Let’s sort out the migration mess

17 March 2007

Austen Ivereigh says that illegal immigration is both a symptom and a cause — of British economic success. The dead hand of the state is getting it wrong, as usual: time for a total rethink

Deporting illegal immigrants seems like a solution, but it isn’t going to happen — not to 99 per cent of them. Many British newspapers are committed to deportation in principle, imagining that it is the scroungers Reid depicts who are being handcuffed on to planes. But they are usually against it in practice — when they discover that it involves model asylum-seeker families with children in the village school who are being returned to a possible death. Yet it is precisely these families which are the easiest fodder for deportation quotas.

The government’s other ‘answer’ to illegal immigration is to arrange sudden swoops on offices and restaurants and threaten employers with £5,000 fines for recruiting people who do not have a right to work — even though most employers would be hard-pressed to tell a fake EU passport from a real one.

The chief executive of a restaurant chain told me recently of the anger which the measures are provoking in the business sector. ‘Most of them are afraid of being busted and being made to pay heavy fines for taking on people in good faith,’ he says. ‘And they’re angry at being made to do the Home Office’s job for them after the event.’

A large operation with a human resources department, his company has invested heavily in sophisticated equipment and training — not something most employers can afford — in order to detect ever more elaborately forged IDs, the price of which has dropped to a mere £300. Even then, he says, the IND (the Immigration and Nationality Directorate) takes months to verify whether or not a passport is real. ‘It’s a mess,’ he told me. ‘A total mess.’

The flaw in the government’s thinking is revealed by Byrne’s explanation that he is attacking ‘the causes of illegal immigration, which are the exploitation of vulnerable illegal labour by racketeers’. End the exploitation, in other words, and you end illegal immigration. It is the perfect spin: appease the Daily Mail while appealing to the Guardian’s sense of social justice.