The cost of mass migration

Way back in the long distant 1990s, net migration into this country used to be in the tens of thousands each year. There was no lack of discussion about that, but we were not yet in the ‘dependency’ period of migration: that is, when people routinely said we had to have migration because otherwise who would do the menial jobs that we Brits didn’t want to do? You know, things like work in the NHS, work in restaurants, clean. That sort of thing.

Then the Blair government came in, sent annual immigration into the hundreds of thousands and everything changed. There is a dispute among partisans over whether that government lost control of immigration or had a deliberate policy to transform the UK. It seems to have been a bit of both, with people like the immigration minister Barbara Roche intent on the latter, and occasional wiser heads wondering whether it was such a good idea but not knowing which levers to pull.

Either way, by the mid-2000s we were in the dependency phase of mass migration. Those who were for it, or who excused it, simultaneously said that it solved the problem of the jobs the locals wouldn’t do and also that the people who were arriving were mainly brain surgeons. Migrants were never middle-class, apparently, only rocket scientists or street sweepers. Nothing in between.

One of the principal reasons people voted to leave the EU in 2016 was because the public had – rightly – got the idea that all of this was out of our control unless we exited the bloc. For years, those in both the Labour and Conservative parties liked to make this point: that the EU effectively tied their hands. So we left the EU – and net migration numbers into the UK actually increased.