Some truths about immigration

02 August 2003

Anthony Browne says Britain is already overcrowded, and that pro-immigration arguments are almost all flawed

Unfortunately for the government, more and more people on both the Left and the Right are becoming open-minded on the problems of the government's policy of actively encouraging mass immigration. The pro-immigrationists' trusty tactic of suppressing all inconvenient truth and debate by denouncing all critics as racist, fascist or xenophobic just isn't working: there are too many intellectually honest people who can see that baseless insults aren't answers to real problems.

The subject of immigration has been taboo in Britain since Enoch Powell's infamous speech a third of a century ago: there has not, until a few months ago, been one debate in Parliament about the optimal types and scale of immigration, only debates on the minutiae of immigration laws. Everyone agreed to that silence so as to promote good community relations. But the government took advantage of the taboo to overturn 30 years of policy which aimed for zero primary immigration, claiming that it wants about 150,000 immigrants a year.

Labour, in its self-righteous arrogance, performed this remarkable U-turn confident that no one would break the taboo. When I started writing in the Times about the economic and demographic consequences of mass immigration, Blunkett denounced me by name in Parliament as 'bordering on fascism'. I was contacted by Sir Andrew Green, the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who had just set up a lobby-group, Migration Watch UK, to curb immigration, and wrote a profile of his new group. Ever since, Blunkett has been denouncing it as 'right-wing' and 'tin-pot', despite the fact that its advisory council consists of former ambassadors, former heads of the government's immigration service, several professors, a Sri Lankan law lecturer and a Sudanese businessman.

The trouble for the government is that while promoting mass immigration might make people feel cosmopolitan and modern, and calling critics racist may make people feel virtuous, few of the consequences of mass immigration have been thought through. The long immigration silence has meant that all negative consequences of migration have been suppressed, and only the positive aspects talked about. If you blind yourself to all negative consequences of a complex policy, you are bound to conclude that it is a thoroughly good thing and want as much of it as possible. Civil servants sat with ministers discussing all the good things about immigration without anyone daring to think any of the bad things, and they concluded that the borders should be pushed wide open.