This week we’re looking at migration. What causes it? What are its effects? And what are the key policy implications?
Immigration is a hot political issue in many countries. Its economic and social costs and benefits are widely debated. The people who are most directly involved in it or affected by it are often highly vulnerable, meaning that policy debate ought to proceed with care and caution. Yet it’s often used as a political tool by one or other side, as campaigners fuel fears or animosities for their own ends.
Our Migration Research Cluster is seeking to coordinate and promote evidence based work on the politics of migration and migration policy. To mark the Migration cluster’s foundation, we are joined by three of its members.
Dr Alex Hartman is Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Methods. Her research focuses on the political economy of institutions in fragile states, with one strand looking particularly at the politics of forced displacement.
Dr Moritz Marbach is Associate Professor in Data Science & Public Policy. He is particularly interested in how policies regulating migration affect migrants, voters and politicians.
And Dr Judith Spirig is Lecturer in Political Science. Among other things, she examines the determinants and the consequences of anti-immigrant attitudes.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
policy, immigration, people, judith, effects, migration, research, interventions, project, moritz, household, immigrants, accommodation, facilitate, inequality, country, ucl, evidence, refugees, government
SPEAKERS
Moritz Marbach, Alan Renwick, Judith Spirig, Alex Hartman
Alan Renwick 00:06
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we're looking at migration. What causes it? What are its effects? And what are the key policy implications?
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Immigration is a hot political issue in many countries. Its economic and social costs and benefits are widely debated. The people who are most directly involved in it or are affected by it are often highly vulnerable, meaning that policy debate ought to proceed with care and caution. Yet it's often used as a political tool by one or other side, as campaigners fuel fears or animosities for their own ends.
So researchers here at the UCL Department of Political Science are keen to inject well-grounded evidence and analysis into these debates. A newly founded grouping of our colleagues – the migration research cluster – is seeking to coordinate and promote that work further. And, to mark the migration cluster's foundation, I'm delighted to be joined by three of its members.
Dr Alex Hartman is Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Methods. Her research focuses on the political economy of institutions in fragile states, with one strand looking particularly at the politics of forced displacement.
Dr Moritz Marbach is Associate Professor in Data Science & Public Policy. He is particularly interested in how policies regulating migration affect migrants, voters and politicians.
And Dr Judith Spirig is Lecturer in Political Science. Among other things, she examines the determinants and the consequences of anti-immigrant attitudes.
Alex, Moritz and Judith, welcome back to you all, because you've all been on UCL Uncovering Politics before, and it's great to have you all back here again. We'll get into some of the specific research projects that you're working on at the moment in just a moment.
But I thought it would be useful to start off by just stepping back a little bit from those specifics and considering what kinds of questions we need to be asking when we're talking about the politics of migration.
And I guess in a country like the UK, a lot of the debate focuses particularly on immigration and the effects of immigration on the country that those people are moving to. But there are wider things that we should be thinking about as well. Alex, do you want to start us off?
Alex Hartman 02:41
Sure. So some of the topics that I consider in my own research have to do with the determinants of migration or what we might call 'migrant decision making'. And I think if we can understand why people make the decision to leave their home, we might also learn something about how they integrate or their impact on the countries that ended up welcoming them. So that's an important topic.
Alan Renwick 03:04
Very good. Moritz, do you want to add anything?
Moritz Marbach 03:06
Yeah, I think like among the things we already mentioned, like one key question that is like of interest in my research is like trying to understand sort of like how to get asylum and immigration politics right – in a sense like how to facilitate migration, and how to do it in a way that it's like, acceptable to those that are like already like living in a country for a long time, so long term residents or what we also sometimes called like 'native foreigners'.
Alan Renwick 03:36
Judith?
Judith Spirig 03:37
Yeah, I think that a third sort of key question that some of the work on migration, maybe particularly in the political science space, tries to answer is one that you've already sort of mentioned a bit, right: what are the consequences of immigration for destination countries? And then obviously, in particular, how does it shape politics and policy?
And I think we're like specifically, right, we're interested in how the arrival and presence of immigrants – that can be sort of, you know, both in a country or in a neighbourhood or just sort of in the media, in the debate – influences sort of voters' views and political preferences. That can be about migration, about immigrants, but also sort of perhaps other predated policy areas. But also parties' behaviour, right. You know, what they talk about, what they discuss, you know, manifestos, which issues they focus on during their campaigns and things like this, which policies are being enacted, what the media discuss.
So it's sort of a range of questions about the consequences of immigration into a particular destination country.
Alan Renwick 04:50
Great, thank you. So that's giving us a really broad agenda of questions that we ought to be considering here. Let's then focus in on some of the particular research that you're doing at the moment.
And maybe we should start again with Alex here, because you mentioned work focusing on determinants of migration. And you're doing some investigations exactly in that space at the moment.
Alex Hartman 05:14
Sure. So some of my projects are purely focused on migration. And those tend to look at forced migration. And oftentimes, I'm interested in how policies, the governments or civil society, how those interventions are experienced or benefit forcibly displaced people.
Some of my other projects are more firmly in the realm of how other marginalised groups interact with the state. And in those cases, it may be that other sorts of government policy have an effect on migration decision making that we didn't fully appreciate previously.
So I can give an example from a project of mine in Cote d'Ivoire, where we're studying the effect of government policies that aim to change decision making patterns within the household. So these are agrarian societies where decisions around the use of an autonomy over land and property rights are very critical. And there's a really interesting new strand of research in economics which identifies the security that an individual household member has over their property rights as a determinant of migration decision making from more rural areas, for example, to urban centres.
So one of the things that I'm quite curious about in my own research is how when the government steps in to try to change social relationships within the household, how that itself might have an effect on decisions to stay within a particular geography, stay within a rural area, or to move outside of that area, and perhaps even to become an international migrant.
Alan Renwick 06:42
So do you want to just spell out that causal mechanism that you're positing here just a little bit more? So it's specifically the security of property rights that is posited to matter?
Alex Hartman 06:54
Yes, that's right. So I think we can just sort of think about how we feel about our own home or property, like for those of us who might be in the rental market. If we have an apartment that we live in, and we feel good that our landlord is not going to come in and take back the apartment while we go on vacation, we might be willing to go on a longer vacation, right.
And so I think it's sort of that intuitive logic: when we have certainty about our rights over non movable property, real property – like land, for example, in this case – then that changes the calculus of going further away from the place where we are.
So there's been some initial work, as I mentioned, in economics, that has found this pattern of changing property rights systems and then differential migration decision making.
And in the study I'm doing, we're looking at, in particular, how changing the rights of women within the household and, in particular, their ability to make claims on real property in the household, how that might change their decision to migrate or not. But not really only for them, right, because the experience of one household member also has an impact on other household members. And so what's exciting about this project is, moving away from data collection which focuses on one household member, we're able to get data from different household members, and to try to understand how an intervention that the government makes at the household level can affect multiple people.
Alan Renwick 08:26
And how do you research an effect such as that? Because I mean I'm just guessing that it's quite difficult to work at what is the effect of that intervention rather than all the other things that might be going on at the same time?
Alex Hartman 08:38
That's right, Alan, that is a very difficult question.
This is a study that is a randomised control trial. So it is set up in collaboration with the government and with many other stakeholders – international stakeholders, donors – to really try to understand, in particular, a policy, and how that policy is leading to changes in behaviour.
And so we've collected one round of survey data in a range of villages for this project, and then a randomly selected subsample of those villages will be exposed – or have the invitation to be exposed – to different interventions, because we have a few different interventions that we're evaluating.
And then those who participate and those who do not will all be interviewed and so we'll be able to understand both the impact of the intervention but also, I think, kind of an underrated but very interesting question of sort of who participates in these policies – who opts into new government programs like this one, what we might call the question of take-up.
And then we'll sort of speak with people over time. It's a panel survey, so we'll have multiple snapshots of people's lives. And then we'll be able to look at how their lives change or don't change in response to these interventions.
Alan Renwick 09:49
I find the methodology of this kind of thing fascinating, and I know lots of our listeners do as well. So randomised control trial here. So does that mean you're randomising that some people's property rights are changed and other people's property rights are not changed and you can see the effect of that?
Alex Hartman 10:03
That's one way of putting it.
The way it works is that the government is deploying a new policy. And within that policy, some people were invited to take up the opportunity to reallocate property rights within their household, which is to say, they were specifically offered the opportunity to transfer property rights within the household into the name of the female, one of the female household members.
And some people might have done this in the absence of the intervention. Some people were offered the opportunity to do this and declined to do so. And then other people, you know, decided, hey, yeah, this sounds like something I might be interested in. And they decided to take it up. And so we have all different choices.
But given that who was offered the opportunity to do this was randomly assigned, we can then look at that array of choices afterwards and we can use both random assignment and then people's decision making afterwards to back out what the individual impact, if any, there was of the intervention on the range of information we collect about people's behaviour and attitudes.
Alan Renwick 11:27
Great. And you said you're partway through the study at the moment.
Alex Hartman 11:30
Yeah.
Alan Renwick 11:32
Do we have any findings that we can start to talk about or-?
Alex Hartman 11:35
No, we don't.
Alan Renwick 11:37
We will just have to invite you on the future.
Alex Hartman 11:39
Yeah, I mean. Yeah, we're in the middle of trying to prepare to collect baseline, sorry, midline survey data. So we don't really have anything to talk about at the moment – just the excitement of feeling that these interventions could really matter and the desire to at least generate some information on them. Even if they are not shown to matter, that would be a huge advance to people who are trying to allocate scarce resources to interventions that do matter.
Alan Renwick 12:10
And it's interesting that you use the word 'excitement' there about the possibility that these things matter. That kind of suggests that there's good reason to think that there is something here – there is a reasonable prospect of a significant change.
Alex Hartman 12:22
I think with any policy that governments are putting money towards, there has to be an expectation, some mean, unless the policy is purely performative, you know. There's some hope that there will be change. I'm not sure if I feel these interventions sort of have a higher probability of impact than the average government intervention, which is to say that perhaps they're not particularly strong.
Nevertheless, I think one of the reasons why I'm motivated to do this work is because I do find a research design like this, which is the work of many years – I mean, this is a project I'm talking about now that I've been working on for years – there's the opportunity to learn something new and different. And the research design has been carefully set up in that way.
And so I feel kind of excited, regardless of whether, you know, the intervention is going to do something or not. I'm just curious to see how people's lives are changing over time.
Alan Renwick 13:14
And one of the interesting things about all three of you and about the work of the migration cluster is the focus on doing really top-notch political science and having very robust evidence and analysis as the basis for any kind of policy recommendations that might come out of the work.
Alex Hartman 13:29
Yeah, I mean I think, you know, Judith and Moritz can speak to this. I think we all believe that good research design can really improve what we can make of the data that's out there in the world and hopefully support policymakers to make decisions that are as informed as possible.
Alan Renwick 13:47
Judith, let's move on to you in that case. And tell us about what you're up to.
Judith Spirig 13:52
Yeah. So I think the project that I would like to talk about today, and maybe also sparked sort of some of the questions that we're discussing in this podcast, is not like a project that is original empirical research, unlike all of the other projects that I'm working on and that I think Moritz is also going to talk about.
But it's sort of one in which Dominik Hangartner, who's my coauthor on this based at ETH, and I were asked to take a step back and think about sort of what we know about the effects of immigration on inequality from a political perspective, essentially. That was for sort of a larger project called the IFS Deaton Review of Inequality that looks at all different kinds of dimensions of inequality within a country and particularly in the UK.
Alan Renwick 14:43
So you're looking at how immigration affects inequality within the destination country, the country that most people are moving into.
Judith Spirig 14:52
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Alan Renwick 14:54
And you said particularly the political dimensions of that. So I guess the economists have looked at the sort of the pure economics of how immigration might affect inequality. But you're looking at the effects that are more kind of mediated through the political process.
Judith Spirig 15:09
Yes, exactly. And it's a group of economists at UCL – Christian Dustmann and colleagues – who wrote about this sort of what you call 'direct economic effects of immigration' on the economy, but also on inequality within sort of countries, and specifically the UK. And they find that the direct economic effects of immigration tend to be really small, right. And that's similar for when we look at inequality as such as well.
And so then, you know, we were, I guess, asked in some sense to think about the political dimension of this. And then we mainly argue – and can hopefully show – that through a political channel – and I can, you know, be more specific about what we think that means – there might be economic effects of immigration that are much larger than sort of these direct economic effects that the economists sometimes tend to focus on.
Alan Renwick 16:05
And that channel, as I understand it, is working really through people's attitudes: support for anti-immigrant parties, support for maybe far-right parties, that kind of thing. Is that fair?
Judith Spirig 16:16
Yeah, exactly. It is about how sort of immigration, or the salience of immigration in political debates and the media and so on, that affects voting behaviour. So how voters, maybe their attitudes change and who they vote for, which parties they vote for, things like that. How parties sort of react to immigration or to those kinds of debates, proactively and sort of passively. And then how through that, policies – like certain policies – are being implemented, and then have sort of economic downstream effects or effects on inequality.
Alan Renwick 16:55
And what do you find? I mean, as you said, this is reviewing existing literature. And what do you find from reviewing the literature on these indirect effects of immigration upon inequality?
Judith Spirig 17:06
The main finding is that these indirect effects are likely to be much larger than any potential direct effects. Now, I think how they play... And I say 'likely' because we really don't know what they would look like. I think we're trying to make plausible that they're likely to be much bigger.
But it's difficult to actually think through all of the different ways in which immigration through political channels would affect the economy or inequality. And so you know, how big or how small or in which directions that they will be is sort of difficult to say.
But we could imagine, right, that let's say immigration increases the success or increases the chances of sort of these anti-immigrant parties to succeed, maybe come into government or maybe become more successful, and then other parties would be tempted to adopt some of the anti-immigrant party's policy positions.
Anti-immigrant parties in Europe, particularly, they tend to share sort of a range of positions about policies beyond immigration, right. For example, they tend to have sort of, you know, welfare chauvinist policies, they tend to care about law and order, they tend to have sort of isolationist preferences. And if any of the policies that those far-right parties would hold in these areas would become more likely to be enacted, you could already see how you know, promoting an isolationist platform could have relatively big implications for the economy in a country and through that also inequality.
Alan Renwick 18:42
And do you want just to explain what you mean by welfare chauvinism?
Judith Spirig 18:45
Welfare chauvinism essentially means – or it's like the idea that – welfare benefits should be restricted to certain groups of society. And most often, right, that is in relation to sort of some distinction between natives and immigrants.
And the idea would be that natives are more deserving of these benefits than immigrants. And hence, welfare-based policies, like sort of services provided, should be targeted at natives rather than natives and immigrants alike.
Alan Renwick 19:14
So the overall kind of causal path that you're suggesting there is that higher immigration leads to higher concern about immigration, which leads to higher support for an anti-immigrant parties, which leads to a greater chance that those party's policies will be implemented. And they tend to adopt these welfare chauvinist positions.
Judith Spirig 19:36
Among other positions, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that that is a very good sort of summary of what I was trying to say.
What we maybe know a bit less about is one thing that you mentioned at the very beginning, and that is whether immigration is sort of the main driver of immigration concerns, right. There are countries for example, where immigration has been relatively low, but still immigration concerns have risen at the time where immigration concerns have been very prevalent, sort of across European countries, right. So obviously there are many sort of aspects that influence every step of this causal sort of pathway along the way. But yeah, that is essentially it.
Alan Renwick 20:22
And it's sometimes suggested, by politicians at least, that higher immigration can have a harmful effect kind of directly on attitudes of social trust and social cohesion. So not working through that mechanism with the anti-immigrant parties. Is that something you investigated? Is there evidence on that?
Judith Spirig 20:44
I did not investigate that in this paper, like for this study, specifically. There is some evidence on that. I don't know Moritz, is this something that you're going to talk about?
Moritz Marbach 20:54
No, I wasn't planning to talk about it. But I'm happy to take the question.
Alan Renwick 20:58
Go for it, Moritz.
Moritz Marbach 21:00
I think that there is some research on that that suggests that the arrival of lots of immigrants in a certain geographical space, in a certain location, could sort of like reduce social cohesion in that space. And often that involves like reductions in social trust.
So social trust is something that like is believed to be important to facilitate all types of like transactions, and not only economic transaction. But all kinds of like interactions that we have as human beings living in complex societies, we need trust to facilitate those.
And so there is this sort of concern that like immigration is, in some way, reducing our trust, because the idea being like people that are not like me, tend to be like... So that the people that look different, that are from different places, like that they are sort of like, since they are strange to people, that they're sort of like less trustworthy, and people like are less trusting towards them.
And so like some then argue that that is contagious, so that at some point even my trust in very like-minded people that I would normally trust in the absence of like high immigration would actually then also be reduced. So that Putnam called this sort of this 'hunker down hypothesis'.
Nowadays there's lots of research is going on on this. And the jury is is still out there. So it seems that sometimes there are small effect, but like often there are also not.
Alan Renwick 22:27
Yeah, we did an episode a while back with our colleague Peter Dinesen. And from memory – it's been a while since we did that episode – but from memory, he found that there are small effects, but they really are small.
Moritz Marbach 22:38
Yeah.
Alan Renwick 22:38
And I mean, I guess this is particularly salient. I'm thinking of some of the UK political discourse around this.
And we're recording this episode a little bit ahead of when it is actually released, shortly after Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, gave a speech in which she argued that we need to be concerned about high levels of immigration because they endanger consent to the social order and endanger a kind of breakdown of that order and-
Judith Spirig 23:10
What would that mean specifically?
Alan Renwick 23:12
Well that that's a good question. I mean, you know, she is often accused of stoking anti-immigrant sentiment, and she's using this kind of discourse in order to do that.
So, you know, I guess what we can do is bring hard evidence into this kind of debate.
And I think what you're suggesting is that, you know, there may be a little bit of evidence that there are some difficulties that are generated in very indirect ways as a result of immigration, but not something on the kind of scale that her rhetoric is suggesting.
Judith Spirig 23:43
Yeah, I mean, so far, I was mainly talking about sort of economic effects on the economy, you know, as sort of the end of that causal pathway, and that we spoke about.
But I think what Moritz suggested with regard to social trust, I think one of a few things that we know quite a lot about is whether and when contact helps mitigate those kinds of anxieties maybe that Moritz was talking about before, right.
So we know that there are situations in which the arrival of immigrants in some geographic space increases anti-immigrant attitudes, along maybe the lines of what she had in mind.
But that is not necessarily the case. And it might be that if there is some sort of... It looks like if there's some sort of meaningful contact between locals and immigrants, that is not the case actually. So that it's not the case that anti-immigrant attitudes increase. But it is the case if there's just sort of some, you know, what we often referred to as 'exposure', where there's no meaningful contact between sort of members of the in group and out group.
So I think one thing that that would suggest, right, is that it's not necessarily the case that the arrival of immigrants has some sort of negative implications for social trust or maybe immigration attitudes. But it depends on sort of the context and the circumstances.
Alan Renwick 25:22
And the policy responses domestically. Absolutely.
This leads us on very nicely to some of Moritz's research. But do you want to pick up on what Judith was saying before we go on to your research?
Moritz Marbach 25:32
No, no, I think like that sort of like that leads sort of like exactly into the research that I'm currently doing.
Alan Renwick 25:38
Let's go straight into it, then. So tell us about the research.
Moritz Marbach 25:42
So I think like what Judith just like sort of described, it is really important, like, how you manage sort of the arrival of newcomers. And so one of the big challenges that governments face is like, especially when there are lots of arrivals like in a very short amount of time, how to facilitate accommodation and how to sort of manage this process.
So, you know, like some governments and, you know, I think that it's still like sort of the prevalent model, is sort of like to put people into shelters. That's often easy, and sort of like you can relatively easily scale that up as sort of like a policy response in the sense of you know like you put people into like old military facilities, or like gyms, or any of those types of like places.
But of course, like, and, you know, like, what that actually implies is that you don't facilitate contact between those that are arriving and those that are already in a certain locality.
And we also noted that actually people – and I think the Ukrainian refugee crisis has really shown it – are actually willing to host refugees, especially like to bridge that period when a lot of people arrive and until like more long-term facilities and accommodations are available.
And so one of the projects that I'm currently engaged in is trying to understand sort of like how a platform that facilitates matchmaking between Germans willing to host Ukrainian refugees and Ukrainians looking for accommodation, how does the platform actually facilitate also long term integration of refugees.
So when I say integration, like integration is sort of like an umbrella term that not only means like economic integration and sort of getting into work, but it's also about like meaningful social contact, psychological integration, being able to sort of navigate the institutions in a country, like language acquisition – all of these kinds of different dimensions.
And so in this project, we are working with a nonprofit in Germany that like is facilitating this matchmaking. So they have a platform, and so during the height of the crisis, refugees from Ukraine were able to register, provide like, sort of, like some basic information about what they need – like, including, like, how large the group is that is looking for an accommodation, are there children, if they would like to go somewhere, specifically, like a particular destination that they would like to have an accommodation – and where they're currently at.
And then that nonprofit had lots of volunteers to try to find a match. So they had, like, Germans register, providing sort of space and saying how much space they could provide, and sort of if they have any particular preferences in terms of are children, for example, okay, and you know, how long they could provide the accommodation. And sort of like then volunteers try to find matches.
And so what we're looking at is how are those that are lucky to get such a match, how do they do in terms of their integration relative to those that, unfortunately, didn't get a match because there's just not enough capacity basically to provide, like, such an opportunity to all the arriving refugees.
Alan Renwick 29:07
So it's interesting, just a methodological question again. You're using language there that implies that whether someone gets a match or not is simply a matter of luck-
Moritz Marbach 29:17
In many ways it is.
Alan Renwick 29:18
-which is important, of course, if you're going to kind of mimic the idea of randomised control trials – that people are randomised in whether they get a match or not.
Moritz Marbach 29:26
Yes, that's exactly right. So like here, it's sort of not like in an Alex study where there is literally someone flipping the coin by design.
Here it's the case that like the matchmakers, they have this registration form, they see like what the refugees have entered, and then based on that information, they try to find a German – or like not German by nationality, but like someone living in Germany – that is willing to host a refugee. They are trying to find a match.
So what we do is we're going to compare people that basically entered, so sort of like their registration form looks identical, right. The only difference is that one of them, one of the refugees, got a match and got into one of these like private accommodations, while the other was unlucky and didn't.
And so then we compare how do they do after 12 months. And depending on like, how long are we going to keep our data collection, you know, like, a month later, how do they do in Germany in terms of their integration trajectory.
Alan Renwick 30:32
Sounds fascinating. Do we have any results yet or are you going to keep us in suspense as Alex did?
Moritz Marbach 30:37
Yeah I am afraid that we are very much ongoing. So I was just like working on the data analysis. We have some preliminary data.
The good news is that it seems that there is an effect in a sense of that like we do see a positive impact on especially social and psychological integration to some degree.
But like it's ongoing research and we will see once we get all the data together what the what the final results are. So I think we need another podcast episode to talk about it.
Alan Renwick 31:08
No I really liked this, because most times on the podcast we are talking about research that has already been completed and has already been published. And you know, it's all very neat and final. But here we're getting a kind of sense of ongoing projects and the hopes and the fears and the aspirations for different projects. And it's a sense of the excitement of the research process.
But so let's talk a bit about the future and the migration cluster as a whole. Judith, do you want to tell us a bit more about what your aspirations are for the cluster?
Judith Spirig 31:38
Yeah. So we are now entering our second year of the cluster. And I think what we continue to do, what's been really sort of working well, I think, last year, is that we meet sort of every other week and we discuss really work in progress. So if any of our members, I don't know, wants feedback on a survey that they're designing or an idea that they have, or anything really, then we meet to discuss this.
It's really informal and I think a great way, you know, not just to get to know each other's work and sort of see where there's synergies, but also really help each other early on sort of develop and conduct the project
Some new things that we're trying to do this year is that we're trying to see if we can integrate interested students in some way into sort of the clusters so that they can hopefully get some impression of what a research process looks like and hopefully provide some inspiration for interesting bachelor and master dissertations. And then I don't know, hopefully, collaborate more, or increasingly, with the Policy Lab to try and see if there's more ways in which the evidence could be introduced or used to inform ongoing policy debates.
Alan Renwick 33:06
Yeah so we should just explain for listeners that the Policy Lab is an institution here at UCL shared between the Department of Political Science and the Department of Economics that focuses on bringing top quality research to bear upon the kind of policy debates and policy questions.
And it's been striking in hearing about all of the research projects that you're doing that they all do that very much. So you're all thinking about doing great research, but also thinking about what are the policy debates that are ongoing.
Moritz Marbach 33:36
Yeah. So I think that the UCL Policy Lab is really in a good position to sort of help us to bring more evidence to the policymaking process when it comes to like immigration policy. And that is important. And for sort of like the future is it's pretty important that we that we do more evidence-informed policymaking in that space.
And I think that, in particular, the UK is showing that in other policy areas, this is possible. Like we have a lot of like work centres across the country here that are like really pushing evidence and informed policymaking in a number of areas.
But there is no such thing when it comes to immigration policy. And I think that's in some way peculiar. And so I think like, you know, like long term like we should really facilitate sort of that – that push to bring more evidence to this important debate of how to get immigration policy right.
Alex Hartman 34:33
Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with that.
I guess I would say one of the very exciting things about the cluster, and having colleagues like Moritz and Judith and also Peter and other colleagues in the department who work in this space, is that it feels like there are many people coming together who both care about the highest quality academic research – really cool research design, thinking about data in a careful way – and then we're also passionate about the impact that our research could potentially have. And we're open to trying to find the best way to communicate that, be it to students or policymakers or other people who might be able to use that evidence for something else in the world.
Alan Renwick 35:13
That's a wonderful manifesto for the future of the migration cluster.
Thank you so much, Alex, Moritz and Judith, for a fascinating conversation. As I said, it's just great to hear about ongoing research that's so interesting around the department. And we look forward to having all of you back on the podcast in the future in order to explore some of these findings further.
We were talking about Judith's paper called 'Immigration and inequality: the role of politics and policies', which is coauthored with Dominik Hangartner. And it's part, as Judith said, of the IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities in the 20th Century. It's available online.
And as we also explored, Alex's research project that she was talking about and Moritz's project are still ongoing. So there's nothing to read yet, but those will come very soon.
Next week, we're looking at the politics of IMF lending, particularly at the degree to which governments in recipient countries use funds to benefit their own supporters, and what effects that has.
Remember, to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Alice Hart and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.