Jenrick: Cap migrants at tens of thousands
ROBERT JENRICK has called for a cap on net migration of under 100,000 a year, arguing that it is the only way to restore voters’ trust.
Writing for The Sunday Telegraph, the former immigration minister called for the Government to commit to reducing net migration from its record high of 745,000 in 2022 to “tens of thousands”, enforced by an annual cap set by votes in Parliament. Mr Jenrick, who will detail his proposals in a report this week with fellow former minister Neil O’Brien, accused the post-Brexit Government of sticking “two fingers” up to the British public by liberalising the immigration system and breaking their promises on leaving the EU to take control of Britain’s borders.
He accused politicians in the “SW1 bubble” of being out of touch with voters by “clinging” to the economic orthodoxy that immigration is an “unalloyed economic good and that our public services would collapse without it”. He added: “This myth needs debunking.” In his report with Mr O’Brien, a former health minister, published by the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, Mr Jenrick argues that it is “undeniable” that mass migration has diluted the UK’s capital stock. “Far too many of the migrants that have come to the UK have been net burdens on the Exchequer over the course of their lifetime,” he said.
“It stands to reason that if all this migration is rocket fuel for our economy, growth would be booming and wages rising. But since 1998, the first year net migration passed 100,000, GDP per capita growth has averaged 1.2 per cent a year, barely half the rate in the four decades before that.”
Policymakers have pointed to the economic contribution of the “average” migrant but Mr Jenrick said this masked wide variations in earnings, employment rates and their fiscal impact. He cited data showing that a migrant from Poland, the Philippines or New Zealand
was 50 per cent more likely to be in work than a migrant from Somalia or Bangladesh.
“This is cause for concern, not least because since leaving the EU we’ve seen migration from Europe radically decrease and an enormous increase in non-EU migration,” said Mr Jenrick.
He called for the UK to create a far more restrictive immigration system that established the UK as the “grammar school” of the Western world where only high-skilled, high-wage migrants who are net contributors to the economy were allowed entry.
Before Mr Jenrick quit Government over his demands for tougher action on illegal migration, he persuaded Rishi Sunak to introduce measures to reduce legal migration by 300,000 including raising the salary threshold for skilled workers to £38,700 a year and restrictions on migrants’ rights to bring in spouses or family. However, he warned that “well-meaning” policy was not enough and the discipline of a centrally-fixed cap, citing how officials’ forecasts of only 6,000 foreign social care workers coming to the UK had turned into nearly 250,000 migrants with their families.
He said: “Since we took back control of the levers of migration, these were promises that politicians deliberately broke by liberalising our system even further by lowering salary thresholds and creating new routes with lax rules.
“Frankly, those decisions were two fingers up to the public who haven’t forgotten or forgiven.
“The only way politicians can look voters in the eye and actually guarantee they can meet their promises to reduce net migration is to introduce a migration cap which would serve as a democratic lock on numbers.
“We propose that this cap should be voted on by all MPs in parliament in a Migration Budget Debate, alongside forecast impacts of immigration on housing, infrastructure and public services.”
He warned that without such action, Britain faced a migration crisis that would drain public services and threaten integration.
Already, said Mr Jenrick, the housing crisis had become a migration crisis requiring an “impossible” 515,000 new homes every year to cope with the current levels of immigration.
“For nearly three decades politicians of all stripes have promised to control and reduce legal migration, only to allow it to balloon to extreme levels. The historically unprecedented numbers we have experienced are jaw-dropping,” said Mr Jenrick.
“In the 25 years up to Tony Blair’s election, cumulative net migration was 68,000; in the next 25 years to 2022 it was 5.9 million - almost 100 times the previous 25 years.”