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

It is also nonsense. Legal migrants are just as likely to be exploited as illegal ones when they first arrive. Exploited migrants often leave again — or move up the ladder and make a new home. A letter I have received from Lena, a highly articulate Russian 23-year-old currently serving a ten-month prison sentence after being caught at Stansted with a false Norwegian passport, tells a typical story: far from being exploited, she is an honest, hard-working estate agent whose boss thinks the world of her and whose language skills (the odd dropped definite article aside) are impressive. Reading her letter — ‘I truly believe and hope that law of this country will see me not as a criminal but as a person who was trying her best to contribute to the community’ — it is hard not to wonder why 8,000 people are serving time in our jails for immigration offences like hers, when there is not enough space in the cells for violent criminals.

The presence of illegal immigrants in the UK really indicates one thing: a disjuncture between the market and the dead hand of the state. Guillermo, Abdul and Lena have stayed in Britain because they were able to find work and opportunity, not because they were exploited. New Labour gave up long ago on the idea of a ‘managed economy’, but it treats people — unlike goods and services — as subject to the diktats of central planning. And it doesn’t work.

A more sensible approach starts from the assumption that it is a successful economy that accounts for illegal immigration. Rather than ineffectually harassing employers and condemning honest, hardworking people to a furtive existence beyond the law, we can accept the reality that thousands have made successful new lives in the UK, and naturalise them. They have done it in many EU nations, and are poised to do so in the United States, where a massive 800,000 Mexicans will become US citizens.