Why we need migrants

This is perhaps not the best moment in history to extol migrants from the developing world or Eastern Europe, but the fact remains that without them my life, and I suspect the life of many other people in the West, would be much poorer and more constricted than it is.

A migrant is not just a migrant, of course. Indeed, to speak of migrants in general is to deny them agency or even characteristics of their own, to assume that they are just units and that their fate depends only on how the receiving country receives them and not at all on their own motives, efforts or attributes, including their cultural presuppositions. It takes two to integrate, after all.

But I want to point to what seems to me a curious paradox. My elderly mother-in-law, who lives in Paris, requires a great deal of daily care because of illness, and in fact has three attendants who look after her on a kind of shift system. They come respectively from Cape Verde, Mauritius and Haiti. We are extremely fortunate to have them: they are very kindly and good-hearted and they do far more than they are strictly paid to do. We have good reason to be grateful to them. They have a difficult job and they do it marvellously well, with patience and good humour that is exemplary.

If we did not have these people to look after my mother-in-law, our lives would be greatly disrupted and indeed dominated by having to look after her ourselves, which would be more or less a full-time occupation and would prevent us from doing almost anything else. Speaking personally, I am not cut out to be a full-time carer, nor do I have any ambitions in that direction.

If it were not for these immigrants from Cape Verde, Mauritius and Haiti, or from other similar countries, we should not be able to find any substitutes, even though the unemployment rate in France is about 10 per cent and much higher among fit young people — 20 per cent, say — and the work itself requires only a certain amount of training.