The media have stoked up fear of immigration, writes Paul Donovan, and politicians of both parties have failed to handle the problem effectively.
Lurid immigration front pages sell papers,” said a fellow journalist, who had just joined the Daily Express. This was years ago, when I asked how he could join such a paper when it ran so many asylum scare stories. The response was dispiriting: every time an asylum front page was run, sales increased. The argument was difficult to refute in economic terms but when it comes to the other roles of the media, such as to educate and inform, it represented a clear failure.
So today, having just voted to leave the EU primarily on the premise of the need to reduce immigration, it can be argued that Britain has reaped what it has sown. The consequences could be dire for a country with skill shortages in vital areas and an ageing population, needing a significant inflow of migrant labour every year to retain its standards of living. This positive side of immigration has failed to register in public consciousness as a result of the way the subject has been covered in the media.
I don’t claims everything about migration is positive. Over the past 20 years it has been badly handled by successive governments. Labour allowed migrants from EU accession countries to enter the UK with few controls. There were no minimum standards of pay, terms or conditions of work, so migrant labour could come in and undercut the indigenous workforce. The failure to set and enforce minimum standards meant that migration effectively became an incomes policy to keep wages down. This bred resentment – many of the problems today could have been avoided had those minimum standards been enforced. Migrants should also have been encouraged to join unions, and revenues generated from the migrant workforce should have been used for public services, including importantly housing provision.
Politicians have also failed to sell the benefits of migration. The government’s own figures show a net migration of 250,000 a year boosts annual GDP by 0.5%. This means more jobs and tax revenues, more funding for schools and hospitals and a lower deficit. Many jobs created over recent years have been done by migrants, with figures from the Office of National Statistics showing that three quarters of employment growth for the year to August 2015 being accounted for by non-UK citizens. So the economic boom, pre Brexit vote, was largely migrant driven.
Migrants also tend to be younger, contributing more tax than they consume in public services; the majority leave before they get old enough to become more reliant. According to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, migrants contribute 64% more in taxes than they take out in benefits. A study by University College London found that EU migrants made a net contribution of £20 billion to UK finances between 2000 and 2011, while the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said that since 2011, foreign students had contributed more than £14 billion to the economy.
These are facts you won’t find in much of the media, which seems determined to present a totally negative view of migration. Most tabloids will print that a migrant has committed a crime on the front page, sending a subliminal message: migrant equals criminal. There is also negative coverage of ‘migrants on benefits’. What’s lacking is any balancing good news: taxes migrants pay to the exchequer, the huge benefits flowing to the education sector, diversity, the positive stories of migrant workers contributing to our health, education and social services. This means many readers have a totally negative view of immigrants.
During the EU referendum campaign, the BBC’s Mark Easton got together old and young voters in Eastbourne. The concern of many in the older group was migration, yet they lived in a town where care homes, hospitals and services were propped up by migrant labour. The disconnect between perception and reality was breathtaking.
Nationwide there is ludicrous hostility to migrants in areas where very few actually live. Clacton elected UKIP MP Douglas Carswell on that party’s anti-migrant ticket, yet the number of migrant workers in that town is low. Comparatively, in London, where many of the migrant workers who come to the UK live and work, anti-migrant sentiment is lower.
The result of a public debate on immigration driven by a media trying to sell product and pander to racism in the process has been to poison the public well on the subject, so the starting point for any discussion on migration is the reduction of numbers. Success on migration is apparently to be judged according to how many migrants can be stopped from coming to the UK.
The Tory government has not helped by setting unachievable targets of cutting migration to the 10,000s, then palpably failing to get anywhere near that target. The only way migration will decline is if the economy plunges into recession – then there will be fewer jobs for migrants to come here to do. And this is where another one of our media myths kicks in. The total misrepresentation of the immigration question has led to a public perception that migrants come here to get benefits, not work.
The reality is different: most come here to work. If there is no work because the British economy has bombed then there will be fewer migrants – the archetypal perfect storm.
Those of us who work in the media have to question the role played by our sector in totally failing to represent a balanced, informative picture of migration. Newspapers have helped build the anti-migrant atmosphere that exploded following the EU vote to leave, but the broadcast media have also played their part. The wobbling lid that has been kept on anti-migrant racism over recent years has blown off revealing a particularly ugly side of society. Responsibility for much of the violent racist incidents seen on our streets resides in the editor’s offices up and down the land. Politicians too have been complicit in creating this situation.
Our responsibility now is to repel that anti-migrant racism. One way is to start telling a more positive story about migrants, not the lopsided hysterical view that may sell papers but also has pernicious consequences. The media has a duty to report the good news on immigration, and politicians must join that discussion. The politicians, too, must stop migrant labour being used to undercut indigenous workers and encourage them to join unions. They must also use the revenues generated by migrant labour to provide services that migrants and the wider community need and deserve – including housing. It is late to be making these moves with the racist genie already out of the bottle, but a start has to be made, otherwise we will all be staring into a particularly unpleasant looking abyss.