Heads up for those interested in policy questions that I’ve started a series on family immigration, trying to think about some of the fundamentals rather than just the details.

Limits can be ‘hard’ and obvious, as with the imposition of a cap or quota.

Or limits can be ‘soft’ and more subtle. The range of recognised family relationships might be limited. Family separation could be justified on public policy grounds in a wide range of situations. Informal controls such as delays, fees and complexity can be deployed. And so on. These indirect controls on numbers may not impose a hard cap or quota but they do render entry and residence very hard or even impossible for many families and thus reduce the number of family members who can actually enter.

You can read the whole thing here. Subscribe to my Substack for the full series, which will follow as I write it. I’m aiming to write more policy-oriented stuff over there and leave Free Movement to focus more on the law.