It is barely a week since President Obama broke the political mould on immigration by demonstrating that it is possible to do the morally right thing, to rise above narrow partisan advantage and still be an elected politician.
In his immigration speech, the US president justified his executive orders providing a protective shield to 5 million undocumented migrants facing deportation so they could ‘come out of the shadows’ by telling Americans that deporting millions was simply “not who we are”.
David Cameron’s dispiriting rhetoric on immigration is about as far removed from Obama’s compassionate reminder that America was built on immigration and will continue to thrive on immigration as it is possible to get.
His latest contribution is simply ramping up a ‘race to the bottom’ between the three main parties over how swiftly they are prepared to push for the removal of the welfare safety net from a marginal number of low-paid and jobless European migrants in Britain.
Cameron, with his arbitrary net migration target now left in tatters, could have, like Obama, risen to the occasion and tried to change the entire political tone of the debate over immigration.
Instead he continued to allow those populist propagandists, Ukip, to frame the entire debate in terms of narrow party advantage rather than what is good for Britain. It is hardly surprising that the Conservatives after spending years in opposition claiming loudly that immigration had got out of control, now face the same accusation themselves.
But the truth about immigration in Britain is that it is not out of control in the way that Ukip claim. Britain does not have an ‘open door’ to the rest of the world.
Cameron had to reach back to the Ugandan Asians in the 1970s to celebrate Britain’s role in providing a safe haven, because he could hardly celebrate Britain’s role today in providing a haven for Syrian refugees when only a few thousand have been allowed in. What is rarely mentioned now is that it is at least 10 years since any legal route for unskilled migrants from outside Europe was firmly shut down. The continuing shambles of the UK immigration system may make it hard to believe but Britain already has a system of managed migration largely based on the contribution that those allowed to come can make whether to work or study.
For the real truth about immigration is that Britain is currently in the middle of a major jobs boom. More than 690,000 more people are in work in Britain than they were 12 months ago and two-thirds of those people are British and only one-third are foreign nationals.
Boris Johnson told his audience in Singapore on Friday Britain was the America of Europe. It is as Cameron pointed out ‘the jobs factory of Europe’ but as he failed to point out it is the fact that Britain is open for business and open for skilled migration that has fuelled that economic growth. One fact unnoticed in the recent controversial UCL study showing recent European migrants have contributed £20 billion more to the British economy than they have taken out was the statistic that 63% of recent EU arrivals have a university degree.
The last 10 years have seen net migration levels above 200,000 every year and it is no coincidence that as a result Britain pulled out of recession long before the eurozone. But it will not last. As every economist knows, boom will eventually turn to bust and no politician wants to accelerate that process. For decades in the 1960s and 1970s Britain had net emigration – nobody wanted to come and work in the ‘sick man of Europe’.
No wonder George Osborne is reported to be among those who blocked Cameron’s dalliance with announcing a Canute-style pause or ‘emergency brake’ on migration to Britain for it would also bring Britain’s relative economic recovery to a shuddering halt.
The dispiriting thing about the prime minister’s long-awaited speech on immigration is that it will frame the entire terms of the debate between now and next May’s election. His choice of the West Midlands to make it revives memories of the 1964 general election campaign in Smethwick when the Conservative Peter Griffiths was elected on the notorious slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’.
Griffiths was treated as a political pariah by both Labour and Tories on his arrival at Westminster. But that nasty undertone is returning to British politics. Home Office ‘go homes’ vans touring high immigrant areas and Ukip candidates flirting with the language of repatriation have ensured a return to debating immigration in the language of 50 years ago. It is all so far from Obama’s universal message that: “We are and always will be a nation of immigrants.”
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