Home > The Magazine > Features

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Let’s sort out the migration mess

Austen Ivereigh

Wednesday, 14th 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.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 Next page

More articles from: Austen Ivereigh | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat

Rudd has lurched from indecision to phoney war

Matthew Castray

Matthew Castray looks back on the Australian Prime Minister’s first year in office and audits an administration which has reviewed much and done very little

Incompetence is fine: but being offensive is sure to get you sacked

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that something has gone wrong when 15 South Lanarkshire social workers are sacked over a dodgy Gary Glitter joke while none of their counterparts in Haringey has even been reprimanded over the ‘Baby P’ case

Brown has played into the hands of the Tory Bullingdon Boys he loathes

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson says that the Pre-Budget Report killed off New Labour without landing a punch on the Tories. It has paved the way for a new Conservatism, in which Cameron woos aspirational voters, focuses on government debt and looks for responsible spending cuts

Sarkozy’s dream of taming America is doomed

Irwin Stelzer

The American model of lightly regulated capitalism may be in disrepute, says Irwin Stelzer. But the French President’s ambition is deluded

Thank goodness we can have a run on the pound when we need one

Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer looks ahead to next week’s Pre-Budget Report and reflects on George Osborne’s contentious remarks about the devaluation of sterling. It looks like Gordon Brown is getting away with his borrowing binge — leaving the Tories isolated

Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how

Fraser Nelson

After a week of clamorous competition between the parties over tax cuts, Fraser Nelson offers a guide to paying for them: a programme of spending cuts that would preserve core services but shave off the fat of the Brown years. All that is needed is political will

If Miliband becomes PM, I’ll join the right-wing coup to topple him

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is outraged by the Foreign Secretary’s alleged comparison of himself to Michael Heseltine: like comparing a Big Beast to a stumpy little Muntjac deer. Where have all the political giants gone?

Welcome to the new austerity era, Mr Cameron

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson says that the Tory leader must not be tempted by a ‘safety first’ strategy at his conference in Birmingham. The global financial crisis has transformed the political context and left an opening for the Conservatives to promise true radicalism and to be proudly bold

‘You grow up with footballs. We grow up with kukris’

James Delingpole

James Delingpole meets the Gurkha veterans seeking citizenship rights in the courts and says that, this time, the government has picked the wrong fight