Counting Points

DAMIAN GREEN MP argues the case for greater control over immigration

There was a time, only ten years ago, when the only politicians interested in the subject of immigration were extremists of the far right and left. After race riots in the 50s, dockers marching in support of Enoch Powell in the 60s, and the rise of the National Front in the 70s, the tight controls introduced by Mrs Thatcher in the 80s reduced the political temperature over the issue. Its salience as an issue reduced markedly.

By contrast, current polling evidence shows that immigration vies with the health service as the most important political issue. The reason for this, quite simply, is the sheer scale of immigration and the speed of change this is creating in British society. Averaging out the last few years net immigration has been running at around 200,000 a year. This means creating the equivalent of a new city the size of Birmingham every two-and-a-half years. More than a third of new households in Britain are created by immigration. More than half of the live births in London are to foreign-born mothers.

This unprecedented rate of change has helped create a background of unease to which has been added the sense of an immigration system out of control either of ministers or officials. John Reid as home secretary described the immigration system as "not fit for purpose", and the errors have not ceased since he said it 18 months ago.

We have upward of half a million people in this country illegally, and the UK is one of the favoured destinations for the world's people traffickers. Foreign criminals were not deported at the end of the prison sentences. The Home Office itself employed illegal workers as cleaners. The security industry discovered that 6,000 workers, every one of them holding a national insurance number, had clearance for security work despite being here illegally. One of them was guarding the prime minister's car. Moving onto the legal side of immigration, the government predicted that 13,000 people would come here from the new accession sates of the EU in 2004. The eventual number was nearer three quarters of a million.

Much of the unease is caused by sheer incompetence. But the underlying question for policy makers is often posed in the form: "Does immigration benefit Britain?" This needs to be looked at both in economic and social terms, and then refined so that it is somewhat less simplistic. The answer to the question "is immigration of economic benefit to Britain?" is, on the slight amount of evidence available, "only very slightly". Ministers quote studies showing that GDP has increased by £6bn because of immigration and therefore claim that it adds to growth. This is a little disingenuous. Self-evidently, if the economy has more people working in it then it will grow - China's economy is bigger than Monaco's. But it is GDP per head and gains in productivity that are the real markers of whether or not we are growing richer as an economy. On both these measures the evidence is mixed. Immigrants tend to be hard working and in some cases highly qualified. But their effect on the labour market needs to be set in context of the wider position of British workers, and those not at work.

Writing in October 2005 in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee argues that migrants suppress the wages of low-paid workers. She wrote: "This is what globalisation does, widening the gap between rich and poor...Cheap labour provides more cheap services for the rich to get their lifestyle at a premium while nailing an ever-larger swathe of the workforce to the minimum-wage floor."

There are two interesting points that can be drawn for Toynbee's remarks. First, though she comes at it from a very different part of the political spectrum, there is not much in her statement with which the leading anti-immigration pressure group Migration Watch would disagree. Secondly, the migrant that Toynbee seems to have in mind is a low skilled eastern European worker perhaps in a Cambridgeshire cabbage field or serving skinny lattes in a London railway station.

Of course, migration is more complicated than that. The city of London is the workplace of many thousands of essentially economic migrants. All of Britain's major universities have sizeable contingents of foreign students. Very many London and Edinburgh pubs still have their pints pulled by backpacking Aussies, Kiwis and Saffas. The proponents of high levels of immigration argue that since immigrants earn higher wages than the average they are clearly improving the productivity of our workforce.

The Bank of England is cautious about statistics showing the relative earnings of immigrants. They state: "immigrants have on average earned more than UK-born individuals since 1993. This result is partly explained by the fact that immigrants have been more likely to live in London, where hourly wage rates are higher than the rest of the country. The chart also shows that average hourly pay of 'new' immigrants was not very different to existing immigrants through the 1990s. But since 2002, the real wages of 'new' immigrants have fallen relative to the wage of those born in the United Kingdom." Indeed the Bank also notes that immigrants are less likely to be in employment than the native population. The Labour Force Survey puts employment rates at 67% against 74% respectively.

The real long-term problem with this influx is that in this country there are already over 1m young people not in employment, education or training - the so-called "NEETS". Immigration can only ever be a short-term answer to shortages in our own workforce and it would be an abdication of moral responsibility if we left a whole cohort of people on the scrapheap. Indeed if we continue to use immigration as the first resort for filling vacancies there will be further cohorts of the relatively unskilled who never enter the workforce. The economic consequences of this long-term unemployment are serious, even before we consider the social consequences. Re-skilling British workers is a key task both for business and government. At present our productivity growth has stalled, and we are falling down the international league tables of productivity. Immigration is only a short-term palliative for this problem.

The second key question is whether immigration is benefiting Britain socially. We have always prided ourselves on being an open-minded country with a global outlook. As well as being attractive in itself, this outlook will be ever more essential as economic globalisation covers larger proportions of the world. But to preserve this traditional British strength requires there to be overwhelming public acceptance of new arrivals, and the ability of the culture to adapt. The whole range of issues bound up in the phrase "community cohesion" is key to the success of modern Britain.

The biggest national challenge is that public services simply cannot cope with an unplanned rate of change on the scale we have seen in recent years. A number of snapshots illustrate this. Cambridgeshire police claim that police officers were now dealing with close to 100 different languages without having the right skills - a situation which had landed the force with a translation bill of at least £800,000. Boston Borough Council in Lincolnshire says that "the language barrier is the biggest obstacle to integration".

In Boston the local FE college currently has learners from 51 different countries. I visited a primary school where half the reception class could not speak English. Kent police say that rapid population growth (78% of which comes from immigration) has cost the force £34m over the past three years, with funding failing to keep pace. In London maternity services are unable to cope with the extra demands from new arrivals having babies.

All of these problems put a strain on community cohesion, and explain why a coherent immigration policy will look at more than the purely economic effects. Even if the economic arguments were less ambiguous than they are, we should be setting limits on immigration. Britain can and does benefit from immigration, but we need not only the right people coming here but the right number of people each year.

So we would set an annual target for those coming here to work from outside the EU. This target would be set after consultation with business, public services and other appropriate bodies. Each applicant would have to show the skills which would benefit the economy (which will of course change over time) so that every year we can judge how many work permits to issue. Of course much immigration is not work-related. Family migration should also be controlled, in the interests of community cohesion. To that end we would require spouses coming here to be over 21 and able to show a reasonable command of English.

We need to enforce the law and protect our borders, or else all our other efforts will be rendered meaningless. That is why we have called for an integrated border police force. This would be a specialist force, combining the police with immigration and customs officers. It would not just patrol ports and airports but deal with illegal over-stayers, people trafficking and rogue employers. Experience tells us that specialisation of police services is effective in fighting new types of crime.

The real answer to the original question about whether immigration is beneficial is that it can be and it should be, both economically and socially. It will only meet those tests if it is better controlled than it has been in recent years. A Conservative government would introduce controls designed both to help the British economy and British workers, and to enhance our currently fragile community cohesion.

Damian Green has been the MP for Ashford since 1997 and is currently the shadow immigration minister. He was president of the Oxford Union while studying PPE at Balliol College.