PEOPLE, PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

WE Deedes on how we are failing

to come to terms with the huge rise in global migration

HOW odd, I thought, to leave the United Kingdom while a storm blows across the English Channel about 'asylum-seekers' trying to break in; and then, after travelling to the other end of the world, to find the same storm blowing over Australia's waters. But it is not really odd at all. Both crises are the product of the same global phenomenon: a prodigious effort by people in poor countries to seek a better life for themselves and their children. Modern communications have brought home to them as never before that the grass is greener across the way.

People in Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania know that there is better schooling to be had in the UK than their children are likely to receive where they are now. People in Indonesia. Vietnam and the Philippines nurse the same thoughts about Australia.

There is nothing new about the urge to migrate. There was a surge when sailing vessels gave way to steamships, and a sea voyage of four months to Australia was cut to six weeks. There was another surge when jumbo jets took over from steamships. We have been admitting migrants since 40,000 Huguenots settled here in the 17th century. Australia has been admitting them profitably since the discovery of gold in 1851, which brought half a million newcomers within a decade. The second world war led to a global wave of migration. Between 1947 and 1969 about two million people settled in Australia. The immigrant population there is now short of eight million in a total population of fewer than 20 million.

What is new is the likely scale of this movement, for which we in the UK seem politically and socially ill-prepared. We failed in the 1950s to prepare adequately for the consequences of heavy Commonwealth immigration, and tackled it haphazardly. We look like making the same mistake with this new global movement. We have not yet grasped its potential.

Having travelled during the last decade or so in many of the world's unhappiest countries, I have some idea of the force that lies behind this movement. The transistor radio, the communal television, to say nothing of the Internet — to which increasing numbers have access have opened a huge window on the world. A century ago, half a century even, the window was opaque. Now millions can see through it, can visualise the sort of lives we lead in Britain and Australia.

'It is primarily the educated ones who move,' says Maria Tence of Melbourne's Immigration Museum. This relatively new institution now occupies, appropriately enough, the splendidly restored Old Customs House where 19th-century customs officers oversaw most of Australia's new arrivals. 'The peasants don't have the money to attempt it,' she adds.

Dinner-table talk in Britain leads one to suppose that an attraction of Britain for many immigrants is our reputation for being generous with welfare handouts. Maria Tence puts it rather differently. The draw is that these people come from countries where there is no safety-net under the unfortunate.'

I recognise the truth of that, having visited countries where those who have lost limbs on anti-personnel mines are likely to be destitute. They are seen to be useless, treated as social outcasts, and left to fend for themselves. It is the existence of this net for the unfortunate — which I remember Churchill extolling in the general election of 1951 — and better opportunities for the children that stirs this impulse to brave the seas and seek a better life.

The harsh fact is that though we chatter a lot about making better economic arrangements for the developing world, and grant billions of aid, the gap between life in Liberia or Laos and life in London or Melbourne remains vast and unbridgeable. Is it altogether surprising that so many are willing to chance their lives on Eurostar freight wagons or on Australia's choppy seas, or, most foolishly of all, entrust themselves to people-smugglers?

Here, as in Australia, there are bleeding hearts who denounce as downright inhuman any move to discourage those who jump the queue by holding them in detention. The bleeding hearts are not easily persuaded that, while a small minority threatened by persecution in their own land deserve sanctuary, the majority are economic migrants: and that unless government keeps a firm hand on their rate of entry, things will fall apart.

Though Australia's ration of immigrants to indigenous population is higher than our own, race relations remain outwardly harmonious. We bring in people with a strong work ethic,' says Maria Tence. Compulsory language support — which means that immigrants must learn to speak the native tongue — has been in force in Australia since 1980. A government that grows careless about such precautions and simply bows to the bleeding hearts (who dance all over Australia's news media) is asking for trouble. Australia's Labour opposition sees the force of that and broadly supports the Liberal government's line, while talking about a 'more compassionate approach'.

Nonetheless, I am convinced that this issue is going to grow increasingly fraught as more of the world's poor discover how much greener the grass is on our side of the fence. We in Britain, moreover, will find it harder to restrain the flood than Australia because the English Channel is relatively narrow and has been tunnelled, whereas the seas that gird Australia are wide and perilous.

What Geoffrey Blainey called in his book The Tyranny of Distance, a new edition of which has just appeared, prevails. Australia has a far longer coastline than we do, but you are more likely to drown when approaching it than in sailing illicitly across the English Channel to Dover or Folkestone.

We ought to think more deeply about this tidal wave of people and plan ahead. It is not going away. In ten years' time, I predict, it will be a bigger political issue than it is now. 'Humanity has struck its tents,' said South Africa's General Smuts as the first world war ended. 'We cannot tell whither they are journeying.' That is truer now than when he said it. We should take note.