The Role of Networks in the Development of UK Migration Policy

This article examines the ‘policy networks’ that existed between 1997 and 2007 in UK asylum, economic migration and immigrant integration policy. The analysis shows that employers and businesses (together with other state and non-state actors) were part of a tightly organised, ideologically cohesive economic migration ‘policy community’. This policy community was crucial to the development of economic migration policy, in contrast to the development of asylum and integration policies. The central argument of this article is that the mainstream interpretation of UK immigration policy change (that change was driven by an elite-led, powerful executive) is correct in tracing the dynamics of asylum policy development between 1997 and 2007 under New Labour, but wrong for the development of immigration policy as a whole, which was more complex, and where businesses played a key role.