An eye-catching new report from Migration Watch, brings together a (selective) range of statistics and claims to indict Labour on charges of "opening the floodgates" to immigration and "changing Britain fundamentally and irrevocably". In today's Daily Mail, Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migration Watch, paints a colourful picture of a government-led political conspiracy to pack the UK electorate with Labour-voting ethnic minorities.
It is worth examining these claims – they have real implications both for government policy and for Labour, as it reviews its immigration policy.
It is certainly true that immigration to the UK between 1997 and 2010 was high. Indeed this has become rather an old story. But to suggest that this was a result of a Labour policy decision to "open the floodgates", or because Labour lost control of the immigration system, is to ignore the realities of how the world changed in this period. The rates of immigration – and emigration (which was high too) – were driven by powerful global economic forces. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates that the number of international migrants worldwide has risen from around 150 million in 2000 to around 215 million today. No western country has been able to isolate itself from these forces – and in many ways, it would have been perverse of them to try. A policy of zero net migration would have been both impossible and counterproductive.
This is not to say that policy decisions had no impact, nor that Labour did not make mistakes on this issue in its time in government. Those of us who worked at the heart of the Labour government have been perfectly open about some of the failings of Labour on immigration – indeed the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) recently published a pamphlet examining Labour's record, which explored many of these issues with accounts from a number of Labour insiders.
It took Labour too long to introduce robust and transparent management of migration. I remember vividly how we struggled to cope with the surge in asylum claims in the early 2000s. We had inherited a totally inadequate asylum system that was not up to the task of dealing with numbers which topped 100,000 a year at one point (driven in no small part by conflicts in Zimbabwe, the Middle East and elsewhere). In response, new processes were put in place (which attracted criticism for being too tough from some quarters) and asylum numbers dropped substantially – by around three quarters. However, a backlog of cases had built up and these are still being dealt with to this day.
Labour was also too slow to engage in an open dialogue with the electorate about the pace and scale of change. Although it is not true to suggest that Labour ignored public concerns, it is fair to say that Labour ministers were too slow to realise the depth of those concerns, and should have done more to acknowledge and respond to them.
New Labour was more comfortable with the essential but ultimately insufficient materialism of "earning and owning" than a politics of belonging and contribution. Immigration became the talisman for this failure. A shrunken, politically weakened and less cohesive white working class became deeply resentful of immigration in the later years of Labour rule.
There is some evidence that increased immigration exerted downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled workers, if not on their job prospects – although the wage effect appears small. But in the context of stagnant living standards, this can easily loom larger than the figures suggest. A scarcity of social housing, particularly in parts of London and the south-east, also generated tension.
Yet the visceral source of this anger was cultural: a sense that a way of life was under threat, and that claims for esteem, value and recognition were ignored by culturally detached politicians. Viewed through this lens, it is easier to appreciate why hostility to immigration spans the social classes. The sense of a national community losing hold over its identity was not confined to those feeling economic threat.
None of this is to contend that immigration was decisive for Labour's defeat at the election – it wasn't; but it certainly was a major issue on which the party performed badly, across all voting groups.
It is quite wrong to suggest that high immigration was some vast conspiracy to bring in Labour voters and keep the Tories out of power – this is to massively overstate the ability of governments to affect immigration levels. It is right that immigration must be controlled, which is why Labour was right to introduce the points-based system for managing migration. But the test of immigration policy should be whether it maximises the benefits of migration while minimising the costs, not whether it delivers some particular level of immigration. The current government may be about to learn this the hard way.
The dilemma the government faces is well illustrated by the current debate about student migration, explored in a report published today by IPPR. Under pressure from Migration Watch and others to drastically reduce net migration, the Conservatives set themselves a target of reducing the figure from "hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands" a year.
It is understandable perhaps that after years of booming immigration they wanted to tell the British people that they would bring numbers down. But in order to meet this arbitrary target they are being forced to take measures which will harm the UK. The government is using the fact that some student visas are abused, and that a small minority of students add to the long-term population of the UK, to justify drastic cuts in international student numbers, driven by its overall target to reduce net migration. This will damage one of the UK's most successful export sectors – education – and will cost the country billions.
Ironically, it will also have only a short-term effect on net migration, as the vast majority of foreign students leave the country after a few years anyway. So yes, student migration has been high in recent years. But on what basis is a large temporary population of international students bringing billions into the country and helping to boost the UK's international reputation a cause for alarm?
Both the government and Labour must be wary of being drawn into a dead-end debate about numbers. It would be much more useful to hear politicians engaging with the real impacts (both good and bad) of migration.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario