On immigration, dull effectiveness could beat noisy aggressiveness

Some migrants to the UK are more welcome than others, it seems. But 'Go home'-style posturing plays on the public's worst fears

The Home Office's 'Go Home' van. 'It’s pathetic, really, watching a government rely on posturing, not policy, to deal with a legitimate public concern'

Whether it's the Home office Twitter account celebrating arrests for immigration offences or sending ad-vans to cruise London boroughs telling illegal immigrants to go home, the government's aggressive, noisy public campaign is more an expression of the struggles politicians have in dealing with immigration than it is a policy.

At the heart of the matter, to adapt a quote, is that there's really no such thing as "immigration". There's individual male and female immigrants, and there are families of immigrants, each with their own qualities and contribution and legal status.

Some of these people are fairly widely welcomed to Britain, others much less so, and it's the attempt to stop the latter without losing the former that creates a conflict between political positioning and policy reality.

Even the louder mainstream voices against current immigration policy demonstrate this gulf in their words and actions, whether it is David Goodhart writing approvingly of "Canadian nano-technologists" or the fact that the three men leading the main parties' re-election campaigns are a South African, an American and an Australian.

Speaking as a third-rate political hack, I greatly dislike these foreigners taking jobs that could go to the likes of me. British jobs for British election workers, says I! I even recently called for Labour's American guru, Arnie Graf, to be sacked. I glumly accept though, that these people might be quite good at their jobs and have something to offer. The same applies in industry after industry.

This means that highly skilled, highly sought-after individuals are usually exempted from concerns about "immigration". For example, the government actively boasts about increasing the number of people arriving in the UK on the "highly skilled" route, when responding to businesses complaining about recruiting the best and brightest to help us compete in the global race, or some such gubbins.

This isn't small potatoes, as in 2012, just over 86,000 migrants arrived on such visas, and when added to the 79,000 British nationals returning, such immigration makes up almost a third of total migration to the UK.

But let's forget skilled and British immigrants, the people who even "anti-immigration" campaigners quietly smile upon. What about the rest, the poor huddled masses? Surely they're the problem?

Well, the OECD says that this migration is good for the fiscal position of the receiving country, and Britain's own Office for Budgetary Responsibility agrees, while the evidence suggests little impact on wages, or native youth unemployment. So growth-minded, fiscally cautious politicians are unlikely to embrace zero net migration policies.

But such projections are just the models of wonks, poring over boring tables of data and sifting through spreadsheets, say the critics of immigration policy. Such models ignore the real world. So in the real world, who are these migrants? Well, there's European Union citizens who are entitled to live and work in the UK. This is what drove the big surge in net migration in the last decade. Do we really want to limit these migrants?

Few British politicians do, reasoning that the gains we get from the free movement of people as part of the European Union outweighs the costs of difficult issues like seasonal and low-paid labour. This is a choice we make, willingly.

Then there's non-EU migration. You can break this down into three broad groups: family, work, and study. In each there are both real problems and important reasons to encourage migration. So in education, there's been abuse in issuing college visas, which needs to be tackled, but doing so in the wrong way could have a negative result for universities who rely on foreign students for income. Similar problems have to be wrestled with when it comes to marriages – what qualifies as highly skilled work, and so on.

Lastly, there's the people who shouldn't be here under the current system, but have managed to stay in the UK anyway. Pretty much everyone wants to remove these "illegal" immigrants. Yet doing this requires resource, time and effort, in an environment where immigration control is being cut and significant backlogs in visa issuing and asylum application remain. Frankly, what it would take to remove every such immigrant from the UK would be so expensive, intrusive and unpleasant, even the most hardline home secretary would balk at the steps needed.

There's actually a fairly broad consensus about the sorts of immigration the government wants to encourage, and what we want to discourage, but major differences over the risks and trade-offs of the policies that will achieve these aims. So the Home Office wants to put bonds on Nigerian visas, fearing abuse, but met protests from unlikely immigration campaigners Gieves and Hawkes, who need Nigerian tourist spending to grow their businesses.

At the same time, public concern about immigration is based on understandable concerns, whether on housing, on jobs being there for British young people, social integration or a host of other results of change.

What can government do about all this? Well, it could be more effective in dealing with asylum cases from application to removal, be better at deciding on visa applications, have more effective border management and greater enforcement of employment laws to prevent exploitation, especially in seasonal and rural work.

Government could also be better at coping with the social change that a mobile global population brings – it could ensure schooling and housing pressures are dealt with more quickly, it could support social integration and language learning and could be quicker to identify and investigate social issues in emerging immigrant communities, rather than staying detached from problems until they become scandals.

Finally, we can improve the education and skills of our young people, so they can match the best in the world, whether they're at home or moving to London. But all this is expensive, hard work, it's boring, will take years, and worse, is not very headline-friendly. What's more, even if you deliver such policies, and migration falls, it's far from clear that people will believe it, or think that you've succeeded in being "tough".

So instead you end up with vans trundling London streets, trying to prove a point to an audience sitting far away. It's pathetic, really, watching a government rely on posturing, not policy, to deal with a legitimate public concern. Indeed, it's so transparently grim and unpleasant, it makes me believe a policy of dull effectiveness could yet beat noisy aggressiveness on immigration.

A focus on practical issues like education visas, overstaying, effective border control and quicker responses to emerging social pressures while welcoming university students and the highly skilled who bring much to Britain doesn't have the splashiness of a cap on migration, but it might actually work, and not leave ministers hiring a stupid van to convince people they've been tough.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and the only way to convince voters their concerns are being addressed is to be unpleasantly divisive. That might even be why Australia's Lynton Crosby has a job running the Tory election campaign. I hope not. I think we're a bit better than that.