Immigration policy will never satisfy everyone. It’s a stubborn fact that more people will want to move to high-income countries than residents will want to admit. But, as Alan Manning – former head of Britain’s Migration Advisory Committee – makes clear, that doesn’t mean we can’t do much better.

We should start, Manning says, by ditching simplistic views that frame immigration as either wholly good or wholly bad. We will always have and need some level of immigration. But, just as inevitably, we will have rules on who can and cannot immigrate. To set those rules we need reliable evidence to navigate among the often-competing claims of the economy, culture, justice, and democracy. Manning supplies such evidence in abundance, guiding us through cutting-edge international research on key questions, including the effects of immigration on people’s lives, their jobs and incomes, taxes and public services, and their communities.

Why Immigration Policy Is Hard is an indispensable resource for informed debate on one of the most charged subjects in public life today.