Latest Publications

To address seeming ‘overreliance’ on international labour, the Labour government’s big idea is more joined-up policy on immigration and skills. This briefing sets out why this approach is unlikely to deliver lower levels of immigration, but how it can still be a political success by showcasing immigration as not only supplementing, but supporting, local skills.

Divisions over immigration and asylum have been a feature of British politics for decades. Much of the debate in this policy area has become tired and repetitive. This short briefing sets out a different perspective, and a challenge to the parties ahead of the next election. It highlights five alternative themes that, while generally overlooked amid the fractious debates, are in fact key to addressing concerns, bridging divides and restoring public faith.

The question of whether and, if so, how countries can construct arrangements to transfer asylum seekers to other countries is viewed with alarm by most supporters of refugee rights. But this need not be so. This briefing shows how Labour’s focus on the potential for tough action on Channel crossings, when combined with improved responsibility sharing for refugees across Europe, may represent a way forward that is compatible with the Refugee Convention, and a preferable alternative to the ‘Rwanda scheme’.

Debates on asylum policy – specifically on their right to work – have been at an impasse, stuck between extremes. To break the policy impasse of over twenty years, this report makes the case for taking a different, centrist approach to the policy around asylum seekers’ right to work in the UK.

With labour immigration to the UK scrambled by Brexit, the pandemic, and broader developments in the practical economy, this report focuses on the challenges of labour shortages for UK immigration policy in the context of the avowed political aim – of both the UK’s major parties – of a high-wage, high-skill economy.  

Over the last 20 years immigration numbers to the UK have hugely impacted British political and public life. This report looks at the past, present, and future of these immigration numbers, from asylum seekers to overseas workers, and how they interact with politics and policy. It challenges common perceptions on both sides of the debate, arguing that those advocating for more open approaches to immigration should contemplate some tough compromises to achieve broader support for their aims.

This briefing paper considers the liberal case for explicitly ‘pronatalist’ policies that aim to increase the birth rate in the UK.

The terms of the EU Settlement Scheme are very generous in giving EU citizens the right to stay in the UK permanently, both absolutely and in comparison with the EU...

This briefing argues that by failing to engage with either the public’s scepticism of asylum seekers, or the problem of what to do about failed asylum seekers, the refugee rights sector has ceded the ground in this area to the Government, and that the New Plan for Immigration is largely the result.