What a relief to read two articles pointing out the drawbacks to the Guardian’s usual support for the free flow of people in Europe. Paul Ormerod (Open borders or fair wages: the left needs to make up its mind, 24 March) shows how the earning power of the poorer sections of workers has been cut and how your paper’s eulogising of economic growth through ever more youthful immigrants (The migration fuelling George Osborne’s ‘comeback country’, 20 March) is a generational Ponzi scheme, since as they grow old there will presumably have to be a compensatory increase of ever more new migrants. Ivan Krastev details the seldom-heard downsides of all this for the communities left behind (Britain’s gain is eastern Europe’s brain drain, 24 March), including how the EU often permanently steals the brightest and the best from poor countries such as Bulgaria, and in the process undermines their domestic economies and the chance of political change for the better.
The crucial question about EU migration is not to do with those migrants that are already here, however, but how to ensure that the level of permanent migration into this country is dramatically reduced. A start would be for all political parties to campaign not for a disastrous in/out referendum on Europe, since this could threaten the level of continental food imports crucial to this densely populated island, but instead vote on whether to change the EU rules on the free flow of people. Given the European polls on this issue, this could lead to a majority of countries voting for such a change. The next vote could then be to control the flow of capital and goods so that the ownership of domestic property and companies remains in the control of the home country and domestic industries are protected and so can thrive. The end result is likely to be a return of public support for a Europe seen at last to benefit the majority.
Colin Hines
Twickenham, Middlesex
• Paul Ormerod presents a false and poisonous choice. His basic story – and his vituperative language – is the same as the Front National’s Marine Le Pen: it’s either globalisation or nationalism, and for workers it has to be the latter.
This is nonsense. Economics has leapt the boundaries of the nation state. Our politics needs to do the same. Match Europe’s single market with balancing social measures: a Europe-wide minimum wage; a maximum working week; and a European integration fund to ensure that investment follows migration. This fund would address the social pressures on schools, health and housing brought about by the free movement of labour. Combined with stronger trade unions, these measures would benefit all workers and offer a progressive model of social democratic politics that goes with the grain of economic development.
The task for the centre-left is not to mimic Ukip and Le Pen but to show that it can offer an alternative model of globalisation that reshapes the single market and offers a future to all of Europe’s people.
Jon Bloomfield
Birmingham
• Paul Ormerod’s article was a breath of fresh air and his implication that the Guardian (and the “liberal elite” who probably read it) are still in denial is not unfair. Immigration has been described as a mechanism which redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich (TTIP promises to be another). This is an obvious if unwelcome truth, and needs clear acknowledgment if policy is to counter the effect. We may or may not try to curb immigration in terms of numbers – and there is strong reason to believe that there is a level above which it will damage community relations – but we do have to do two things: first, accept as publicly as possible that immigration does have an impact on services; and second, take vigorous and, again, publicised steps to compensate communities for that impact.
The good aspects of Gordon Brown’s government are, as so often, forgotten: it took the logical step by creating the migration impacts fund in 2009. Its aim was to collaborate with local public agencies to counter pressures resulting from immigration in a wide range of areas, including health, education and housing, but also such things as volunteering and English language courses. It was absolutely the right thing to do, and showed the Brown administration had correctly identified that that immigration has a bad side and a good. The coalition , however, rapidly restored the previous state of denial when it abolished the fund in 2010, and we are now back to the former polarised state where people tend to argue either that immigration is a good thing (contributing to economic growth, community diversity, innovation etc) or a bad thing (putting pressure on services, reducing indigenous people’s access to jobs and income, creating community tensions, etc). The truth is that both are true, and this needs to be publicly acknowledged.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter
• Paul Ormerod focuses on the supply side of the labour market to argue that the influx of immigrants enables employers to drive down wages. He fails to recognise the legal, cultural and institutional constraints operating in the labour market. These need to be considered along with the supply of labour. When UK citizens complain about wages being undercut, we should emphasise not the low-paid immigrant worker but the employer who pays the low wage. Historically, effective collective bargaining and legal regulation have been happily important constraints on a free labour market. In recent years, supply of labour has increased in prominence as a determinant of wages, but it would be a mistake to ignore the potential of the law and trade unions to shift the labour market in favour of workers.
The 1980s’ propagation of individualism rather than collectivism, and hostile trade union legislation introduced by Thatcher, only partially repealed during the 13 years of the Labour government, severely damaged effective collective bargaining. Ormerod writes as if the weakened power and influence of unions is immutable. Honouring International Labour Organisation conventions 87 and 98 on freedom of association and the right to organise and bargain collectively, to which the UK government is a signatory, could do much to improve real pay and reduce wage inequality.
Michael Somerton
Hull
• Paul Ormerod clearly explains how immigration depresses the wages of those at the bottom. But what about capital flows? The US would not have suffered so much from low Chinese wages had it not allowed them to buy its assets (often government debt). This flow of capital into the US finances a trade deficit with China that continues as long as China chooses to invest its surplus savings in the US. I ignore other nations for simplicity.
Mainstream economics allows nations with very different wage rates to trade, but relies on some goods being cheaper in each nation when the exchange rates remove the average price differences. But this only happens automatically when capital stays home. The US would not have lost so many jobs and built up such huge debts to China had it not insisted on free capital at Bretton Woods, against the advice of Keynes, believing it must export capital to raise employment at home, as the Chinese have been doing. Do EU nations believe that to be competitive labour must be free as in the US?
George Talbot
Watford, Hertfordshire
