A snobbish shunning of low-skilled migrants will not help our cause

Fundamental issues around freedom of movement in Europe cannot be fixed by setting arbitrary limits

made him a bit homesick, but he was happy here because “everybody is so nice”.

One of the most dastardly, irresponsible aspects of the anti-Brexit campaign has been to equate the desire for controlled immigration with bigotry. The latter is wicked and rare in Britain; the former is common sense and widely held. So let’s leave behind the calumny and get on with the serious business of how to address the problem of numbers.

That is what the Government was caught attempting to do last week when it – predictably perhaps – walked into a blizzard of contention at home and another round of that unscrupulous grudge match known as the EU “negotiation”. Oddly, Michel Barnier and his team seem to have been surprised by the idea that the status of EU citizens coming to work in Britain might change after Brexit. This prospect may seem self-evident to you but it was apparently a mysterious outrage to the Brussels outfit, which appears to have assumed that we would continue with unlimited free movement – one of the electorate’s main reasons for voting Leave – even after we left.

But there it was. The UK Government was considering, according to a leaked document, putting limits on the rights of low and unskilled workers to remain for longer than two years and to bring family members along with them, etc.

Paradoxically, this might have seemed less objectionable if not for the fact that they were apparently contemplating no such limitations on either the numbers, or the rights to remain, of highly qualified migrants. In other words, the medical professionals and the IT engineers could come and stay – pretty much as if nothing had changed in our EU relationship – but the fruit pickers and the waiters and the sandwich-makers would only be allowed a timed working visit even if they were earning their keep. Now it is pretty clear to me – even as I describe it – that there is something nasty about this. Not only does it have a distinct whiff of heartless snobbery but it is also ruthless.

In effect, it says to the poorer countries of Europe: we are happy to cream off as many of those highly qualified professionals whom you have paid to train as we can, and let them bring their probably well-educated spouses and clever children too. These wonderfully endowed creatures – often described as “the sort of people we need” – can stay indefinitely with few questions asked. But the common folk who come here to do menial jobs with little complaint and considerable conscientiousness will be allowed in only on brief sufferance.

Apart from the obvious class discrimination (very British) there is something distinctly illogical about this plan in economic terms. While doctors and technology experts may be essential to fill immediate needs in our most advanced modern services, these gaps are a result of poor planning and unsatisfactory education – both of which could be remedied.

It is actually low-skilled jobs where Britain has an intractable recruitment problem. Put bluntly, indigenous working-class people do not want to be employed as waiters or fruit-pickers. There are class connotations (again) attached to menial service, and seasonal agricultural work cannot sustain an all-year-round domestic life.

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion Having thousands of willing Europeans coming here – usually temporarily because they are young – to fill the vacancies that British people disdain is arguably less damaging for everybody than pulling medical staff and engineers out of their struggling home countries, possibly permanently. However, it is true as well that the incoming young who take low-skilled jobs are a loss to their old communities, and their willingness to accept low wages is being shamelessly exploited by global corporate interests. “Free movement of people” is a cleverly touted pretext for the recruitment of poor people to provide cheap labour for rich countries whose demographic decline means they must import a younger generation.

This shifting of labour across a continent has far deeper – and darker – implications than the happy-clappy “free movement” champions can admit. It is presumably designed to emulate the unfettered transit of job-seekers from one American state to another – since the object of the EU project is to create a “United States of Europe”. If so, there is some serious misunderstanding at play: Americans are already displaced people. They – or their parents, or grandparents – made a conscious decision to abandon their cultural roots and take up the opportunity of a new kind of life. Those born in Oklahoma who trek to California, or who move from Maine to New Jersey are not abandoning a historical identity and a native language.

If Europe is ever to be unified – which is what the enthusiasts say they want – then it must create prosperity in all its member states: not offer up its poor populations to be harvested by the wealthy ones.

‘Free movement is a cleverly touted pretext for the recruitment of poor people’