I think Labour's making mistakes. Research shows that when parties either at the center left or the center right start to adopt the language of the far right, it only helps the far right. Labour seems to be adopting a deliberate strategy of saying: ‘We have to talk about immigration in a way that we believe is going to reassure people who are concerned by the things that make Reform possible’.

Jonathan Portes recently said that up until Brexit, and even the immediate aftermath, the debate around migration was somewhat reasonable. The discussion was on things like the impact on housing, public services and the labour market. But there's a shift now where Reform and parts of the Conservative Party are openly using the language of the culture wars. There is a shift towards opposing immigration on more culturalist, ethnic and frankly, racialised grounds. For example, the Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin recently stood up in Parliament and proposed banning the Burka.

The Government is making a mistake by not trying to explain to citizens why immigration happens. This doesn't mean it can't control migration. The Conservatives were completely silent on what is the more numerically significant issue than ‘stop the boats’, which was regular, authorised migration. Labour has accepted that kind of approach but shifted to ‘smash the gangs’. The Social Market Foundation published an interesting paper recently arguing that what lies behind Labour's immigration policies is ‘workerism’; a protective approach to the UK labour market. I think you can have discussions about that, but the way Labour talks about immigration is a big mistake.

Does the Home Office deserve the criticism it gets on its management of migration and immigration? Is there anything it gets right?

I've been doing interviews with employee representatives and other people involved in immigration policy, and one of the things that's come out of that is that there is much more cooperative, even collaborative, relationship between employers and parts of the Home Office than people think.

There is a deeper institutional culture in parts of the Home Office towards a more control oriented, security-minded approach. But the part that deals with regular migration is less like that. There's far more collaboration and cooperation than a lot of people realise. The Home Office talks a lot to businesses – they’re significant players. It’s not quite lobbying, because that suggests they're external to the policy making system. They’re actually embedded within it.

In terms of technocracy, the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister will come up with a new sound bite to try and allay concerns about immigration. But beyond the headlines, this filters through the system and becomes less draconian than it sounds, because policy gets made through technocratic institutions not media headlines. The Migration Advisory Committee will look at various policy options. So does the Home Office deserve its reputation? It's a complex story, but it's not as uniformly draconian and control-oriented as its reputation suggests.

What is the single most important action the government could take to defuse the immigration issue?

It should stop speaking the language of anti-immigration. We don't have a sensible conversation about why immigration occurs and why it’s central to Britain's identity. Why did we become a nation of immigration? It's because of our colonial history. Why do we have a lot of immigrants? We're an aging society. There are a whole range of ways in which you can frame migration, embedding it in Britain's history and acknowledging its economic centrality, talking about the fact that large parts of our economy and public sector would not function without migration. They need to construct a narrative about why migration happens, and use that to rebut the very simplistic and frankly often false claims that you hear from the ethno-nationalist right. To some extent, you see bits of that, but it gets muddled up with much more negative language.

Professor Derrick Wyatt recently wrote a piece suggesting that Keir Starmer: Open a Cross-Channel Safe Route for Asylum Seekers’. What do you think of this idea?

I think the UK could do a lot more in comparison to other European countries to offer protection to those who are fleeing conflict or or being persecuted. The UK took far fewer refugees from Syria, for example, than did most other European countries. The Ukraine scheme was an exception; they are a group of people who are racialised as white, largely Christian, and had been invaded by an opponent of the UK. I think the principle of creating safe routes is something that needs to be taken seriously. I’d like to read the finer details, but if there was a way of creating a formal, safe route which would prevent people losing their lives, then I’d absolutely support it.

Cas Mudde told me: “It's hard to study the far right today, and it wasn't when I was young. I would literally read like 10 hours a day of far-right propaganda and it wouldn't affect me at all, because they were completely marginal. Now I can't even watch 15 minutes of Fox News, because they're in power.” Do you identify with this experience?

I completely identify with that. There’s a direct parallel with me; when I started working on immigration it wasn’t quite a niche subject, but if people asked me what I did, I’d happily say I researched immigration and we’d have a conversation. Now if I’m sitting next to someone on a train and they ask me that, my heart sinks and I worry about where the conversation will go.