Policy poser

THE Leave campaign’s new immigration policy sounds awfully familiar. “An Australian-style points system” has become the preferred way of opposing immigration without actually saying that we do not want so many foreigners here.

It also has the advantage of being unspecific about how such a policy would work. All it said was: “Such a system can be much less bureaucratic and much simpler than the existing system for non-EU citizens.”

All we can surmise, therefore, is that to cut annual net immigration from last year’s total of 333 000 to below the target of 100 000 a year would require very tight restrictions on people coming both to work and to study – assuming that family reunions cannot be reduced significantly without breaching people’s human rights.

Such restrictions would without doubt have a dramatic effect on the UK economy. We accept that the wages of some of the lowly paid are likely to rise in the short term. That was what ex-Marks & Spencer chairman Lord Rose was mocked for admitting.

Yes, some low wages would rise – maybe in some cases even more than the rises in George Osborne’s so-called National Living Wage. They might rise in higher-paid shortage occupations too, because immigration for work would have been cut almost to zero.

The consensus among economists is surprisingly clear: the only question about the effect of Britain leaving the EU is precisely how much poorer we would be. And if the country as a whole is poorer, it is likely that the burden of that loss would in the end fall harder on those least able to afford it.

Anti-immigration policies – whether or not they are dressed up in the cliché of “an Australian-style points system” – would make Britain a smaller, more mean-minded, less successful country.