Now more than ever, we need a firm immigration system; that is what the public understand, and what they thought the government meant, by ‘control of our borders’.
Our economy is heading for stormy seas. Some nine million jobs could be lost due to the pandemic and lockdowns, according to recently published research. This makes it imperative that we have in place an immigration system that will protect our domestic workforce. Not only is lockdown devastating our economy but the government has ploughed ahead with its irresponsible plan to uncap and weaken the skills and salary criteria for work permits. The upshot is that UK workers in 250 trades and occupations are now exposed to massively increased global recruitment pressures (see our paper), while seven million full-time jobs held by UK-born workers have been opened up to new or much increased competition from foreign labour at a particularly vulnerable time (for more please see this piece on the impact of the new changes).
We learn that some five million EU nationals have registered for pre-settled or settled status – and there is still time for more to do so because the scheme doesn’t close until June. It seems that many of these are not in the UK and might not have been for some years but they all have been given the right to return to the UK to live here or look for a job. So much for the end of free movement and getting Brexit done.
Here is what we have been up to at Migration Watch UK:
Blog of the week:
A Guardian article argued that because of reductions in the population of major countries such as Japan and Spain, greater global immigration is the only way to combat this ‘crisis’. We spotted a problem with the reasoning of this article. We found that the Guardian was muddling up overall population with where people were living in the country. While villages may have been depleted, the towns and cities are often bursting at the seams. The Guardian article was effectively arguing to repopulate the countryside with immigrants even where the total population had grown (as in the UK) significantly over the past 20 years. As our blog response says: ‘It would be a disaster to seek to import large numbers of immigrants from even poorer countries around the world in the vain hope that they can make livelihoods for themselves in areas where the indigenous population cannot.’ You can read the full blog post here.
Migration Watch in the media
Our Chairman Alp Mehmet has been in demand this week from the national and local media. Here are some of his comments.
‘It would be short-sighted – and a wasted opportunity – if the Government were not to now keep thorough records of how many illegal immigrants come forward, where they are from and how long they have been here. That would be absolutely batty.’
You can hear a snippet of Alp’s comments on the same story about vaccine amnesties on BBC Radio Essex here. Both Chairman and Executive Director Dr Ben Greening were quoted on amnesties in Breitbart. You can read the piece here.
‘This is a frankly barmy situation. The Government is struggling to find hotel rooms for travellers to quarantine in, but there are hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers staying in a hotel right next to the airport. You couldn’t make it up.’
Here are some Migration Watch responses to some other press reports:
Telegraph: Nearly 5m EU citizens apply for British residency after Brexit
Migration Watch UK said: ‘A constant theme in the pre and post-Brexit debate was how three million (that was the number often quoted) EU nationals would leave in disgust because they would be denied their rights, while the UK pulled up the drawbridge. Xenophobic Britain would be abandoned for more welcoming EU member states or countries of origin. Well, five million have voted with their finger and applied online for settlement.’
Migration Watch UK said: ‘As our Channel tracker demonstrates, over 11,000 people have been reported illegally crossing the Channel into Britain since the end of 2017, and last year saw a record number of people cross these waters. In 2020, at least 8,713 people entered the country through via this illegal and dangerous route. That is twenty nine times the number in 2018. This is despite the country being in lockdown and dealing with a health emergency. It has to be stopped.’
Make your voice heard
(Spoiler alert, we have said this before.) Please do write to your MP about the new system for work migration. You can do so here. Brexit was not the signal to increase immigration but that is exactly what the host of additional and more permissive routes introduced by the new system will likely mean.