EU Referendum


Booker: tackling the immigration riddle


07/05/2017




Although immigration was high profile during the referendum campaign (or the latter part of it), it has not been as prominent of late with the so-called "divorce bill" taking the headlines.

Nevertheless, Booker has chosen this subject for this week's column, picking up some of the issues that have had less coverage than perhaps should have been the case.

The greatest problem with immigration, Booker writes, is that it is so much more fiendishly complicated than is usually allowed for. For a start, of course, the problem is worldwide, as so many people want to move from poor countries to those that are richer and safer: Africans and Middle Easterners to Europe, eastern Europeans to western Europe, Mexicans to the US, Asians to Australia.

From a British point of view, the cry may seem understandable that we should "take back control of our borders". In recent years, more people have poured into these islands than all those who did so between 1066 and 2010. Even official projections show that within a decade or so, our population may top 70 million (up from 56 million 30 years ago). We all know about the stresses this is already imposing on housing, schools, the NHS and wages.

But when it comes to what might be done about it, there are two reasons why it is so important not to resort to crude and emotive over-simplifications.

One is the undoubted fact that much immigration has been hugely beneficial. Without immigrants at every level, so much of our national life would be the poorer: from the City of London and foreign doctors and nurses in our hospitals to the staffing of our care homes; from hard-working eastern Europeans picking fruit and veg or serving in our restaurants to Albanian car washers and those proverbial Polish plumbers.

The first difficulty is trying to devise a system that could distinguish between immigrants who are welcome and useful and those who are neither. These, for instance, include criminals we cannot deport, the Romanian gangs who seem to dominate cashpoint fraud, even the Roma beggars on our streets.

They also include those from the Asian sub-continent who have established alien enclaves in our cities, not least those men from the more tribal parts of Pakistan who played a dominant part in the wholesale abuse of young girls in towns such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Oxford.

But the second huge problem is that so much immigration is not covered by EU laws but by a thicket of other international rules, such as the UN Refugee Convention, our legacy obligations to citizens of the Commonwealth and, above all, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as interpreted by judges both in Strasbourg and Britain itself.

More than half of our immigrant population comes from outside the EU; by far the largest group, 3.5 million, are from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And 18 percent of immigrants are currently entering under the "family reunion" Article 8 clause of the ECHR, which can allow one immigrant who has arrived to bring in many more members of his family. Even when Britain leaves the EU, this will remain.

The truth is that no country in the world has yet found a workable way to meet all these pressures. The solutions offered all seem to be riddled with holes, from President Trump's absurd Mexican wall to the much-touted Australian points system, which has given that country an immigrant population of 27 percent, more than twice as large as our own.

In many ways, Britain's problems are not as grim as those faced by other European countries, where immigration has become a heated issue, such as Italy, Greece, France, Hungary, Germany and Sweden. But if we do seem to have a particular problem, accounting for the massive surge in the past few years, this is chiefly because our economy has been doing comparatively so well.

It is this, not our benefits system, that in the past two years alone has attracted record net immigration to our shores of more than 600,000. And the irony is, Booker concludes, that the one certain way in which those numbers could be dramatically reduced would be for our Brexit negotiations to fail so badly that our economy would no longer be a magnet for them.

Obviously that is something none of us wishes to see. But if Brexit can somehow leave us with the access to our largest export market and the thriving economy we are promised, we will still be left with a problem far more intractable than most discussion of this issue has so far allowed for. Strangely enough, the latest figures from the ONS show that EU net immigration marginally exceeded non-EU immigration (year ending September 2016).

In the post-referendum period, however, it is also the case that EU immigration dropped by a significant amount and it is reasonable to expect a continued fall while the uncertainty remains.

There are, for instance, reports of the number of EU nationals registering as nurses in England has dropped by 92 percent since the referendum. A record number are quitting the NHS.

If this becomes a continuing trend, we could end up with a long-term drop in EU migrants without any formal action being taken. We could even have the perverse situation where the UK kept the freedom of movement channels open but nobody came to the party.

The corollary of this, of course, is that proportionately – if not in absolute terms - immigration from the rest of the world goes up. As Booker indicates, only one part of the problem is solved.

Should the UK economy remain stable, however, the job market will continue to pull migrants into the country. And, with 37 million visitors coming to this country each year, policing our borders isn't going to get any easier.

And therein lies the real issue. The UK has a tradition of open borders which long precedes our membership of the EEC. As I recalled in a previous blogpost we were signing up free movement deals with our European neighbours back in 1946 and it seems hardly likely that, post-Brexit, we will be erecting a Mexico-like wall on the lines advocated by Mr Trump.

Basically, free movement is and has been since the end of the Second World War, an important part of the UK economy, comprising in the main tourism, services and education provision. Interruption of that flow could have repercussions that go way beyond the effects on the jobs market.

If the truth were told by the more extremist "kippers" though, their main concern is not white immigrants from European countries but coloured Muslims – mainly from Pakistan. But this is a prejudice that dare not speak its name, so Farage chose to make the "non-racist" pitch for shutting down freedom of movement from the EU.

But since this is going to have only a marginal effect on the overall problem – and was never really the real problem anyway – Brexit in many ways is a distraction from the broader failure of the UK to manage its borders, even where it had powers to do so.

I think we all recall the ongoing scandals concerning the UK Border Agency and the fact that Theresa May announced that it was to be abolished in March 2013, after it had been declared "not fit for purpose". Four years on, there is no evidence that border controls are any better and there is no good reason to believe that Brexit is going miraculously to increase the competence of HMG.

On that basis, long after we have left the EU, and can no longer blame it for our failures, immigration is going to be as much a "riddle" as it is now. But then, Ukip will be long gone leaving a vacuum in the public discourse. And if we're not going to solve the problem, we're going to have to find a whole new set of things (and people) to blame.

I suppose, at least, that the change in the rhetoric might be refreshing – until that too begins to pall. Then, perhaps, we might get down to analysing and addressing the real problems.