No country has cracked the immigration riddle

The greatest problem with immigration 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 70million (up from 56million 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 oversimplifications.

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, 3.5million, are from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And 18 per cent 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 per cent, 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 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.

‘Those who are neither welcome nor useful include criminals we can’t deport and cashpoint fraud gangs’