The FishTank

There’s a certain irony in the role immigration is playing in this election. In 2005, the Conservatives politicked heavily on the subject, confirming the public opinion that they were still ‘the nasty party’ and losing the election as a result. This time, when Cameron’s new Conservatism is playing the subject down, it seems to be second only to the fiscal crisis on people’s priorities. And with the bigot-gate scandal spilling across the web this afternoon, clearly it’s an issue that will continue to garner headlines across the next week.

Interestingly, immigration is also an issue where the parties’ positions are recognisably distinct. Labour has gone for an Australian-style points system which, they claim, has already paid dividends in lowering migration. The Conservatives, whilst accepting this system, want to go further and impose an overall cap on numbers each year. The Lib Dems, seemingly trying to come up with a policy they can announce nationally and yet still play differently from seat to seat, have proposed a strange system of internal immigration barriers. Which one of these will work? Let’s take a look.

We’ll start with the existing problem. Nobody, with the exception of UKIP and the BNP, is against immigration per se. We all recognise our nation’s historic role as a destination for the world’s oppressed and the role this has played in attracting and exploiting talented individuals whose light could otherwise have been hidden under some foreign bushel. However, nobody except for knee-jerk liberals believes that the numbers should be completely unchecked. Had we kept the post-war policy of an automatic right to settlement for all citizens of the Commonwealth, our population density could now be higher than Hong Kong’s, we could be having to import any food that couldn’t be grown on a window ledge and people wouldn’t be talking about concreting over the green belt so much as concreting over the concrete. Unlimited migration is not sustainable. The perception is that immigration in recent years has been too much. There is a debate over how much of this was avoidable (or even intentional), whether we should have staged the admission of EU accession countries, whether migration from outside the EU constitutes a greater or smaller proportion of the total, but that people feel the current levels are unsustainable is an absolute fact, no matter if you do call them bigots when you think the microphone is off.

There is, therefore, a question of how much migration is sustainable. This isn’t an easy number to quantify, but it depends on what the immigrants can offer us, what we can offer them and – and it isn’t racist to feel this – how much immigration the existing population can comfortably accept. This last does matter, not simply because of feelings of racial or cultural tension, but because crowded residential areas lead to social tension. It’s why the high-density housing of the 1960’s failed; it’s why there were race riots in the 1980’s and it’s why the BNP are gaining seats in areas where people feel crowded out by an endless stream of new arrivals. Unfortunately, as I say, it’s very difficult to ascertain how much immigration is politically acceptable, but since tensions were lower in the past, it is theoretically possible to crunch the numbers and come up with a rough estimate. It’s not a good way to do it – which is why the Conservatives won’t answer the direct question on how much their cap should be – but taken with an objective analysis of the benefits and costs of immigration it can produce a figure.

Looking to the easily quantifiable issues, what the immigrants can offer us is the one most often addressed. Immigrants, we are told, take jobs that our people will not fill, whether because they are considered demeaning or demanding. Apart from roles in the NHS, this often implies unskilled work such as cleaning, waiting tables or hotel work. Two problems arise with this: the first is that the jobs being unskilled makes a mockery of any kind of points system. Clearly, if we say that anyone who can operate a squeegee will have enough points to enter the country we end up with a system where nobody is rejected. The second problem is that we have a great many people of working age who are wilfully economically inactive. Some of these people are hidden in the statistics by reclassifying them as disabled – about half of the disabled have been written off because of stress, for example – but even ignoring the reclassified there are still a great many people choosing to live on benefits rather than work. Welfare reform is therefore a key part of immigration reform: remove the luxury of choice from those capable but not desirous of work and you don’t need immigrants to fill unskilled roles; the points system begins to work.

But the points system also fails to address another problem. Some degree of our immigration comes not from those who come here to work, but from those who come with them. Our current immigration policy does not discriminate against people with dependents, which means that we can easily take in a whole family for the price of one. A fairer system would mark dependents down against an immigrant’s total: most households in this country include two working adults, so it would not be unfair to expect an immigrant family to have the same in order to fund the extra burden on the state of any children they may bring with them. Since immigrant children present particular problems – multi-lingual schooling, culturally aware healthcare and suchlike – recognising their impact in the points system is both logical and reasonable. After all, what are the points for if not to establish whether someone is a net benefit to our society?

What we can offer immigrants falls into two distinct issues. The first is direct service provision. A one percent increase in population will, broadly speaking, require a one percent increase in public sector workforce to service it. This isn’t a problem if either some of these immigrants become public sector workers or at least generate enough tax revenue to pay for them. It is the second issue which leads to the sense of burden on services – capital provision.

To explain: if we have a one percent increase in children due to immigration this will leave us with a requirement to educate an extra one percent. Even if these children are already English-speaking and thus create no complications, that still means either an increase in class-sizes or an increase in the number of classes. If the former is undesirable or impractical, the latter is more expensive – because it requires the building of new schools. Clearly if a whole swathe of people suddenly turn up expecting a new school or hospital before having contributed a penny in tax money it presents a significant problem.

And this is where the issue of some kind of hard limit matters. If we say we will accept any people with skills or education above a certain level then, unless we are racist enough to assume the world outside is full of idiots, that still constitutes a great many potential immigrants. And, as long as our economic and political conditions look better than those at home, they will come. In fact, Labour’s much-trumpeted reduction in immigration is more likely due to the recession than to any deliberate government policy (unless Labour are now claiming the recession was deliberate). The Lib Dem idea of controlling where people go inside the country is an attempt to deal with areas suffering particular pressure, but because it controls where they work rather than where they live it does nothing to mitigate the impact on services – and that’s even if it could be made to work. The reason it works in countries like Canada or Australia is because these are highly nucleated societies, comprised mainly of large cities with great distances between them. If you tell someone they can only work in Quebec then they’re hardly going to commute from Vancouver.

And there is another problem with the Lib Dem policy, which is this: even if can ensure that people only live and work in areas that can sustain them it still leaves the question of how you determine where you want them to live and work. If we are saying that we don’t want people to keep coming to London, but send them to Liverpool then what we are – in effect – saying is that we are imposing a cap at a regional level. Since it stands to reason that Liverpool, Leeds or wherever else will not be able to absorb people ad infinitum this policy must, of necessity, be dynamic – it must be updated to restrict people in each area as they absorb what they can. Which means that what the Lib Dems are proposing is actually a cap. They aren’t giving figures, but then that’s what they say about the Conservatives. And given that the Lib Dem proposals have been condemned as unworkable what we are left with is a default position where the Conservative view – points, welfare reform and an adaptive immigration cap – is the only one that can possibly work.

Finally, beside immigration is the often conflated problem of illegal immigration and asylum. Much has been made of the prison-like centres in which failed asylum seekers are held. Much also has been made of the number of illegal immigrants in the country. It is not unreasonable to state, however, that if we didn’t hold failed asylum seekers prior to deportation the number of illegal immigrants at large would only increase as they disappeared into our society. The best we can do here is to make the system both fast and transparent. Fast, because we then wouldn’t need to hold people; transparent, because if people were aware of what grounds would lead to their rejection they’d be less likely to come here and fail in the first place. Finally, on illegal immigration, it’s tempting to accept Lib Dem policy as a humane and practical solution to a thorny problem. Unfortunately, the experience of other countries suggests that amnesties lead only to further increases in illegal immigration. Some countries have had many amnesties and the problem still remains. The Lib Dems point to their ten year criterion, but riddle me this: if someone has entered this country entirely illegally – and I mean smuggled in rather than failed to leave when their visa expired – how are you supposed to know whether they’ve been here for ten years or not? If someone tells you they’ve been here for ten years and can’t prove it, what then? Do you expect them to register and come back in another ten years? If you didn’t and you gave them the benefit of the doubt then you might as well dispose of the precondition in its entirety. It may not fit with the touchy-feely politics of the age and it may be the kind of thing that makes an unguarded politician mutter bigot, but the truth is that sometimes you do have to take a hard line to deal with a perceived problem – even if that does get you regarded as the nasty party.