KENAN MALIK Forget all that hoohah about benefit
tourists. From 1st of May, Britain will welcome with open arms anyone from
the new EU countries who wants to work here. Why? Because it's good for the
economy. So why not lay out the welcome mat for the rest of the world, too?
SUKE WOLTON What is the reason we have too few
houses in Britain? It's because we have too few builders at the moment. What
is the reason that we don't have enough NHS resources at the moment? Well
we have too few NHS workers. It's true. We do not have enough doctors, we
do not have enough nurses. Everybody's crying out for plumbers at the moment.
We do not have enough people in Britain. That's the reason that everybody's
complaining that we don't have these things... It's not that we don't have
the things we want; it's that we don't have the people to
make the things that we need.
KENAN MALIK Suke Wolton, tutor in politics at
Regents College, Oxford. It's not the economy, stupid, it's the people. We
haven't got enough of them. So let's open the door and let them all in. But
whatever happened to the idea that it's the job of a government to decide
who we want in the country and how many?
SUKE WOLTON I think it's one of those things
which it's a mistake to pretend that you could master it. Nobody says, 'Oh
we're going to master the stock market today, oh we're going to have it clear
that the FTSE index is going to stay in a certain way.' Nobody would be so
foolish. I think the same has to be said about immigration controls.
There are two ways of looking at factors that affect immigration and they've
been broadly sort of identified as well as pull factors and push factors -
push factors being things that affect people in their country of origin and
why they might move; pull factors being what happens here in Britain and how
that affects whether people move and stuff. All studies so far that have been
done on how migration is affected have shown that pull factors are minimal
in terms of actually affecting whether people come to Britain or not. The
only thing that is important really in terms of people's migration is the
economy and the state of the job market
KENAN MALIK For all the bitter debates about
immigration and asylum, no one disputes the idea that we should control the
flow of people into this country. No one, that is, apart from a few brave
souls who want to think the unthinkable and scrap controls altogether. Are
they mad? No, they say, not only is controlling immigration impossible but
also undesirable. Nigel Harris, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University
College London.
NIGEL HARRIS The world is moving towards a single
economy, a single world economy, that means in theoretical terms integration
of capital and trade and ultimately labour. Governments at the moment control
the borders and they're trying to accommodate the
need for increased mobility through increased regulation. What that means
is when Britain needs more software programmers, they set a particular target
and invite people to come into the country. They can't possibly predict in
that field any more than they can in any other field what demand is likely
to be. The result of that was that
they caught... just as the numbers were increasing, the dotcom boom collapsed.
There were a whole lot of people who came in and were stranded or had to go
out and so on. So I don't believe governments can plan labour demand and so
they can't operate a regulatory system.
KENAN MALIK Are you not placing great faith
in the ability of the free market to regulate labour flows?
NIGEL HARRIS Certainly more than I invest in
governments. I mean those are the two options, aren't they - either governments
or free markets - and between that the free market is much better than governments
in regulating labour supply and demand.
KENAN MALIK The debate about whether of not
there should be an open door to immigrants is not a debate between left and
right. On the one side, we find free marketers holding hands with campaigners
for immigration rights in demanding the freedom of movement across borders.
On the other side, you may find conservatives, left wing activists and, of
course, racists all making the case for tighter curbs on immigration. The
critics of the open door seem to have not just public opinion but commonsense
on their side. After all, the state may not be very good at matching labour
supply and demand. But do we really want to leave it all to the market?
GEOFF DENCH I think the impact would be really
quite devastating because I'm sure from the contacts that I've had, the research
I've done that there are absolutely millions of people who would want to come
in and would be prepared to live in a very low standard of living in order
to be here and have a chance to live here, and that this would create tremendous
conflicts and difficulties with the labour market.
ANDREW SIMMS I think the argument for complete
open borders would be the argument for a complete free market per se. It would
be the argument that there should be no barriers to the movement of either
trade or finance or people. I personally think, given the state that the world
is in and given the great disparities that exist within the world, that if
you did that it would be a recipe for chaos.
KENAN MALIK Geoff Dench of the Institute of
Community Studies, based in East London, and Andrew Simms of the New Economics
Foundation. The logic of their argument seems indisputable. Open the door
to everyone and everyone will walk in. So how does Nigel Harris respond?
NIGEL HARRIS Well that's a reasonable fear.
But you ask the same question about internally - what is to stop people coming
to London. Nothing. people come into London and leave without restriction.
The same would in principle be true in the world...
KENAN MALIK But the wage differential between
Beijing and London is far greater than a wage differential between Manchester
and London, so would not it be more likely that say Chinese cocklepickers
come to Britain because even if they're only earning a pound a day, as it's
been alleged, they're still earning more than they would back home?
NIGEL HARRIS Yes, yes, that's the correct point
except that the costs of getting here are so high that people by and large
can't do it. I mean leave aside the fact that the overwhelming majority of
people don't want to leave their homes, even though you would think on the
face of it they ought to want to leave their homes because their homes are
so awful. And the real value of what they earn here is vastly increased when
they go home. But in fact the overwhelming majority of people don't want to
move and, even more, they don't have the costs of moving, so moving from China
to Britain is such an extraordinarily fraught and expensive operation that
relatively few people do it.
KENAN MALIK These days the cost of a Easyjet
fare will take you from Budapest to Luton, and it's not much more to fly in
from Beijing. Immigration only becomes expensive when it's illegal and you
have to pay traffickers to smuggle you across borders. Make all immigration
legal and it becomes dirt cheap. Of course, immigrants suffer more than simply
a financial burden. They have to leave their family behind, uproot themselves
from all that is familiar, often facing hostility in their new country. This
is why, in relative terms, very few people actually migrate. Nevertheless,
the idea that high cost will stop people coming through an open door seems
a bit of a hit and hope policy. Supporters of open borders argue, though,
that it's when you impose controls that you create the problems of mass influx.
Suke Wolton.
SUKE WOLTON If the borders were more open people
would be able to go back and forth more easily and they would be able to say,
'No this is not a good situation, this is too much hardship', or 'I would
rather be with my family', or 'I've done some... I've been here for a harvest,
I've been here for a particular season, I won't stay the winter, I'll go home.'
We have a situation now which once people have risked their lives to enter
into a country and then risked their constant discovery finding work, they're
in a position of extreme vulnerability and they can be easily exploited. But
they also dare not go home. Whereas if we did the opposite and had the border
more permeable and people able to travel backwards and forwards, we could
have a situation where people are able to assess what the situation is, perhaps
work for a few months, then go back, then come back again, come back you know
and decide for themselves which country they want to be a citizen as a positive
decision rather than as one which they have to do because there's no other
way round it.
KENAN MALIK The evidence suggests she's right.
In the 1950s many immigrants to Britain were single men who expected to return
home to their families within a few years. When the government decided to
impose controls - the first immigration act came into force in 1962 - there
was a surge of people trying to get in before the door closed. And temporary
migrants had little choice but to settle here and bring their families over.
In America, millions of Mexican agricultural workers who had migrated with
the seasons were forced to settle permanently (and illegally) when the US
government imposed
controls on their movement. But what about the impact on local workers? Uncontrolled
immigration must surely make it more difficult for locals to find jobs. And
if employers have a constant supply of cheap labour, it must force down wages
of British workers. Not so, says Nigel Harris.
NIGEL HARRIS There were up to two hundred econometric
studies done in the United States in different localities at different times
in order to try to detect whether there was a decline in wages or an increase
in unemployment of native workers as a result of a significant inflow of immigrants
and in general they could find no trace whatsoever. And that is because the
immigrants are moving into the jobs that the native workers won't do. They're
not competing. Of course that's not true all the way through - the software
programmers are competing, the doctors are competing - but in terms of unskilled
workers, which is where many of the fears are expressed, they aren't competing.
Furthermore, the immigrants are doing jobs which are necessary for the productivity
of higher skilled workers to be realised. If there aren't porters and cleaners
and laundry workers and all the rest of it, the hospital breaks down and the
doctors and nurses can't do their work.
KENAN MALIK This might seem counterintuitive
but it appears to be empirically watertight. A Home Office study published
last year concluded that 'the perception that immigrants take away jobs from
the existing population, or that immigrants depress wages of exiting workers,
do not confirmation in the analysis of the data.' Indeed, Andrew Simms of
the New Economics Foundation suggests that without immigration, local workers
and communities would in fact be worse off.
ANDREW SIMMS Our research and a lot of other
research shows that people who come to this country display much greater entrepreneurial
flair. So even if they begin by doing the dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs,
there's a lot of evidence to show that new immigrants to Britain display huge
amounts of energy and initiative and go on to make much larger contributions
to the wider economy. Where first or second generation immigrants in this
country are active in the local economy, you're seeing increases in the level
of average wages in those areas and you're seeing increases in the
general availability of employment opportunities and jobs. So actually there's
a huge lot of myths that we have to shoot down. That there is a kind of one
for one substitution of jobs with people coming in with people already living
here that is simply not the case as we've already said. Immigrants coming
to this country are doing jobs that otherwise simply would not get done on
the one hand and, on the other hand, because of the way that they are on the
front line of breathing life back into communities that otherwise are very
often dying, they're actually bringing new opportunities.
KENAN MALIK But why don't local workers want
to take the jobs that immigrants eventually fill? It's true that by European
standards Britain has a low unemployment rate. There are nevertheless a million
people on the dole, a figure we used to consider as high. Geoff Dench of the
Institute of Community Studies.
GEOFF DENCH If you use immigration to solve
the problem of filling jobs that people don't want to do, you create throughout
the economic system an incentive not to take certain jobs seriously, just
to regard them as things that can be done by people coming in from outside.
And this doesn't solve the problem because those people then come in. They're
rightly, treated as full citizens with choice of what they want to do themselves.
And their children won't want to do those jobs, so that you're setting yourself
into a position where you constantly need new immigrants in order to balance
your economy and I think that the overall indirect effects of this are very
harmful to the economy.
KENAN MALIK In effect you're suggesting that
the kinds of jobs to which migrants are attracted now could easily be filled
by local workers, yet we know that migrants are attracted to Britain precisely
because locals don't fill those jobs. So are you suggesting that local workers
should be forced to fill the jobs they don't want to do?
GEOFF DENCH It's not a matter of forcing people.
I think it's more a matter of restoring some sense that these jobs are important;
and if they're seen as important, then there are local people who are not
working who would do them. What is needed is much more sense that all jobs
are important in the economy and maybe they need different conditions of work,
different levels of payment, different this or that, but they're all important
and that there is a sense in which respect is owing to all of the people who
play a part in the system. I think that this is what’s gone wrong.
KENAN MALIK Respect is certainly important.
But can it really be bought by excluding immigrants? Any more, for instance,
than we can turn cleaning into a respected male profession by banning women
from the workforce? The fact that immigrants are usually forced to take low
status jobs does not mean that without immigrants all jobs would be high status.
Yes, we need to improve work conditions for those at the bottom. But there
can be no denying Britain's need for immigrant labour. Take construction.
The trade magazine Building estimates that the industry needs 80,000
new workers a year, largely to replace people who are retiring. There are
currently 500,000 vacancies in the South East alone. Yet, only 18,500 apprentices
are coming through every year. Even a coercive workfare system under which
the unemployed are frogmarched from the dole office to the building site will
not make up the shortfall. Many employers, on the other hand, like the current
regime of immigration controls, because it gives them a large pool of illegal
workers upon which to draw. Workers, in other words, without rights or protection.
The answer to these problems, many argue, is for the government to manage
migration in a more active fashion. Sarah Spencer is Director of Policy research
at Oxford University’s Centre on Migration, and an advisor to a number
of government committees.
SARAH SPENCER The challenge for government is
to create legal channels which first of all ensure that anyone who has a human
right to come, can come - that we don't divide families, that we provide protection
to people facing persecution - and, secondly,
legal channels which match labour migrants to the job vacancies: the skill
vacancies that we have and the vacancies for low-skilled jobs, so that the
people who are coming in can move into jobs and make an economic and social
contribution. If the controls are too tight, then there will be huge incentives
for people to come and stay illegally. If the controls are not there at all,
if we had open borders, then more people would come than there were jobs to
go around and that would create tensions on the ground, so the trick in managing
migration is to try and get that balance right.
KENAN MALIK Who could possibly argue with that?
Except that if the legal channels were broad enough to allow anyone to enter
who wished to, it would effectively be an open door. If they were narrow enough
to exclude many potential immigrants, it would require heavy policing and
recreate the problem of illegals. That's the dilemma of managed migration.
Sarah Spencer again.
SARAH SPENCER Any government which offers the
public perfection, which suggests that it control numbers absolutely is only
going to disappoint and further sap public confidence in the government's
ability to manage migration in their interests. Migration is inherently anarchic,
if you like. The best that a government can offer is that it will seek to
manage migration through many different policy levers, including enforcement,
in order to channel it where it’s going to do most good and create the
least difficulties.
KENAN MALIK The government has taken such ideas
seriously enough to set up a Managed Migration Section in the Home Office.
David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University, isn't impressed.
DAVID COLEMAN I don't think that a managed migration
policy is really feasible in the way that the government envisages it for
all sorts of reasons - the main one being that I think that a managed migration
policy is a kind of verbal improvement over a migration situation which is
not properly under... under control. I think that the general issue of relatively
rapid growth of populations of foreign origin is one which is troubling all
of Europe to varying degrees and not just Britain. I think it's a problem
for a variety of
reasons. It's a problem because some of those populations bring with them
very distinct cultural habits which create difficulties for themselves and
for any welfare state in which they are situated - I'm thinking of large family
size, of low workforce participation, of low levels of education and all of
that. That is more a question of immigrants rather than of people born in
Britain, although obviously the numbers are so large it gets transmitted to
the second and third generation in Britain and also throughout Europe where
these problems are quite widespread.
KENAN MALIK The debate about the economic benefits
of migration, David Coleman suggests, misses the point.
DAVID COLEMAN I think given that I feel that
the economic benefits of migration are marginal... then it is indeed the social
and demographic dimension which is important. There are no benefits accruing
to population growth or population size it is quite clear looking at all the
different populations of western Europe. This is by British historical standards
a very large increase indeed.
KENAN MALIK The net inflow of people into Britain
last year was around 150,000. That doesn't sound to me such a great number
in a population of 60 million. It would comfortably fit into two Millennium
stadia. So why are you so worried by it?
DAVID COLEMAN A hundred and fifty thousand,
it seems to me, is a very large number indeed it means that you have to build
effectively a city the size of Oxford every year to accommodate the additional
population. And this is very big news indeed. It would not take very long
at that rate to cover the greater part of the South East of the country where
of course the majority of immigrants go to live there not going to the highlands
of Scotland they are not going to Northern Ireland. It'll make the Southern
part of the country very, very powerfully overcrowded and, quite independently
of issues of culture, simply in terms of numbers it is something which no
one planned for, no one intended, from which no good consequences will come
and which will produce some really very serious problems indeed for the whole
of the appearance and structure of the Southern part of the country.
SUKE WOLTON I have heard this before. I have
always found it difficult to understand because every time I take a plane
anywhere and I look down on Britain all I can see is green and there's just
lots of green. So I don't really see the preoccupation with Britain being
overcrowded.
KENAN MALIK Suke Wolton.
SUKE WOLTON I think there is a problem with
lack of housing, but then I think that's largely been caused by lack of having
builders. I think actually we've got lack of people that are able to do the
things that we need being done. We need the people in order to have the resources
in hospitals, we need the teachers to be able to teach in the schools. It's
these sort of workers that we lack so crucially at the moment and if we don't
have more people then we cant do those and that is when we feel tight and
that's when we feel overburdened.
KENAN MALIK What do you say to those people
who say that if you had increased immigration, continued population growth,
what you'll have is more overcrowding in inner cities, more congestion, etc.
It will reduce the quality of life, the quality of life is bad enough as it
is. If we increase the population, it will deteriorate even further.
SUKE WOLTON If that were the case then we'd
have people coming to us saying you can't possibly live in the city centre
of London. But the city centre of London has the highest property prices,
so evidently people do want to live in the city centre of London. If you thought
that living in a place which was crowded was awful, then surely nobody would
want to live in New York or Manhattan? I just don't see any evidence for saying
that we don't like living next door to somebody.
KENAN MALIK There's a difference, of course,
between living cheek by jowl in Mayfair or Manhattan and living cheek by jowl
in Bethnal Green or Brooklyn. And that's the problem of continued large scale
immigration: not so much an overcrowded island, as the concentration of newcomers
in areas which have the greatest problems with a lack of resources. The dilemma
of an open door immigration policy is that people can be a burden as well
as a benefit. There's no guarantee, even if we welcome thousands of new builders
into Britain, that new houses will be built. That takes political will, as
well as people. But, then, if we were less obsessed with stopping people coming
in, perhaps we could think more clearly about the kinds of policies needed
to make life better for those already here: policies to increase house building,
provide the right kinds of training and ease integration. For Geoff Dench,
though, the costs of immigration will always be too great.
GEOFF DENCH I think it's impossible to run a
country properly unless you give some reward and some stake for loyalty to
the system. The elite denies really that there is any such thing as national
legitimacy, that there is a country that has got a heritage of interests and
people and their antecedents have worked within it and have some legitimate
stake in it. And I think it’s this denial that there is any sort of
national stake that ordinary people themselves feel that creates the biggest
misunderstandings between ordinary people and the government at the moment.
KENAN MALIK Are you saying that the problem
isn't immigration as such but the fact that immigrants are accorded the same
rights as everybody else in the country to housing, to jobs and so on?
GEOFF DENCH Yes, I mean that does make a tremendous
difference because it means that there are all sorts of extra incentives for
them to come. They're not coming in the way that migrants would have done
a few generations ago - to really struggle for a few years to start building
up a small stake in the country themselves so that they can bring people in
- and this was what brought out the strongest contributions from immigrants
to the country and indeed to other countries. But if they can come and immediately
get access to the resources on a basis of equality with other people, then
this tremendously increases both their motivation to come and the tensions
with people whose families have been living here for a long time afterwards.
KENAN MALIK Would you argue then for a two-tier
employment system, welfare system and so on?
GEOFF DENCH It's very difficult to do that.
Once you've got a welfare state to have different... different grades of citizens
and all of the various discriminations that arise from that, especially given
that the majority of the people coming will be racially different from the
people who are already here, I mean of itself is likely a thing to promote
all sorts of conflicts. And I think it in many ways is better to think in
terms of trying to limit the volume of movement at any time, have a continuous
flow in all directions but not to have a massive flow at any time because
it's the volume of the flow, I think, that creates the problems.
KENAN MALIK It's true that many people feel
they have no stake in the system. A disenchantment that runs particularly
deep within many white working class communities, the kind of communities
Geoff Dench wishes to defend. But can one really build a sense of inclusion
simply by excluding others? After all, pre-immigration Britain wasn't
exactly a working class paradise. David Coleman insists though that mass immigration
has transformed Britain for the worse.
DAVID COLEMAN I think generally speaking its
a problem of the rights of the ordinary people of Britain who've first of
all been promised time and time again that the situation would not develop
and it has. It is a question of the as it were dethronement of what they take
to be their national identity and their history - because, after all, there
are now substantially growing areas in many of our major cities which are
in some important respects rather more like foreign countries than those of
the ordinary English domestic scene. They're not parts of the country where
most English people will want to go.
KENAN MALIK Immigration has clearly brought
about major changes to this country, creating in some white communities a
well of resentment and a nostalgia for the old pre-immigration Britain. Yet,
even had Britain not been the destination for large scale immigration, British
society today would have been vastly different from that of half a century
ago. And there still would have been those for whom England had ceased to
be England. For whom increasingly large parts of the country had ceased to
be the kind of
country which they had been brought up in and in which they felt at home.
This is really not an argument against open door immigration specifically,
but against all large scale social change. And for Suke Wolton, there's more
than one way to change a society for the worse.
SUKE WOLTON If we step back and think well what
is it that we're trying to hold onto, what's important about being British,
well I can list lots of things that I hold to be important and are worth hanging
onto. I mean I suppose one of the most clear examples for me you can give
today is I would have thought that one of the things we should uphold in British
tradition is the right of habeas corpus, the right not to be detained
without trial. This is exactly what David Blunkett in the name of upholding
immigration controls has now taken away in Britain. That is a significant
change to our sense of what we mean to be British in terms of our rights to
freedom and I think it's very important that if we think that it's important
to be British that we uphold what is right, what we've learned about being
British - i.e. our upholding our right to be free - and we've just lost that.
KENAN MALIK The debate about open door immigration
is not about whether we want to hold onto certain values but which
ones? Control over borders or the protection of civil liberties? Continuity
in the social landscape or a dynamic economy? Open borders would be a leap
into the unknown, and might prove an open door to disaster. Controlling immigration
is the safe option. But we also know that it doesn't really work. Tens of
thousands of illegal immigrants still enter the country every year. Controlling
immigration is neither as easy nor as sensible as it might first appear; an
open door policy is not as outrageous as it might seem. Both embody different
visions of the kind of Britain in which we want to live. Both pose a raft
of practical problems. The trouble is, given our current obsession with keeping
people out, there's little chance of a reasoned discussion about which might
be better.