I just tried a new game and these are the results …
So on that 4th day (when there’s the big stack of policies), is that when you passed every immigration-reducing policy available in the game?
At some large political cost you should be able to set legal immigration to zero (very high international relations and international trade cost). Also at some (minor) cost you should be able to get illegal immigration very low. Illegal immigration is very low in most countries except for in crisis. Simply because it is very hard to live in a country without legal status. It has to get really bad for people to immigrate illegally.
Immigration is mostly a political problem and not a actual economic or crime problem. The relative numbers of immigrants are just too low.
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The thing is, in the first two pictures, if you add every positive and negative influence, I’m pretty sure you would end up with a negative value, meaning that the Legal and Illegal Immigration simulation don’t start at 0% but at something like 50%. Does anyone knows why? Because if the simulation had a -50% from what we have now, you could bring them both to 0% with just min/max Immigration Rules and Border Controls. Which would be far better than what we have now.
Do you have a booming economy and a stable country though? with decent wages? in those situations is it really likely you can reduce all immigration, legal and otherwise to zero? Despite the rhetoric, neither the UK or the US has really made much of a dent in immigration over the last few decades.
The UK even had a party trying to boast that it would reduce immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, and still failed, despite its best efforts.
Is this the UK? if so, the border wall is unavailable, but perhaps we do need a patrol-boats policy, or maybe linking enforcement to high military spending?
Yes. They did not implemented really tough measures. If you put a total ban on immigration and you really enforce that…deportations, detentions, incarcerations… and so on… even with a really well economy, legal immigration and illegal immigration can be 0.
Well, you say “despite its best efforts,” but let’s be honest. The Conservatives have consistently betrayed any manifesto pledge that wasn’t slashing social care, and with the corrupted socialism that Labour promote, you’ll never see them doing anything about immigration 
I do think immigration and illegal immigration need to be stoppable. Now, I do agree, it would be impossible to stop people from coming in at all, some will always overstay visas, disappear when on a holiday, be smuggled in, etc. But that is “solveable” through having a Deportation Agency, to then get them back out again. A sliding bar, from deportation of violent criminals, to random raids, to total deportation of immigrants, at increasing cost and exponential liberal and foreign relations damage.
In this regard, legal Immigration would be totally stoppable, as you can simply stop legal immigration through declaring it all illegal, thereby turning it into Illegal Immigration. Illegal Immigration shouldn’t necessarily be able to be stopped through reduction of Pull Factors, but there should be an ability to make it a non-issue (at great expense) through Push Factors.
Patrol-boats would be a good additional policy as well, maybe scaling from a token force to gunboats. That would only prevent illegal immigration.
And a proposal someone else has suggested in a thread from long ago was having one of those staggered bars (like Abortion Law or Selective Schooling) that determines the rights of Immigrants. Ranging from practically no rights, to needing to remain a resident for a while, to instantly becoming a citizen. That may have a lot of factors it influences however (wages, private/ social housing, private/ state healthcare and schools, employment, ethnic minority happiness, racial tension), so it could be better to have an Immigrant Rights bubble for every policy area, with the slider effecting the things relevant to that section (a section being Tax or Law and Order or Welfare, etc).
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The dev is correct here. To perhaps placate the folks who still want to be able to stop all immigration -and- have a prosperous/healthy/happy country, have a policy that addresses punishments for those who hire workers who have come into the country illegally? If jobs aren’t available then folks won’t come into the country - buuuuut those jobs are, typically, not ones sought after by non-immigrants.
So if a nation was to fine a business a million euros per illegal immigrant worker per year, no business would hire any of them. But the net effect on the country would be drastic.
- Wages would skyrocket upward.
- Cost of living (reflected in decreased middle earnings especially - the cleaning people / lawnmowers / drycleaning / etc will now be unaffordable) would go up.
- Farmer opinion would go down.
- Food price would go up noticeably.
- GDP and/or productivity would go down.
- Unemployment would rise in relation to the # of ethnic minorities / amount of immigration.
- Emigration goes up dramatically, in relation to the # of ethnic minorities.
- Increased risk of corporate exodus & brain drain.
- Income for the state initially in fines.
This could also be achieved via very high capital controls - if an illegal worker supporting family members back in Africa or Central America can’t support them financially anymore, they’d likely go elsewhere.
Or as an alternative… have the world economy make a big impact on immigration levels. If life is good in one’s native country, they’re less likely to move elsewhere.
my argument is that the effects of immigration are much, much too large in game. It is hard to know what the immigration graph at 50% means but the number of immigrants into an economy are so small compared to the economy.
UK had 300k immigration last year but that is 0.5% of 66.65 million population.
The impact on the game is all out of proportion.
I do think the political impact of immigration is enormous.
But everything we know about immigration is its relatively small compared to the economy and close to an economic wash. Although shutting off all immigration should have a big economic impact due to foreign relations.
My problem with the game is the huge unrealistic impacts on the economy and the population structure. (country becoming 80% ethnic minority in a few turns)
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I do agree we definitely need some tweaks and some more policies here. A policy to set the legal position of immigrants with regards to work etc. would make a lot of sense. I will also at some point look at the economic effects.
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