We should all try and read a full account of today's House of Lords report which questions the official conventional wisdom that current levels of immigration into Britain benefit us all.
It has emerged from the economic affairs committee chaired by Lord John Wakeham, a wily old Thatcherite. That doesn't make it wrong, and the immigration minister, Liam Byrne, not lacking in wiles himself, was quick to welcome it.
He's right to do so. On a rising economy we have failed to have a proper debate about immigration, which is inevitable in a corner of the world which, as Hamish McRae famously observed in his book 20/20, is a bit like Bournemouth: relatively elderly, relatively well off and surrounded by poor people.
Migrants want to come here and most of us don't breed enough (too few babies too late in life) to do without them to keep things ticking over.
But how many and what sort? Ministers are belatedly introducing a points system to create some order. It's a separate question from asylum policy for which the government was condemned for inhumanity last week, though fraud among some asylum applicants muddies the waters.
But clearly mass immigration on the current scale doesn't benefit people who have to compete directly with incomers for jobs, housing and public services.
Most such people are poorer citizens, though the global super-rich have also gobbled up some space to which our home-grown elite has felt entitled.
They don't like it up them either, when Daddy's job or Pandora's place at the nursery is taken by some wealthy foreigner.
So let's talk more openly about it all. If we don't the debate in the festering margins will be dominated by the nasties. It already is.
