Theresa May's recent tough talk as home secretary about "getting the immigration system back under control" has bolstered the Conservative party's support from anti-immigration groups such as Migration Watch, but also forced business groups such as Universities UK to object that the "government's tough rhetoric threatens to undermine the multibillion-pound market in foreign students".
This government will probably bend to business interests over nationalist ideals – but they must look reluctant, in order to retain sufficient support among white British working people. Anti-immigration rhetoric is a foil for the party's elitist image, and plays off internal factions while deflecting criticisms onto opponents.
So the Conservatives have a good problem: their net migration target might fail, but if so they will get more support than if it succeeded. They might look clumsy, but they could not have planned a better outcome. Did they?
The Conservatives' immigration stance arose from the scramble for the anti-immigration vote during the late 2000s. Rising immigration under New Labour had generated a backlash that breathed life into the far right of UK politics, turning the British National party (BNP) into an electoral worry for both main parties. Gordon Brown's declining Labour government desperately courted BNP sympathisers by promising "British jobs for British people". The Conservatives' counter suit was its 2010 election campaign promise to cut annual net migration from hundreds of thousands to "the tens of thousands".
This battle for the anti-immigration vote bequeathed two legacies. One was the electoral destruction of the BNP, in a hollow victory for its ideological opponents: the party was defeated not because its anti-immigrant ideas were rejected, but because these ideas were taken over by the mainstream parties. Indeed, the other legacy of the fight for the right in 2010 was that the Conservative party pinned its flag to an anti-immigration mast.
Net migration targets are ineffective because several immigration channels are beyond control. Freedom of exit defines liberal democracies and therefore emigration, the other half of net migration, cannot be capped. European Union migration to the UK cannot be hindered, and asylum and family migrants have recourse to the courts.
The Conservatives have painted themselves into a corner because the remaining immigrants – workers and students – are needed by the UK economy. As the Migration Observatory shows, student inflows have grown fastest, partly because inflated foreign fees are shoring up a tertiary education sector faced with funding cuts. Cutting student numbers further strangles revenue and recruitment streams. This would alienate the base of any self-consciously pro-business government; predictably, some in the cabinet have opposed the targets, including the industry-beleagered business secretary and universities minister.
In this context, the home secretary's rhetoric sounds blustery. The former Cabinet Office chief economist, Jonathan Portes, has detailed how May's tough talk to the centre-right Policy Exchange thinktank stretched the facts. Vince Cable may be mollified by the idea of interviewing "considerably more than 100,000" prospective foreign students every year, but can the government afford to indulge the far right with an expensive inquisition in a time of austerity? Fighting words aside, ditching the quixotic net migration target might soon be the least worst option.
Why are the Conservatives in this position? Perhaps they did not foresee the consequences of their election promises. But, intriguingly, those consequences are politically optimal: by reaching for the impossible on net migration, the Conservatives can burnish their nationalist credentials without ultimately taking action that would jeopordise their pro-business, light-touch-regulator image. Such happy mistakes are rare. Maybe it is no mistake.
Perhaps the net migration target has been set up to be knocked down, so as to satisfy mutually incompatible political demands on the Conservative party. This is a text-book tactic. Rightwing social conservatives want less immigration so as to preserve national identity, but rightwing economic liberals want cheap, pliable foreign workers. Leftwing social liberals see migration as a right, but leftwing economic conservatives want less immigration to protect native wages and working conditions. The immigration divide is therefore not between the traditional left and right, but between liberals and conservatives. To hold the centre, a government must satisfy both wings of its own party, and court strange bedfellows across the aisle.
In other words, when faced with an impossible task, one option is to look busy, avoid sudden moves, and pass the buck. If the promised immigration cuts are scuttled, mutinous Liberal Democrats and cash-strapped universities are easy scapegoats. Viewed from this perspective, the UK Conservative party's net migration cuts look less doomed to fail than designed to do so.