Immigration: a global issue

By Richard North - December 18, 2023

A short piece on social media took me recently to Chris Grey’s blog, a place I very rarely visit, mainly to avoid the weary drone of anti-Brexit rhetoric from a man who, after more than seven years, still hasn’t come to terms with losing the EU Referendum and seems incapable of moving on.

Neither, to judge from his latest post, has he really understood what Brexit was all about, or that it was just the first step in an attempt to claw back power for the people, of which control over immigration was just one element.

But, viewing immigration solely through the prism of Brexit, as Grey seems to do, rather neglects the fact that the issue has global implications, affecting many different countries apart from the UK, yet it was only the UK that went through the Brexit process.

The trouble with people such as Grey, though, is that they only talk to the same claque of like-minded people. Their reading lists are dismally narrow and those writers he reveres are of similar mind. Never, ever, would he expose his fragile intellect to a contrary opinion, from which he might actually learn something.

After all, it is very hard to accept his premise that the immigration and asylum rows “are another sign of Brexit’s total failure”, when the reality is that May and then Johnson imposed a new, post-Brexit immigration regime that had nothing to do with the EU exit talks.

This may be a matter of definition, but the Brexit process was the formal one of leaving the EU and negotiating the settlement deal. Post-Brexit policy, strangely enough, is post-Brexit. Otherwise, you might just as well attribute the net-zero policy to a failure of Brexit, and just about everything else which has happened since we left.

Offering a wake-up call to the likes of Grey, and his “little England” obsession, is Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph with a piece headed: “World governments now face a bigger predicament than the economy, stupid”, making the obvious point that governments are having to deal with the problem on a global scale.

Warrner, therefore, frames the issue as a war between globalisation and nativism, and takes a pessimistic view of it, suggesting that there are “no easy solutions”.

But what strikes a particular chord is Warner’s assertion – mirroring my piece yesterday – that the issue transcends concern even for the economy, arguing that “in almost all ‘high income’ countries, it threatens to be eclipsed by a still more potent worry of immigration”.

Dissatisfaction with incumbent governments is today as much driven by perceived failure on migration as it is on the economy. The electoral pushback is universal. Republicans have voted against more aid to Ukraine not out of sympathy for Putin, but as a way of highlighting the Biden administration’s seeming inability to get a grip on illegal migration.

Even in Australia – a country notorious for its hardline immigration policies – Warner notes that the still relatively young Labour government has been forced by a growing public backlash to reverse a loosening of visa rules that had caused immigration to spiral out of control.

Similarly, he says, in ultra-liberal Canada, where relatively high levels of immigration have been deliberately encouraged to boost growth, the government is now fast backtracking in the face of a collapse in its poll ratings. Visa quotas are being trimmed and moves are afoot to crack down on so-called “puppy mills”, second rate educational establishments used by migrants as a backdoor into the country’s labour market.

We need no reminding that the same concern prevails in continental Europe, where high levels of migration are proving fertile ground for the populist Right, threatening to torch the traditional centre ground, which is strongly associated with the globalist policies of the past.

Even in Ireland – where the government is desperately trying to hold the line on its pro-immigration policy – popular resistance is stiffening. As a sign of the times, the Ross Lake House in Galway, Ireland, which was supposed to host 70 asylum seekers starting next Thursday, has been mysteriously engulfed in flames.

Across the Atlantic, Trump is successfully exploiting growing unease over the torrent of illegals crossing over from the Mexican border, and looks to be touching a nerve with comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the country”, claiming that migrants are “charging across the border by the hundreds of thousands” and pledging that “the invasion will end” if he is elected president.

Nor is this actually just a concern of “high income” developed countries, as we see from another piece in the Telegraph which has the interim prime minister of Pakistan, Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, complaining about the flow of Afghan refugees over the border, totalling between four and five million over the last three to four decades.

From Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar we get the same laments that are common to other countries. Despite frequent opportunities to repatriate voluntarily, and multiple government attempts to register those who remain undocumented, he says, a significant number has persistently refused to formalise their status, choosing instead to stay in the shadows.

He acknowledges that Pakistan has benefitted from many hardworking and law-abiding migrants, but remarks that the overall socio-economic and security cost of this huge influx “has been staggering”.

Many, he says, work on the black market, paying no tax, depressing wages for legitimate workers. They are also susceptible to exploitation by the criminal underworld, with all its disturbing links to terrorist organisations operating in the region.

Similar complaints are aired by Iran, illustrating the global scale of the problem. Closer to home, we have Egypt reinforcing its border with Gaza to prevent Palestinian migration, refusing like most of the Arab states to accept Gazan refugees.

Returning to Warner’s piece, one finds him making the same point that I did about Sunak’s focus on illegal immigration, despite the fact that, in the year to June, there were 97,390 individual asylum applications, but an estimated 1.2 million new arrivals. The vast bulk of this influx, Warner says, is entirely legal.

The politicians, he adds, are kidding themselves in thinking that voters make a distinction between illegal and legal forms of migration. When the numbers are as high as they are now, the differences get lost in the wash. Wherever it comes from, the pressures from unrestrained migration on public services, housing and national identity are little different.

Warner also tackles the economic argument for immigration, noting that, in theory, migrants improve overall productivity and therefore living standards for everyone. But that, he says, is not supported by the experience of the last 20 years. Unprecedented levels of net immigration have coincided with an equally unprecedented hiatus in productivity growth. High net immigration has failed to shift the dial.

But then he gets lost in the assertion that there are no easy solutions. They maybe are not easy, but there are solutions. Legal migration can be contained by the simple expedient of imposing an annual cap. And the difficulties that that might present can be handled if there is the political will to do so.

With illegal immigration bogged down in the Rwanda scheme, we need another stratagem. I still favour the idea of deporting all illegals to South Georgia, although it might be more economic to transfer them to an uninhabited Scottish island, release permitted only when the migrants can secure the agreement of another country to take them.

Come what may, though, Warner is right in stating that immigration is “the defining political battle of our age”, and although he states that the ultimate winner is still far from clear, it is a battle for survival that we must win.

One of the main hurdles, though, is the enemy within, the Liberal “progressives” who will always find a reason why more immigrants should be allowed in, and there are always endless hard luck stories that can be churned out.

The lack of national unity over the scourge of mass immigration is perhaps the most difficult issue to resolve, especially as new and existing immigrants have the vote, which they can use to manipulate political sentiment, blocking robust action. Yet tolerance will only go so far. I see the mood changing and continuing to change. The failure to come up with solutions could get very messy.