Maintaining Public Trust in the Governance of Migration
Governments around the world face increasingly complex migration management challenges at a time of plummeting public support. These two trends are inextricably linked. As Europe’s current refugee crisis illustrates, the difference between success and failure can often hinge on the ability of policymakers to win public trust.
When there is little or no trust in a government’s ability to manage immigration, the capacity to test creative immigration and integration ideas—and build a system that learns from its own experiences, and particularly its mistakes—is severely curtailed, and the penalties for missteps become disproportionately higher. Conversely, winning and maintaining public confidence allow policymakers the political and management space to experiment and maneuver, while mitigating the penalty for the occasional “failure”—inevitable in any complex system.
Public confidence hinges on not just concrete policies and their results, but also on how government activities and outcomes are interpreted and presented to the public, as a new Transatlantic Council on Migration report by MPI Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus Demetrios G. Papademetriou makes clear.
In Maintaining Public Trust in the Governance of Migration, Papademetriou outlines the principal challenges to public trust that policymakers face—including both external forces as well as the structure of government itself—and reflects on why it is so crucial for immigration policymakers to win back public confidence.
While politicians and public servants responsible for migration cannot control external factors—such as global conflict, instability, and vast opportunity differentials that may give rise to large-scale migration—they can address a host of interlinked governance challenges that affect how an immigration system is perceived by the public.
Creating an honest but nuanced narrative about immigration and how it benefits society at large—coupled with straightforward explanations of the tradeoffs that certain decisions require, and thoughtful policies to address the inevitable losers from immigration—is essential to gaining and maintaining trust in the immigration system.
The report is the third in a Transatlantic Council series that examines the drivers of anxiety that often surround immigration and explores the conditions under which these can be addressed. The first publication in this series examines how religious difference is managed across the Atlantic in fundamentally different ways, and the second describes public opinion on immigration in the United Kingdom.
KJ