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What a funny way to control immigration

By Madeleine McDonagh                                                                                                             Daily Telegraph

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/10/2008

A repentant sinner is one thing; a wilful bloody amnesiac is quite another. It is into this latter category that the Government's new immigration minister, Phil Woolas, falls. He didn't take long to stick his head above the parapet after being appointed, did Mr W.

A couple of days ago, he was telling us that he wanted to see strict limits on immigration. As a result of the economic downturn, he said: "The question of immigration becomes extremely thorny… it's been too easy to get into this country and it's going to get harder." 

Oh, right. When migrants were granted citizenship or indefinite leave to remain, during the good times, was there no thought that things could, conceivably, one day, get worse? Funny basis on which to conduct a policy with lasting effects on people's lives. Anyway, Mr Woolas is emphatic that the population of Britain shouldn't exceed 70 million, as the present trajectory suggests it will.

It gets better. Mr Woolas, now well into his stride, says that employers shouldn't hire immigrants, in order to protect native Britons from unemployment. Employers who prefer to take on migrants because they are "ready, willing and able" to work need to hire the British jobless instead.

Oh yes? I can tell Mr Woolas for free that, in the Knightsbridge hairdressing salon that I frequent, they're not going to be giving the lovely, hard-working Magda from Gdansk the push in order to bolster the Government's ability to service the social benefits bill for the unemployed.

And by way of showing how very fierce and tough he is, Mr Woolas is presiding over the closure of a programme that last year allowed 105,000 unskilled temporary workers to come to work here for up to a year. Employers will still be able to hire some migrants in the short term. But the effect of the Government's crackdown has been precisely to restrict the kind of migrants the country needs.

As those of us who get up early enough to listen to Farming Today, or who have friends in farming, can tell Mr Woolas, this crackdown on temporary migrants has actually cut the number of workers that the British economy really does need. Britons can't and won't do the hands-on seasonal work on farms that the Ukrainians can - and the reasons for that deserve scrutiny. But if there aren't the eastern Europeans, the fruit-picking and the rest of it doesn't get done.

However, it's the sheer, unvarnished nerve of Mr Woolas that stands out. The one unambiguous legacy of the 11 years since 2007 has been the increase in immigration and the liberal way in which citizenship, and indefinite leave to remain, have been granted. Some 2.3 million people have come here between 1991 and 2006; only 8 per cent from EU accession states. Well over a million of them have been granted citizenship. Those are the ones we know about.

If the population trajectory of Britain is heading for 70 million, it is not just because of some mass migration movement almost beyond our control, such as climate change or swallows moving south. It is because of the Government's conscious, wilful, light regulatory touch on immigration.

What's more, the realities of the immigration debate have been obscured by the fact that ministers talk about net immigration rather than the overall numbers coming here - in other words, the number of people arriving minus the number of Britons who are leaving. In one way, this makes sense. It's the people actually resident in the country who make calls on schools, benefits and the health service. In another way, it obscures the fact that the ethnic and religious make-up of London, in particular, has changed beyond recognition in a decade. And that has an effect on what is fashionably called social cohesion - in other words, how we all rub along together.

Much of this happened during David Blunkett's tenure as Home Secretary - yep, he who is waiting in the wings for a recall - when he declared that there was "no obvious upper limit" to the extent of immigration. Neither he nor his successors seemed to think that, one day, the sun might not shine, the economy might contract, and their policy of giving nearly everyone who comes here the indefinite right to remain, rather than just a work permit, might look a bit short-sighted.

If we were talking about historic errors that are now acknowledged, Mr Woolas's about-turn - curiously, one that has not been echoed by his boss, Jacqui Smith - would be welcome. But we're set to make things worse. One of Tony Blair's proudest achievements in office was that he bullied the EU into accepting Turkey's candidacy for membership. In this, he was supported by the Tories.

Yet Turkey is a country with only three per cent of its land mass in Europe and a population of more than 80 million and rising. Let me spell out the consequences. Any EU citizen has the automatic right to live and work in other member states. The upshot is that eventually, several million Turks will, if the Government gets its way, be perfectly entitled to come to Britain. Will anyone bet me they won't?

So Mr Woolas wants to contain the population within 70 million, does he? You and whose army, Phil?