Comment

Britain isn’t ready for the coming immigration surge

By talking tough on immigration and repeatedly failing to deliver, the Tories are losing on all fronts. They need a coherent strategy

An RNLI vessel carrying migrants rescued in the English Channel

To read the Guardian or listen to trade union leaders, this Conservative government is a heartless, xenophobic – racist, even – regime which has slammed the door shut to the foreign citizens who could enrich our economy and culture. Labour and Gary Lineker all seem to agree that the current administration has built up the barbed wire around fortress Britain so high that net migration over the past year could well be over a million.

Was there ever a pre-election promise which went more spectacularly wrong than David Cameron’s pledge in 2010 to reduce net migration to “a few tens of thousands”? If you have voted Conservative at any point over the past 13 years because you wanted less migration, you must be feeling somewhat let down. The same is true of people who voted Brexit for similar reasons: the biggest myth peddled by the Leave side (there were plenty on the Remain side, too) was not the infamous £350 million figure on the side of the bus: it was the idea that Brexit would help bring migration under control.    

We have not seen such a loosening in modern times. We may have fewer Polish plumbers, but they have been more than replaced by other migrants – be they among the 480,000 students granted study visas in the year to last September, 249,000 granted work visas, the 160,000 Ukrainians invited to stay or the tens of thousands of asylum applicants from elsewhere.   

The very big political problem for the government is that it has ended up with the worst of all worlds. It has offended its more liberal supporters by talking tough on immigration, while offending those who worry it is a threat to public services and the standard of living. The former will no longer vote Tory because they don’t like the Rwanda scheme and other efforts to wave an angry paddle at migrants arriving in small boats; the latter because promises to limit migration have obviously failed. What has all that tough talk on illegal migration achieved? In the year to June 2022 we saw just 3,250 “enforced returns” of people who do not have a legal right to stay in the UK. 

There are votes to be won in reducing migration; there are some votes to be won (though almost certainly far fewer) in extolling the virtues of a liberal migration policy. What certainly won’t earn you votes is barking at migrants every five minutes, threatening deportation, establishing a “hostile environment” – while simultaneously practising a policy of mass migration. That just makes a government look silly and ineffectual.

Even worse, we have had mass migration without the necessary preparation for it. If a government is going to throw the doors wide open, public services will have to be expanded to keep pace. They haven’t been. Our housing stock is not increasing at anything like the rate it would need to cater for net migration of 500,000 a year, let alone a million – and many new homes that are built are allowed to be left as “buy to leave” investments and not used as homes. Nor are we building hospitals, schools, road space, surgeries and many other things (NHS staffing levels may seem to be up a healthy 4 per cent on the year but waiting lists and the difficulty in securing appointments tells a different story) at sufficient levels.

The trouble with a liberal migration policy is that it tends to impact disproportionately on certain areas, including inner cities. We end up with overcrowding in perhaps illegally-sublet rental homes, or in insanitary sheds thrown up in back gardens.

Being tough on migration was supposed to be a vote-winner for the Conservatives. If – as seems likely – they go down to a hefty defeat in a general election next year, their failure to enact their promises will have a lot to do with it.           

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