09/11/2014
On few subjects is more nonsense talked these days than on immigration, and there is, above all, one good reason for this, writes
Booker.
Yet again, he says, we are almost entirely missing the elephant in the room. This was reflected again last week when Angela Merkel was reported as saying that if David Cameron continues to press for a change to the EU's "freedom of movement" rules, this could lead to Britain having to leave the EU.
Even if we did leave the EU, this would make little difference to most of our immigration problems, because they do not arise from the EU treaty's "freedom of movement" rules at all.
We may be alarmed by the thought that 13 percent of our population are now immigrants; that last year immigration rose by 38 percent; that more than a quarter of all babies in Britain are born to mothers from abroad; and that by 2050 it is predicted that a third of our population will be from "ethnic minorities".
But the real problem posed by loss of control over our borders stems not from the EU treaty or even laws passed by politicians. It comes from law made by judges, most notably those of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as they have interpreted international treaties to mean something quite different from the way their framers intended.
Easily the biggest part of the problem arises from a process launched by the ECHR in 1985. In the so-called "
Abdulaziz case", its judges ruled that, under Article 8 of the Convention on Human Rights â upholding the right to "respect for family life" â anyone entitled to live in a country is then entitled to bring in other members of their family.
This is why we have had to admit more than one-and-a-half million of our immigrants, mostly from the Indian sub-continent, including wives, children, grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins. Up to 100 of them for one family, all then eligible for benefits.
It is also under this judge-ordained "right" that many immigrants have been allowed to enter the UK from elsewhere in the EU. The EU treaties explicitly guarantee "freedom of movement" only to "workers" â not to their families. It is true that, in 2003, the EU passed a directive allowing "family reunification". But Britain opted out of that. So the countless EU families entering Britain with only one "economically active" member do so only under the same human-rights rules.
The other conspicuous problem is that we are no longer allowed to deport most of this countryâs 100,000 "asylum seekers" back to where they came from. This is also under the Human Rights Act, as interpreted by our own judges in 1999, when they ruled that we could not return refugees to France, from where most arrive, because France (like Germany) was deemed not to be "safe", on the grounds that they might be at risk of racial or other persecution.
Only last week, the ECHR ruled that an Afghan family that arrived in Switzerland, after years travelling the world, could not be returned to Italy, for the startling reason that living conditions there would not be "salubrious".
All this makes nonsense of claims that uncontrolled immigration could be stopped by our leaving the EU, because we would still be ruled by the ECHR. The fact is that mass migration from poorer, more dangerous countries to richer, safer countries has become a vast worldwide problem.
Some people, such as the MEP Daniel Hannan, propose that Britain follows the example of Switzerland, outside the EU. But the Swiss immigrant population is 23 percent, nearly twice as large as ours. Others, such as UKIP, say we should copy the Australian system. But this has resulted in an even higher percentage, at 27 percent.
The truth is that immigration can bring great benefits, but also huge dangers; and our aim should be to work out how we can keep one while reducing the other. A vital precondition of that must be to identify just where the problem originates. It has, above all, been brought about not by the EU, or even by our pusillanimous politicians.
The real problem is that we have allowed judges to misuse their powers to interpret the law in ways that were simply never intended. To regain control over our borders we would first need to regain control over those unelected judges.
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