This paper presents opportunities to upgrade democracy – to address the ‘democratic doom loop’ of mistrust, disengagement and political ineffectiveness – through setting out a practical route to detoxify one of the most polarised policy issues of our time – immigration.
It outlines how large-scale public deliberation can help get beyond incendiary media headlines and social media noise, to surface the opinions of the ‘silent centre ground’. This in turn will lead to immigration reform that can earn public consent, as a representative cross-section of the public has been involved in creating it. The paper calls for government to commission a national deliberative process – a citizens’ assembly – on earned settlement, and to pilot place-based deliberative processes on integration and social cohesion.
This is one strand of a programme of work on immigration that Demos is working on, including working with the Home Affairs Select Committee on public engagement with the challenge of reducing net migration, and developing and trialling a new model of MP-constituent engagement to open up conversations about immigration at a local level.