Immigration: wind of change?

By Richard North - March 18, 2023

As far as the British media goes – national and local – the default value for immigration seems to be a determination to present it as an unalloyed good, with relentlessly positive coverage on its advantages.

From the likes of the Guardian and other left-wing organs, we get an endless drumbeat, celebrating the  diversity that results from such immigration, matched by laments about any measures which might impact on the flow of “people of colour” into the country.

Rarely are we allowed to see the downside, and when publicity becomes inescapable, the obvious conclusions are rarely drawn.

With the Office for Budget Responsibility contradicting Sunak’s promise that he will reduce immigration overall, though, predicting that net migration will settle at 245,000 a year in the long term, we now have what seems to be the unusual coincidence of three comment pieces, respectively in the Telegraph and The Times challenging the conventional wisdom on the issue.

The first, by Camilla Tominey – one of the Telegraph’s associate editors – takes on the issue full-frontal, in a piece headed: “Britain is addicted to mass migration – and it is not racist to say this must change”, the sub-heading telling us: “Politicians haven’t just lost control of the Channel: the huge scale of legal immigration is being allowed to continue with little scrutiny”.

Tominey starts as she means to go on, declaring that there was something “horribly ironic” about Lineker’s claiming to “speak up for those poor souls who have no voice” on the question of immigration, after effectively trying to silence dissenters with comparisons to 1930s Germany.

Nevertheless, she does say that he was right in one sense. There is, she asserts, a group of people who don’t have a voice on this issue, but they certainly aren’t the ones for which Lineker advocates so passionately. They are the silent majority with legitimate concerns about mass, uncontrolled migration who have been cut out of the debate by elites who consider it crass to want to manage Britain’s borders.

They are the ones’ she adds, who are hounded and patronised into submission by supposedly “tolerant” liberals, a group which uses its sense of moral superiority to justify political browbeating. This tactic, Tominey says, has been hugely successful in shutting down the national debate, and helps to explain why the Conservative Party has failed to get a grip on post-Brexit immigration.

Here, the second writer, US author Lionel Shriver, usefully complements the first, writing under her title of “Our interests count more than migrant needs”, with a sub-head that asserts: “No one wants immigrants to risk death in the Channel but the honest reason to stop them is cost to the public purse”.

The argument, she (yes, she) writes, is numbingly familiar. Small boats bursting with “irregular” migrants must be stopped from crossing the Channel because a busy shipping lane and overcrowded, unseaworthy vessels put migrants at risk.

With more than a trace of irony, she adds: “We must stifle the people-smuggling trade because helpless customers suffer at the hands of unscrupulous criminals, who sometimes subject them to modern slavery on arrival”. By inference, the accelerating crisis on the southern coast is made out to be mostly a humanitarian question.

While this reasoning is sound enough, Shriver dismisses this standard political defence of stricter immigration controls as “disingenuous hooey a sentimental fig leaf for what we can only hope is brass-tacks calculation of British self-interest.

But here we get the familiar observation that, when considering the merits or otherwise of mass immigration, promoting policies purely because they benefit the people who live here is routinely spurned as crass.

Then we get to some interesting reflections on the backgrounds of people who take different stances in the debate. Shriver refers to a 2019 paper in the journal Nature, which found that small-C conservatives are apt to focus their sense of moral obligation on local ties — to family, friends, community and nation.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to pledge moral allegiance to distant universalist abstractions humanity as a whole, the ecosphere, and to what she labels supranational organisations such as the EU and (wrongly) the UN, and animals.

To the degree that they care about particular populations, Shriver says, they feel more passionately about the plight of those far away (Africans, Afghans, Syrians, Palestinians) than the near at hand (skint white families in Leeds).

She has a special word for “EU luvvies” who – as we see so often in the comments section on this blog – are prone to exalting virtue for its own sake and international-everything. This, Shriver notes, is a slight reformulation of David Goodhart’s “somewheres” and “anywheres” – the Liberal who took a “right wing turn on immigration” and ended up stating the obvious, that “most of us prefer our own kind”.

Yet, Shriver laments, even capital-C Conservatives now justify policies such as Sunak’s proposed immigration revamp in liberal terms. “We must halt the small boats because these crossings are bad for the immigrants – never mind if they’re bad for the British”, she parodies as the argument.

But now we get to the substantive Shriver thesis: “Whether you believe Britain needs more or fewer immigrants, it’s time this discussion focused on the level of foreign influx that most profits the UK”.

What that level might be is sure to be contentious, she says, but the human-rights lobby argues for de facto open borders – an end to deportation (already slowed to a trickle), the establishment of further legal avenues for claiming asylum in Britain – almost entirely through emotive appeals to our sympathy.

It is then her turn to state the obvious. “It’s not up for grabs whether the life chances of foreigners who make it safely to Kent are probably improved”, she notes. But that’s the wrong question. The correct question addresses competing rights.

It what sound almost heresy, so rarely do we hear it, she openly declares that “people who live here also have rights”. Quelle horreur! as Lineker might say. The indigenous British people also have rights.

Yet, according to YouGov, immigration is currently one of the top three issues Britons rate as most important. It’s doubtful, says Shriver, that these poll respondents mean, “I’m worried about the asylum seekers’ wellbeing”. It’s far more likely they mean, “I’m worried about mass migration’s impact on my country and community”.

Thus, we are enjoined to re-frame the debate. “If you’re going to be persuasive, whatever policies you advocate”, asserts Shriver, you have to address the nitty-gritty of public resources rather than appeal to soft hearts.

For example, she says, Britons are also greatly concerned about housing, a shortage of which has been a problem for decades. Last year, net migration in the UK soared to over half a million newcomers – a rate that, should it continue, could increase the population by at least five million in a mere decade. (The ONS projection that immigration will plummet by half this year seems optimistic.)

Folks who rock up with nothing put especial pressure on limited social housing, she adds. Few could have failed to notice that the preponderance of the unfortunates caught up in the Grenfell Tower fire were foreign-born. That was council housing.

And if the white, British-born working class have realised that the chances of them getting council housing are about the same as them being allocated space on a moon shot, the Guardian happily confirms this for them, recently reporting that: “Black people in England and Wales three times as likely to live in social housing”.

But such is the distorted lens though which this paper views the world, that this once privileged – and much sought-after – status is seen as a sign of social disadvantage, the figures supposedly showing that “black and minority ethnic communities are at the forefront of the housing crisis”.

Shriver puts a lid on the debate. Now that one in six UK residents are foreign-born, assimilation is more elective and social cohesion frays, she rightly observes. Yet into this mix of dysfunction and stretched resources we are throwing, all told, according to Migration Watch, about 100,000 illegal immigrants annually – abundantly unskilled, poorly educated and heavily dependent on public largesse.

This is the conversation she says Sunak should have with the British people. National politicians owe their first allegiance not to “humanity” or to “the planet” or to burnishing a vague vanity about the “generosity” of their country’s character, but to the rudimentary concerns of the citizenry they were elected to protect.

There’s nothing embarrassing or unseemly about the overt pursuit of self-interest, she says. Choosing what best benefits the resident population – indeed, elevating the wellbeing of inhabitants above the wellbeing of outsiders, in the instance these interests conflict, as they often do – is what governments of democratic nation states are for.

One of these days, a government of the United Kingdom might remember that we are supposed to be a democracy and take heed of these words. As the Telegraph says in the third comment piece (introducing a podcast), “Voters do not want ‘control’ over our borders, they want lower numbers. The Conservatives must stop gaslighting their own voters”.

Maybe, just maybe, the tenor of the debate is about to change.