Fraser Nelson
We don’t want silly promises on immigration, just an honest debate
Theresa May’s allies tell a good story about the origins of the Conservative Government’s muchmocked and muchmissed immigration target. David Cameron was being a bit squeamish about the whole issue – to the chagrin of Damian Green, then the shadow immigration minister. One day, when asked on television about what the Tories would actually do about the issue, Mr Green blurted out something about getting annual net immigration down to the “tens of thousands”. His colleagues, listening, were shocked: when, they wondered, had that policy been agreed? It hadn’t.
But rather than admit as much, Mr Cameron’s Conservatives pretended it was all intentional. A target was born. It was policymaking that makes Yes Minister look like a documentary.
At the time, Mrs May regarded all of this as quite funny – but, at the same time, useful. Even an unachievable immigration target, she thought, was better than no target. And she has always been quite hawkish on immigration, despairing of Cabinet colleagues whom she regarded as fainthearts. In this way, Mr Green’s on- air improvisation was converted into Tory policy and survived two manifestos. At last year’s general election, voters seemed not to mind that the Conservatives were missing the target by miles. Its very existence seemed good enough for many, a sign that the Tories cared. Mr Cameron, it seemed, had got away with it.
Not for long. During the referendum campaign, the latest annual immigration figure dropped like a bomb into Downing Street. At 333,000 it was more than three times higher than Cameron’s target – with all of the growth coming from the EU.
It made the Brexiteers’ point perfectly: how could the prime minister even pretend to be tackling this, if he has no control? And surely the only remedy was to take control by leaving the EU? Cameron’s adoption of a bogus, unachievable immigration target turned out to be one of the worst mistakes of his premiership.
An inability to talk plainly about immigration is the great British political disease. Bad thinking leads to bad policy, and it persists. The “tens of thousands” target will come to be just as toxic for Mrs May as it was for Mr Cameron. Yesterday, we heard that the figure is bobbing away near its record high, with net migration from the EU having trebled over the past six years. Brexit won’t help. It will take two, perhaps three years for Britain to leave the EU – and any new system will take years to have any effect. So by the 2020 election, Mrs May risks being the woman who has spent an almighty 10 years missing this target.
The existence of this target is a nonsense, a deceit that the Cabinet allows to be perpetrated on the public. And leaving the EU won’t transform things. It will allow the tightening of restrictions on Portuguese waiters and Polish cleaners, but even this is a fairly blunt tool.
The Organisation for Economic Coopoeration and Development assumes that Brexit could reduce immigration by about 84,000 a year, nowhere near enough. As Boris Johnson said shortly after he departed these pages for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the immigration target is bound to end up “disappointing people again”.
At least the new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, seems to realise the futility of the task she has inherited. Commendably, if rather cheekily, she tried to wriggle out of it a few days into her job by saying that she hoped only to lower immigration to “sustainable levels” – whatever that means. Mrs May’s team in No 10 lost no time in telling her it meant “tens of thousands,” just like in the old days.
As I’ve often argued here, the great surprise about mass immigration to Britain is how well it works; how well we cope and adapt. The xenophobic backlash consuming politics on so much of the Continent has almost no equivalent here – and this isn’t because (as we hear occasionally) we’re somehow an island of immigrants. The remarkable truth is that about two-thirds of Brits are descended from the Stone Age grunts who occupied these islands 6,000 years ago. At no point in our history have we ever had immigration on this scale. What we’re dealing with is unprecedented, under-examined and still misunderstood.
The problem is not workers’ pay being dragged down, but in accommodating and educating the newcomers. House prices go up, schools become oversubscribed and locals become worried. When they do, they encounter another new problem of immigration: the pathological inability of MPs to engage in a sensible conversation about its challenges. Even now, politicians seem terrified of waking a sleeping racist giant in Britain – an absurd notion in a country that has good claim to be one of the most tolerant in the world.
So no one is discussing issues like the employers who have grown addicted to immigrant labour, using it as a cheap alternative to training Brits. Why should they bother, when they can pick up Slavic graduates on little more than the minimum wage? The old linkage, whereby economic growth forces expanding companies to help those at the very bottom by hiring them, has been broken by mass immigration. Then come the tougher challenges of what amount to ghettoes, and of integration in general.
And at the other end of the scale, lies the problem of Americans, Australians and others being threatened with deportation. We saw an absurd case of an American flautist facing being sent back to Washington because she didn’t earn £35,000 a year – a bizarre earnings threshold brought in by Mrs May four months ago. Hopefully Brexit will allow an end to the shameless discrimination against non-Europeans, and restore a sense of justice to the system. It’s a classic case of crude targets causing absurd results, in defiance of public opinion. Polls show we want more high-skilled immigration, less unskilled. And more fairness.
Concern about immigration has always been more than just a numbers game – yet a numbers game is all that our political class has seemed able to play. The Brexit vote was, among other things, a plea for a new political discussion. It is one that Mrs May is ideally placed to start.