The case for (controlled) immigration

There is a pinch of heroism in every immigrant journey

Immigration – controlled, legal immigration – can bring advantages to the destination state. That sentiment is often trotted out as kind of obligatory throat-clearing before a politician goes on to call for restrictions, a neat example of the Everything-Before-The-But-Is-Bullshit hermeneutic rule (“I am the first to say that I recognise the benefits of successive immigrants from the Huguenots onwards, but there comes a moment when we reach saturation point…”)

Except that it isn’t bullshit; at least, it needn’t be. Immigration can be either good or bad, depending on how it is managed. Unrestricted, unplanned settlement is usually disastrous. I remember a truly idiotic argument that Leftie columnists and Labour MPs used to trot out in the late 1990s about how Britain had always been a nation of immigrants: Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans and so on. Perfectly true – and every one of those waves of immigration brought calamity to the existing population.

Legal immigration is a different phenomenon. It involves admitting particular individuals in agreed numbers, generally in response to an identified shortage or need. Human capital is the most valuable resource in any economy and, by and large, the people who have the energy to leave everything behind for an unknown country are the kind of people who will boost their new home’s GDP. Planned immigration allows the host government to avoid the formation of cultural or linguistic ghettos, and regulates the net influx so that infrastructure can keep pace.

A museum has just opened in Antwerp in the old warehouse through which more than two million emigrants, including Einstein and Irving Berlin, passed between 1873 and 1934 on their way to North America with the Red Star Line. The display manages to convey the vastness of the population movement without losing the scale of the individual families.

Here, for example, is the record of a Jewish woman from Ukraine, bringing her children to join their father in the United States after eight years. On arrival, her youngest child, an eight-year-old girl, was refused entry because she was suffering from an eye disease. The mother had to decide whether to take the entire family back across the Atlantic, or to divide it. She chose the latter course, and the eight-year-old returned to Antwerp alone. Two years later, having been cared for in the mean time by a Jewish charity, she crossed again, only to be stopped a second time by immigration officers: there were still traces of infection. Only when she was 14, on her third attempt, was she allowed to rejoin her family.

Every migration involves courage – often a quiet and unremarked heroism. We know it better than many peoples: the Anglosphere became the first global civilization, and English the first global language, largely as a result of massive migratory flows.

“Every immigrant,” as Ronald Reagan put it in a characteristically upbeat phrase, “makes America more American.” The reason that immigration worked in the United States was precisely that it was regulated and controlled. The little girl with the eye infection was by no means unusual. In a country that was hungry for labour, there was scant interest in absorbing those who would be unable to work. Other restrictions, at various times, covered literacy, political opinions (Americans had no intention of importing trade union agitators) and nationality, so that the ethnic balance of the United States should not be upset.

That’s the quid pro quo which people demand in exchange for agreeing to a measure of settlement. Most of my constituents would accept some inward migration – provided that Britain was free to decide whom to admit, on what terms and in what numbers.

The last Labour ministry systematically destroyed any such sense. One of its very first acts on assuming office was to reverse the rule that you could bring your spouse into Britain only if the marriage was genuine, and had not been contracted primarily for the purpose of immigration. At the same time, asylum applications were allowed to spiral. Almost no effort was made to deport those who had been ordered to leave.

Result? Net inward migration rose from 50,000 in 1997 to 250,000 in 2000. Over the lifetime of the last Labour government, nearly four million people settled in the UK. We lost the sense that we could admit whom we wanted (Islamist preachers are no easier to deport than Polish nannies), on what terms (attempts to restrict welfare claims by foreign nationals are struck down by the EU), or in what numbers (despite a declining birthrate, our population will grow by the equivalent of three Waleses over the next 25 years).

The current government has radically changed course, issuing fewer work permits, closing down bogus colleges, enforcing repatriation orders, expelling hate preachers and, now, limiting welfare entitlements for EU migrants, whatever Brussels says. The trouble is that it will take years to restore the sense that we control our borders. In Australia and Canada, managed immigration rests on popular consent: people understand that there are rules, and that those rules are generally followed. Newcomers consequently feel proud to have arrived, which facilitates assimilation. Still, look on the bright side: we’ll be able to do the same once we leave the EU.

Incidentally, do visit the Red Star Museum if you get the chance. Long-standing readers will know that I love the handsome towns of Flanders, and Antwerp is the grandest of them all. The place was under socialist administration for a century, but had the good sense to elect Bart De Wever, the ablest politician in Belgium, as its mayor last year. Seriously, go. As the Michelin Guide would say, vaut le voyage.