The real immigration lie
Yet again, New Labour’s predilection for spin and misleading statistics has landed the government in trouble. Ministers have long been fond of making the argument for immigration on the basis that it increases the country’s GDP. But as the House of Lords Economics Affairs Committee rightly points out in its new report, adding more people to the population will lead — barring a recession — to a higher GDP. So this is hardly a clinching argument for immigration. After all, the fact that Turkey’s GDP is larger than that of Switzerland scarcely means that the Turks are better off than the Swiss.
The report also concluded that immigration does little for per capita GDP — a far more important statistic. And from the furore surrounding this, one would have thought that the economic case for immigration had been holed below the water line. But a close reading of the report shows that this is not the case. In spite of its calls for stricter controls on immigration — and nobody sane can be opposed to a managed migration system that functions well — the Lords committee has to concede that the rapid flow of workers into the country has kept down the costs of both goods and public services. Without them the economy would have been hit by a double whammy of higher inflation and increased taxes.
This is by no means the only economic argument for immigration. Foreign-born workers are more productive than their British-born counterparts. Immigration also expands the talent pool, allowing greater specialisation and thus efficiency, while the addition of skilled and motivated people to the workforce creates a virtuous cycle as native born workers adapt to keep up. There are also the intangible benefits enjoyed by any open society: communities with static populations are neither innovative nor successful.
The debate about immigration is about far more than economics, of course: Britain is more than a labour exchange with a flag on top. In the past decade the population has grown by about 1.5 million (net), and the mis guided creed of ‘multiculturalism’, the invention of white left-wing ideologues, has created many more problems than it has solved, especially for black and Asian people. In practice, furthermore, the British government has control over only about a third of immigration: citizens of all but the newest EU member states have the right to move here. The psychological and social impact of such change is considerable: how could it be otherwise? If the existing population is to feel comfortable about continued immigration, then it must be reassured that the government is in control of the borders and planning public service and housing for the needs of the future. Self-evidently, that reassurance has not been forthcoming.
There is, though, no intrinsic reason why immigration should not continue to benefit Britain as it has throughout our island history. To ensure that this is the case, the government should not fiddle about with caps or quotas for non-EU immigrants: the idea that Whitehall can work out precisely how many and what kind of workers the British economy might need in any given year is worthy of the Soviet Union’s central planners. Instead, the government should concentrate on repairing the damage caused by the ‘multiculturalist’ agenda in town halls and schools over the past three decades, and upon reform of the public services and the welfare system.
If Britain is to be a cohesive society, its citizens must be able to speak to each other and share the same essential liberal, democratic values. Integration, as Gordon Brown seems to grasp, is the only way a pluralistic society can cohere and prosper. All immigrants should be required to learn English and all children should be taught how Britain came to be the liberal, democratic and tolerant society that it is today. Government should interact with all citizens as individuals — not as members of a group, ethnic or religious. There is no place for communalism or cantonisation in this country — although this is precisely what the municipal Left has encouraged in our inner cities. In an era of population mobility, moreover, Britain’s centrally planned, hopelessly rigid public services are drastically out of date. The current top-down system means that local schools and hospitals can suddenly be overwhelmed by the arrival of new immigrants — causing inevitable tensions. A supply-side system, such as the one the Tories are proposing for education, would prevent these problems from occurring.
The most misleading claim made in the debate about immigration is that it is somehow preventing young British people from finding work and therefore exacerbating welfare dependency. Youth unemployment, as the House of Lords report notes, has gone up by 100,000 since 2004, while many young immigrants have arrived and found work. But it is emphatically not the immigrants who are the cause of 5.4 million working-age adults claiming benefits; rather immigration is a symptom of this depressing phenomenon. Today’s immigrants are not taking jobs from British workers but rather doing jobs that would otherwise stay vacant: between the spring of 2002 and 2006, migrant workers found 740,000 jobs, while the number of jobs taken by British-born workers remained steady. The solution to the inability — or unwillingness — of British workers to find employment is not, as the Lords suggest, raising the minimum wage in an act of workforce protectionism that would make British businesses and goods less competitive in the global marketplace. This, combined with the plans to tax non-doms, would send out the message that Britain is no longer a competitive, economically flexible nation.
The truth is that Labour has relied upon immigrant labour to cover up both its failure to reform the welfare system and the scandal of educational failure in this country. Immigration raises many serious issues, but the most serious is that the British economy is so dependent upon help from foreign workers. No artificial ‘cap’ is going to disguise the sobering fact that our homegrown labour force is not yet fit for purpose.
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