Migration Policy: How Receiving Countries Decide

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Every country that receives migrants has to answer the same three questions: how many, which ones, and on what terms. The answers are rarely arrived at coherently. Migration policy in most democracies is an accumulation of separate decisions made by different departments at different times under different pressures, and the visible result, a set of visa categories with numbers and acronyms, conceals the fact that no single authority designed it. Understanding how the pieces fit together explains a great deal about why some applicants wait weeks and others wait decades.

Almost every system divides permanent migration into three streams. The economic stream selects people expected to contribute to the labour market. The family stream admits spouses, children and, more restrictively, parents of existing residents and citizens. The humanitarian stream admits refugees and others owed protection, the core obligation deriving from the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, which bind signatories not to return a person to a place where they face persecution. The relative size of these streams is the single most consequential policy choice a country makes, and it varies enormously: the United States admits the large majority of its permanent residents through family ties, while Canada and Australia weight their programmes heavily toward economic selection.

Points, employers and queues

Within the economic stream there are two basic selection philosophies. The first is supply driven and uses a points test: the state defines characteristics it believes predict success, typically age, education, occupational skill level, language proficiency and prior work or study in the country, awards points for each, and invites the highest scoring applicants. Canada introduced the first such system in 1967 and now operates it as Express Entry, a pool from which candidates are ranked by a Comprehensive Ranking Score and invited in rounds. Australia adopted a points test in 1979 and manages it through the SkillSelect expression of interest system, with eligibility governed by occupation lists that are revised as labour market assessments change. New Zealand and, since 2008 in modified form, the United Kingdom have used variants.

The second philosophy is demand driven and puts an employer at the centre: a firm demonstrates it needs a worker, sponsors the visa, and the state checks that the job is genuine, that the salary meets a threshold and, in some systems, that the position was advertised locally first, a requirement usually called labour market testing. The United Kingdom's post 2021 Skilled Worker route is essentially employer sponsored, with a salary floor and a licensed sponsor requirement. The United States relies overwhelmingly on employer petition, both for the temporary H-1B specialty occupation visa, which is capped annually and allocated by lottery when demand exceeds supply, and for employment based permanent residence, which requires labour certification for most categories. Most countries in practice run both models simultaneously and shift weight between them.

The feature of the American system that matters most to Indians is a numerical rule with enormous consequences. United States law caps the share of employment based and family based permanent residence visas that may go to nationals of any single country at seven per cent of the annual total. Because demand from India in the employment categories vastly exceeds that share, the queue for Indian nationals in the main skilled categories has extended to a length measured in decades, while nationals of low demand countries in the same category are processed promptly. Applicants remain on temporary status for the duration, tied to employers, with children at risk of ageing out of dependent eligibility when they turn twenty one. Legislative proposals to remove or raise the per country cap have been introduced repeatedly in Congress and have not passed. This is the clearest example in migration policy of a rule that is neutral on its face and radically unequal in effect.

Temporary migration and the two step pathway

The most important change in migration policy over the past two decades has been the growth of temporary categories that function, in practice, as the entry point to permanent settlement. Students are the central case. International education is a major export industry for Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, and all of them attach post study work rights to student visas, allowing graduates to remain and work for a defined period. Australia's Temporary Graduate visa and Canada's Post Graduation Work Permit are the clearest examples. A graduate who then obtains skilled employment can accumulate the points or the sponsorship needed for permanent residence. This two step migration model has advantages for the state, since it selects on demonstrated local qualifications and local work experience rather than on paper credentials, and it has an obvious vulnerability: it ties migration outcomes to an education market with its own commercial incentives, and it creates a large population living in prolonged uncertainty.

That vulnerability became a political problem in the 2020s. Sharp increases in net overseas migration after pandemic border closures reopened, combined with acute housing shortages, pushed migration to the centre of politics in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom simultaneously. All three moved in the same direction: tighter English language requirements, higher financial capacity thresholds for students, restrictions on bringing dependants for some categories, caps or targets on international student commencements, and increased scrutiny of low quality education providers. Australia published a Migration Strategy in December 2023 signalling a redesigned system with a fast track for genuinely high skilled applicants and tighter control of the temporary sector. Whether these measures reduce migration or simply redirect it is not yet clear from the data.

Running alongside the general rules is a growing layer of bilateral agreements, which is where India's diplomacy has been most active. India has signed migration and mobility partnership arrangements with several countries, including the United Kingdom in 2021 and Australia in 2023, and comparable agreements with Germany, France, Portugal and others. These typically combine three elements: easier movement for students, researchers and professionals; mutual recognition of qualifications; and cooperation on the return of nationals without lawful status, which is the concession the receiving country wants. The Australian arrangement produced a dedicated early career professional scheme allocating a limited annual number of places to Indian graduates in specified fields, filled by ballot. Such deals are small in volume compared with the mainstream programmes, but they signal something structural: receiving countries increasingly compete for the same pool of skilled young people, and origin countries have begun to negotiate on that basis rather than simply supplying it.

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