Immigration: a return to dog-whistle politics?
“It is a great pity,” said The Independent, “that Priti Patel’s ‘resting face’ is the appearance of a smirk.” It makes it harder to take the Home Secretary’s comments on sensitive issues seriously. Then again, that would have been difficult in any case with her remarks last week about immigration. In a bid to turn the issue into a dividing line in the election, Patel declared that, under the Tories, “overall immigration” will be “lower”.
The system will apparently be brought under control by a points-based system post-Brexit that will prioritise skilled workers and treat EU citizens the same as migrants from the rest of the world. Labour, by contrast, would – according to Patel – effectively throw Britain’s borders open to everyone in the world, causing net immigration figures to more than triple, to some 840,000 a year.
The claims about Labour are “obviously nonsense”, said Ben Kelly on Reaction. life. The party is not about to introduce free movement from the entire world, and there will be no increase to 840,000 people a year coming to Britain. By resorting to this sort of “dog whistle politics”, the Tories have taken “a deeply disappointing backwards step in the immigration debate”. The good news, though, said Jonathan Portes in The Guardian, is that these misleading claims were designed to distract attention from a more welcome development: the “long-overdue abandonment” of David Cameron’s “economically illiterate and politically damaging” target to reduce net annual migration to the “tens of thousands”. It was that arbitrary target, continued by Theresa May, which drove the Home Office to focus on repelling immigrants and kicking people out, leading to the Windrush scandal and other abuses. Its replacement with a vaguer commitment to rein in immigration is a positive step.
There is another such move the Tories could make, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, and that’s to offer an amnesty to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been living in Britain illegally for ten years or longer. Boris Johnson has long argued in favour of regulating the status of these people, who are often restricted to cash-in-hand work, unable to pay tax or enter the real economy. Tory election strategists insist the party has to sound tough on immigration, but “being tough on border control – as Patel promises to be – makes it easier for the Tories to attempt some difficult reforms on other areas”. An amnesty for long-term illegal migrants could be just the liberal policy the Tories need to win over critics who regard Leavers as “a bunch of anti-migrant Little England nativists”.