Immigration Targets, Quantification and the Suppression of Complexity

In 2010, the UK Conservative Party adopted the target of reducing net migration ‘from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands’. While the target was highly contested by the media, business, higher education and political opposition parties, it had a pronounced impact on political debate. In order to analyse these effects, the paper draws on literature on the sociology of quantification and theories of issue definition. Building on these accounts, I suggest that we can identify two main mechanisms through which quantification affects policy framing: a classification effect, whereby quantification creates discrete, equivalent (and simplified) units to be counted; and a measurement effect, whereby the codification of social issues in terms of numbers becomes a normal and expected feature of political debate. Both effects imply that while quantification may be challenged and contested, it can exert a powerful simplifying effect on political debate, compressing nuance and producing binary and simplistic framings of social problems. I explore these two ideas by analysing parliamentary debate on the target between 2010-15, specifically, monthly Home Office Questions.