Why Immigration Policy Is Hard
And How to Make It Better

Alan Manning (Author)

9781509563654, Polity Press

Hardback, published 28 November 2025

416 pages
23.6 x 16 x 4.3 cm, 0.748 kg

"No issue is more important or more politically dangerous than immigration. Manning is one of the few writers to take it seriously, to cut through the prejudice and to deliver a balanced and deeply knowledgeable understanding. People need to read his work before immigration tears us apart."
Angus Deaton, Nobel laureate, Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton University

"An eminently sensible and genuinely entertaining book that shows why immigration policy is much more complicated than you might expect. Manning is a rare honest broker concerning the evidence on migration."
Madeleine Sumption, Director, Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford

"Alan Manning's tour of the 'infernal circle' of migration policy is both accessible and instructive. He provides a lucid guide to the economic impacts of immigration as well as a refreshingly clear-eyed perspective on the difficult trade-offs inherent in the policy and politics of immigration."
Jonathan Portes, King's College London

"This book is a must-read for anyone interested in immigration policy. Written by a top-notch economist with hands-on policy experience, it brings a wealth of evidence to a controversial topic and highlights how campaigners on both sides of the debate tend to pick and choose from that evidence to justify their own position. Manning provides a more dispassionate analysis, arguing that the impacts of migration are generally neither as dire nor as positive as people claim."
Brian Bell, King's College London

"This is the book that every hard-headed progressive needs in order to understand the intractable problem of immigration and its endless trade-offs. Examining the issue from every possible angle, Alan Manning is meticulously fair to all sides of the debate and fully aware of his own biases. He brings deep knowledge of the global story both through the academic literature and from his own front-line experience of policy clashes and interest-group lobbying during his time as chair of the Migration Advisory Committee."
David Goodhart, author of The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration

"A fantastic, accessible and wittily written book regardless of where you sit on the issue – if you have an interest in immigration policy you should read it."
Stephen Bush, Financial Times

"Anyone who thinks they know how rich countries should frame their rules on immigration should read economist Alan Manning's carefully balanced guide to the complexities of the subject."
Delphine Strauss, Financial Times

"The most important political book of the year"
Financial Times

"excellent"
The Spectator

"The politics of immigration is never easy, and Manning's book helps to explain why crafting coherent policy is so hard."
Inside Story

Immigration policy is hard, involving difficult decisions and trade-offs. But, as Alan Manning – former chair of the UK's Migration Advisory Committee – makes clear, this doesn't mean that we can't do much better.

We should start, Manning says, by ditching simplistic views that frame immigration as either wholly good or wholly bad. We will always have, and need, some level of immigration. But, just as inevitably, we will have rules on who can and cannot immigrate as more people are likely to want to move to high-income countries than residents will want to admit. To set those rules, we need reliable evidence to adjudicate among the often-competing claims of the economy, culture, justice and democracy. Manning supplies such evidence in abundance, guiding us through cutting-edge international research on the many ways immigration affects people's lives, including effects on their jobs and incomes, their taxes and public services, and their communities.

Why Immigration Policy Is Hard is an indispensable resource for informed debate on one of the most charged subjects in public life today.

Preface and Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

Part 1: A Picture of Migration
2 How Many Migrants: Where Do They Come From and Where Do They Go?
3 Why People Migrate
4 How Many Would Like to Migrate?

Part 2: Migration from the Migrants’ Perspective
5 The Impact of Immigration on the Immigrants
6 And What About the Children of Migrants?
7 And What About the Countries Migrants Leave?

Part 3: The Receiving Country’s Perspective
8 Demography: Population and Ageing
9 The Economy: GDP, Productivity and Innovation
10 The Labour Market: Wages and Unemployment
11 Prices and Profits
12 The Public Finances and Public Services
13 Community

Part 4: Policy Options
14 Open Borders
15 Work Migration
16 Student Migration
17 Family Migration
18 Asylum and Refugees: The Journey
19 Asylum-Seekers and Refguees: After Arrival
20 Unauthorized Migrants
21 What I Would Do

Notes
Index

Subject Areas: Economics [KC]