Make immigration boring

The fiercest political battle of our age needs less moral drama and more hard thinking about numbers and fair tradeoffs

by Alan Manning  BIO

Whitechapel High Street in London, United Kingdom, December 2025. Photo by Mike Kemp/Getty Images

is professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His latest book is Why Immigration Policy Is Hard: And How to Make It Better (2025).

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

The share of migrants in some high-income countries has roughly doubled in the past 35 years, reaching historic highs. In the United States, migrants made up 14.8 per cent of the population in 2024 – very similar to the previous high around 1910 and more than triple the proportion at the low point in 1970. This is despite most people saying they want a decrease in immigration. For 60 years, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they want higher or lower migration, and in almost every year most people said they wanted the level lowered. Similar results have been found in surveys among residents of European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Denmark. There is a gap between what voters say they want and what they have got.

Surveys also show that people are more concerned about some forms of migration than others. Large flows of unauthorised migrants can quickly reinforce a view that immigration is out of control. In 2024, 77 per cent of Americans considered the situation at the US border with Mexico to be a crisis or a major problem. Residents in other parts of the world – including South Africa, Colombia, and certain European nations – also tend to have negative views about migrants entering their country through irregular means.

It is no surprise, then, that immigration is now prominent in the politics of many countries. Populist Right-wing parties draw much of their support from voters who think that immigration has been too high, and that this has eroded living standards and cultural cohesion. As Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party in the United Kingdom, put it in his manifesto: ‘Record mass immigration has damaged our country … Multiculturalism has imported separate communities that reject our way of life.’

Against these views is another tribe, one that thinks of itself as pro-migration. They often want higher immigration and believe that only racists and bigots (and those opposed to economic growth) could fail to see the benefits that migrants bring to their host nations. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, claimed in a Guardian headline that ‘Migration Is Britain’s Superpower’.

Today, we remain caught in a polarised debate between these two tribes, with one arguing that migration is very good and the other that it is very bad. Each side has cherry-picked, misrepresented, exaggerated and (sometimes) made up evidence to support its position. Each side has been free with its criticisms of the other side but not critical enough of its own arguments. This style of debate serves us badly. Asking whether immigration is good or bad makes about as much sense as asking whether food is good or bad.

The impacts of migration are rarely as concerning as the critics claim but also not as beneficial as supporters say. Consider one major source of concern for those who want a lower level of immigration: the idea that immigrants are negatively impacting the wages of locals. In the US and other high-income countries, immigration has probably not reduced the wages of locals to any great extent, but it hasn’t raised them much either. A thorough review of the evidence by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that ‘the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small.’ Complex issues like these have become flashpoints that deepen the positions of both tribes.

We badly need a better discussion of migration. It’s something I learned the hard way. In 2016, I became chair of the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), an independent, government-appointed body tasked with making recommendations on the details of UK migration policy. As chair, I quickly found that pontificating from on high about whether migration is good or bad (as I had probably been prone to do) was not very helpful for designing actual policies. That experience changed how I think about the debate and gave me an understanding of what we need to do to improve our discussion of immigration. I’m not here to persuade you to join one side or the other. I’m here to set out a clearer, and ultimately more boring, way of thinking about immigration.

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First, we need to recognise that, for as long as people can move between countries, we will need policies that limit such movement. Without........

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