Why Immigration Policy Is Hard

Reviews / Votes

"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, The Financial Times