Policy-driven evidence: Evaluating the UK government’s approach to immigration policy making

Abstract

This critique conducts a technical analysis of a UK Home Office report which was a key justification for passing the Immigration Act 2014. The law seeks to reduce non-EU immigration to the UK. The report is based on a 2012 report by the Migration Advisory Committee which used firmly established methods in the field of immigration studies. Despite this, it is concluded that the Home Office report not only excludes several important aspects of analysis, the entrepreneurialism of migrants and student immigration, but also has severe statistical problems. The report’s choice of operationalisations, lack of information regarding confidence intervals, and lack of sufficient model testing and repetition all combine to make it a weak piece of research and substantially undermine its suitability to inform policy. In the final analysis, this critique posits that the Home Office report reflects the Conservative government’s utilisation of 'policy driven evidence'.