The Tories and immigration

A prominent Conservative writes, of my remarks last week on the Tory manifesto:

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the logic behind the two statements on targets set out on your weblog and have concluded that the answer is this: the number and nature of targets set by the centre for the NHS has been damaging whereas a central immigration target would be a good idea.

What do you think? Is this publishable?

This is pellucid and cogent. But I still don’t agree with it. I grant that those who welcome immigration, as I do, ought not to be averse to a mainstream political party’s debating the issue. Immigration may have disruptive as well as beneficial economic and social effects, and a liberal society needs to mitigate them.

Unfortunately, little comment on the subject in political debate deals with these contingent matters. The Conservative manifesto talks of a ‘fixed quota’ on asylum seekers – a term disconcertingly reminiscent of the cruelly-administered ‘quota vouchers’ introduced (in very small numbers) under the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. Admittedly, the Conservatives are here talking not of British citizens of foreign residence (as the 1968 Act shamefully discriminated against – in particular those of Asian descent living in East Africa), but of foreign nationals. Nonetheless, a quota is arbitrary in its application (the applicant who fulfils the last place in the quota will be for all practical purposes no different from the one who falls just outside it) and will certainly result in injustices born of bureaucratic indifference to individual circumstances. On immigration overall, politicians lack the type of knowledge required to make such fine judgements – just as they lack the type (and not merely the amount) of knowledge required to administer efficiently the allocation of capital to competing commercial enterprises.

My correspondent has recommended to me a new pamphlet by Peter Lilley, published by the Centre for Policy Studies, a summary of which is available here. Lilley makes a fair point that ministers have made economically populist (and fallacious) claims about immigration (e.g. that there absolute shortages of labour in certain industries and that immigration can fill them). But in invoking market forces to “restrict the inflow of immigrants” and thereby “protect UK workers from being undercut”, Lilley assumes that such undercutting does in fact take place, whereas the evidence is that it does not. The Home Office published a valuable paper on the social and economic analysis of migration in 2001 of which the most important single point (p. 34, para. 6.21) is that national insurance data in the UK support the “assimilation hypothesis”, i.e. that – as in the US – migrants generally earn less than native workers but after a time overtake them. (Admittedly I haven’t read Lilley’s full case, but have the pamphlet on order – my correspondent tells me Lilley deals with this point, so I shall add an update to this post in due course to render accurately Lilley’s case.)

There are policies that should be implemented to ameliorate communal tensions – forging a common adherence to the Crown as a symbol of British constitutionalism, combating Islamist demagoguery, ostracising far-Right parties such as the BNP and Respect, and insisting on monolingualism in the public sphere (a common language being essential for a polyglot nation). But if immigration has so little to do with the case, I can see no good reason for making it an election issue, and quite a lot of reasons for not doing so.