We need to talk about migration like adults

Scotland’s migration debate is becoming increasingly polarised. But the latest evidence suggests people’s views are more nuanced than the political debate allows, and that what we need is less certainty, not more.

There is something increasingly strange about the way we talk about immigration. The debate has become so polarised that there seem to be only two acceptable positions. Either immigration is an unqualified good, and raising concerns about it makes you suspect, or immigration is an existential threat, and defending any form of it makes you naive.

Neither is a particularly useful way to run a country.

The latest Migration Policy Scotland survey makes clear just how far this polarisation has gone. The proportion of people who want immigration to Scotland reduced has risen from 42% in 2024 to 50% in 2026, while the proportion wanting it increased has fallen from 31% to 23%. But the really interesting finding is not the movement towards more restrictive views. It is what is happening in the middle.

People are becoming more certain. The group with nuanced or uncertain views is shrinking, with more people moving towards one side or the other. The report describes this as a process of growing certainty and polarisation rather than simply a straightforward movement towards hostility.

That should concern anyone who thinks immigration deserves a serious political debate. Because immigration is not one thing. A skilled worker is not the same as an asylum seeker. A university student is not the same as somebody joining their family. Someone arriving for six months is not the same as someone intending to spend the rest of their life here.

And the public knows this, whether political debate does or not.

Half of the respondents want immigration reduced when asked about immigration in general. But when asked about specific routes, the picture changes dramatically. Seventy per cent or more want skilled, health and social care, seasonal and temporary work visas to increase or remain at their current level. Fifty-five per cent want skilled-worker migration increased. Forty-four per cent want health and social-care migration increased. By contrast, 45% want asylum numbers reduced.

This is not the population speaking with one voice about “immigration”. It is people making distinctions. And perhaps politics should be doing more of the same. There is an uncomfortable truth here for the political left. Being broadly supportive of migration is not the same thing as having a migration policy. The former is a position. The latter is a responsibility.

If a country is going to accept significant numbers of people from elsewhere, it has to think seriously about what happens afterwards. Where will people live? How will children learn? How will people access public services? What opportunities exist to learn English? How do people enter workplaces and communities? How do newcomers become participants rather than simply residents? And how do existing communities adapt to demographic change without being told that noticing it is itself somehow illegitimate?

These are not anti-immigration questions. They are the questions that arise precisely because migration is permanent rather than abstract.

The Migration Policy Scotland survey contains a striking finding on this point. Social contact with immigrants is more strongly associated with attitudes towards immigration than most of the demographic characteristics examined. People who have some social contact with immigrants are 24 percentage points less likely to favour reducing immigration than those who have none. Three-quarters of those with social contact say diversity is good for Scotland, compared with 47% of those without it. The authors are careful to point out that this does not establish causation: people with positive views may be more likely to seek contact in the first place.

But whatever the direction of causality, it tells us something important. Integration cannot simply mean bringing people into the country and hoping that proximity will do the rest. It has to mean creating the conditions for actual contact.

That means thinking about schools, workplaces, neighbourhoods, public services and civic life. It means making it possible for people who have arrived from somewhere else to build relationships beyond their immediate community. It means taking seriously the practical work of helping people understand how the society they have entered operates, while also recognising that integration cannot mean demanding that migrants erase their culture, religion or identity.

There is a distinction between integration and assimilation that gets lost remarkably easily. Assimilation asks people to become more like the society they have entered. Integration asks how people with different backgrounds can participate in the same society. The latter is both more realistic and more demanding.

“The answer to a difficult question does not become less true because somebody unpleasant happens to be asking it.”

It also means that the left cannot simply leave every uncomfortable question to the far right. This is one of the consequences of treating immigration as a moral test. Once one side insists that immigration is obviously good and the other insists that it is obviously disastrous, any attempt to discuss the practical difficulties of integration gets sucked into the culture war.

The far right is perfectly happy with that arrangement. It can take a genuine concern - about housing, public services, community cohesion, integration, or the pace of demographic change - and inflate it into a story about national decline. The answer cannot be to pretend the underlying question does not exist. It has to be to answer it properly.

Otherwise, the only people explaining are the people with the most extreme explanations. That is particularly important because the survey suggests that attitudes are not simply determined by how many immigrants people think there are. Forty per cent of respondents substantially overestimate the proportion of Scotland's population who are immigrants, while 38% give an estimate within the report's broad range of accuracy.

Facts matter. But facts alone do not create social cohesion. People also need to feel that somebody is paying attention to what is happening around them.

There is a temptation in progressive politics to respond to anti-immigration sentiment by correcting people's perceptions: immigration is lower than you think; migrants contribute more than you think; diversity is good for Scotland; the economy needs workers. All of those things can be true. None of them answers the question of whether we are actually doing integration well. And this is where the distinction between being for migration and being for a functioning migration system becomes important.

The Migration Policy Group's 2025 impact report, for example, describes integration work not simply as defending migrants' rights but as building practical systems around them: multilingual services, coordination between organisations, education, participation, entrepreneurship and tools for governments to identify where their integration policies are failing. Its underlying premise is that inclusion requires institutions and practical infrastructure, not just good intentions.

If we believe migration is necessary, and Scotland's demographic position makes a serious case for continued migration, then the answer cannot simply be to defend the principle of migration whenever it is attacked.

We have to make it work.

That means decent housing. It means properly funded public services. It means language support. It means education. It means employment that does not trap migrants in insecure, low-paid work. It means opportunities for genuine social contact. It means expecting everyone who lives here to understand and participate in the same civic framework, while leaving room for people to retain the cultures and identities they brought with them.

And it means being capable of distinguishing between a legitimate problem and a racist explanation of that problem. Those are not the same thing.

The danger of polarisation is that we lose the ability to do precisely that. The person who raises a legitimate concern gets told they are racist. The person who encounters racism gets told their concern is illegitimate. Meanwhile, the most extreme voices on both sides become increasingly certain that only they are willing to tell the truth.

The survey's most interesting finding may therefore be the shrinking middle. Not because the middle is always right. It isn't. But democracy depends on people being able to hold two thoughts in their heads at once. Migration can be economically and demographically valuable, while its pace and distribution can create genuine pressures. People can retain their cultural and religious identities while still being expected to participate in the civic life of the country they live in.

Racism can distort perceptions of migration, while some concerns about how migration is managed can still be legitimate. The answer to a difficult question does not become less true because somebody unpleasant happens to be asking it. Scotland's immigration debate badly needs that distinction.

The alternative is a politics in which every conversation begins with deciding which side of the culture war you belong to, and only then deciding what you are allowed to think. That is precisely the kind of politics the Migration Policy Scotland report is warning us about. Perhaps the way out is not to become more certain. Perhaps it is to become more capable of being complicated again.