Charity Starts Abroad
'Few issues," argued Chris Roberts in the OxStu the week before last, "are more likely to incite the pent-up fury of middle England and the right-wing press than asylum and immigration." I disagree. I have never seen socialists reach greater heights of apoplectic fury than when I put the case to them that increased immigration is morally wrong, is not necessary, and damaging to the economy. They kick; they scream; they call me a racist.
The issue of immigration is one of the most emotive issues in politics today. Any discussion of the topic is bound to raise powerful feelings on both sides, and it is one of the comfortable myths of the debate that only right-wing people get angry about it, because they are all implicitly racist. In this article, I would like to dispel some of those comfortable myths.
Reading Roberts' article on immigration, you could have been forgiven that the immigration debate was about multiculturalism. But this is not the case. Britain is already a multicultural society - and no one is suggesting that it should be changed. Multiculturalism, for better or worse, is here to stay. Immigration is about one thing and one thing only. It is not about multiculturalism. It is not about racism. Immigration is about numbers.
Let's start with economics. The advocates of mass immigration to Britain make great play of the supposed economic benefits it will bring us. Immigration, it is argued, will keep Britain topped up with abundant cheap labour. It is somewhat ironic that immigration appears to be the only social process where broadly left-wing commentators (who are normally all too happy to alert us to the excesses of capitalism) are willing to stress capitalistic business interests above the demands of employees.
However, it is abundantly clear that any increase of cheap, unskilled labour is profoundly unhelpful to the British economy. Immigrant labour depresses unskilled wages in the UK, as immigrants will work for fewer wages than those workers already here. This causes the unskilled workers in this country to compete for less work at lower wages. Employers who employ immigrants can thus increase productivity at less cost. The rich get richer; the poor, poorer. Bear this in mind the next time you hear a socialist arguing in favour of increased immigration.
It is another convenient myth of those in favour of increased immigration that immigration is a cure for Britain's growing demographic crisis. Ageing populations, it is argued, need bigger working populations to support them in their retirement. The only solution is to increase immigration to shore up the working population. This is nonsense. Population ageing is inevitable: there is no solution. Longer lives and fewer children will, eventually, give all human societies a top-heavy population, forever. Constructive solutions need to be employed to support an ageing population, such as raising the retirement age or increasing the number of people in work. But it is impossible to maintain the status quo with immigration. To preserve the present ratio of people of working age to pensioners in the UK would require an additional1.2 million immigrants per year every year to 2050, by which time the population would have doubled to 120 million. To keep this figure up to 2100 would take up to 5 million extra per year and double the population again. Immigration on this scale is patently ludicrous.
But, figures aside, what about our moral obligation to take immigrants? Surely we have a duty to offer asylum to people who are persecuted? The Geneva Convention on refugees states that anyone with a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion" has a right to apply for political asylum to Britain. The sad truth is that we can't possibly offer asylum to anyone who fulfils those criteria. Any Tibetan living in China, any Kurd living in the Middle East, any African under a dictatorship or any Palestinian living in Israel has a perfectly legitimate claim to asylum in Britain. That's 60.4 million Africans, 22.6 million Kurds, 1.25 million Tibetans, and 3.5 million Palestinians to start with. The total figure comes close to a half a billion people. We can't possibly hope to take all those millions of people who have a right to asylum.
The current system is morally reprehensible. Allowing oppressed people to come to Britain is a 'soft option' that does not solve their nation's problems. We need to increase international development aid and intervene to remove the corrupt regimes that oppress those people. British foreign policy needs a new clarity of moral purpose. If we want to make life better for persecuted people, we can start by dealing with the root causes of their problems - not by offering them a new life here.
27th Feb 2003