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Labour has a subtle plan to fix migration’s problems

Jonathan Lindsell, 30 September 2014

Even if you listened closely to Ed Miliband’s Labour conference speech, you’d be forgiven for missing his immigration discussion. He missed it too. It was part of the planned script omitted along with Labour’s deficit commitment:

Immigration benefits our country but those who come here have a responsibility to learn English and earn their way. And employers have a responsibility not to exploit migrant workers and undercut wages.

Behind this, though, Miliband actually implied a whole raft of measures that could mitigate British unease with immigration. He didn’t talk about leaving Europe or limiting actual migrant numbers – even Eurosceptic conservative Owen Paterson thinks this logic is ‘wrong’ since Switzerland, Norway and Australia have comparable migrant strains.

Instead Miliband’s six promises all addressed different symptoms of immigration. His plans would’ve been seen in a different light if he’d voiced the paragraph above. By reducing the problems migration arguably contributes to, Labour could make the system fairer for everyone and reduce native-migrant antipathy.

Dignified work is a standard Labour topic, hence Miliband’s focus on zero-hours contracts, increasing the minimum wage to £8/hour and committing to ‘halve the number of people on low pay’. If these policies succeed, they would help Britons feel their work is being properly valued and their wages aren’t being undercut by migrants, who are traditionally exploited on illegal low wages or in criminal conditions due to their disorientation and low job security.

A common method of exploitation is to hire migrants on a questionable ‘self-employed’ basis, meaning they don’t qualify for vacation, pensions or sick pay. Miliband promised that the self-employed entrepreneurs will get ‘equal rights’. If Labour both helps to increase natives’ wages and cracks down hard on migrant exploitation, it would address the fear of native labour being undermined.

This should be complemented by Miliband’s jobs promises. His ‘third national goal’ includes creating 1,000,000 new jobs in green technology, plus beefing up the green investment bank and devolving funds to insulate 5,000,000 homes. Together with commitments to subsidise employers offering apprenticeships and ‘gold standard technical qualifications’ created by an education-business partnership, this should create a good deal of new work. The more new work there is for the British-educated, the less natives will feel that migrants are ‘stealing’ jobs.

Housebuilding is an important third consideration. Labour intends to double the number of first-time buyers to 200,000p.a., to build garden towns and cities with 500,000 new homes, and to develop brownfields with ‘top priority…capital investment’.  This would sustain jobs, but equally importantly should reduce strain on the housing market so natives don’t feel they’re being outcompeted by migrants for a place to live.

Infrastructure strains could also be met by Labour’s headline promise to boost NHS funding. Over 20,000 new care staff, costing several billion, might assuage fears of ‘NHS tourism’ – especially as they are paid for by a mansion tax and crackdowns on hedge funds’ tax avoidance. The man on the street won’t be out of pocket to give migrants healthcare.

The whole plan is optimistic, and certainly long-term, but forms a cohesive set of ideas to alleviate immigration’s challenges. However it fails to soften culture clash, unless Labour gets serious with language provision and cultural integration. The Coalition recently cut funding to migrant language courses but it makes economic and social sense to incentivise newcomers to learn English as easily as possible.

Not everyone will agree with Miliband’s rosy opinion of immigration, of course. Ukip want to leave the EU and limit net migration to 50,000 (or 155,000) while the Conservatives aim for under 100,000. However, if you accept Labour’s premises on migration being positive overall, then using measures that are good for the country to ease tensions in work, housing and public services certainly seems sensible.

3 comments on “Labour has a subtle plan to fix migration’s problems”

  1. What I mean by surreptitious conquest is precisely that, colonisation with the ready neglect or active assistance of those with political power. Moreover, we know from Andrew Neather that the 3-4 million net admitted immigration figure for the Blair/Brown years (the illegal immigration probably added another million or two was a deliberate policy to change the nature of British society, viz:

    ” Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67”, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case.

    But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

    I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

    Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.

    This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants” http://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-listen-to-the-whingers–london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html

    Hence, the immigration policy of Blair was a most fundamental act of treason because it was done with the intention of changing the nature of British society without this being put to the British people. There was also the crude party advantage that Labour knew they would accrue from mass immigration, because immigrants vote for Labour in most cases.
    What such a policy loses Labour is the trust and loyalty of white voters, especially the working-class, who are either moving to Ukip or simply stepping aside from politics and not voting.

    As for stopping the shutting out of British workers from many jobs through deliberate foreign employment, while we are in the EU there is nothing which can be done to stop it because of the free movement of labour within the EEA. Forcing employers to advertise at home in job centres for a few weeks will have no substantial effect, because employers have their labour supply lines already in place for most of the types of jobs which will be affected. They will simply ignore the proposed adverts in the jobs centres.

    In the case of large employers, especially public sector ones, there will also be corrupt practices going on with foreign agencies being employed to supply staff for which they get handsomely paid on the understanding that the person giving them the work in Britain gets a backhander . (I used to do criminal investigation work for the Revenue so I can assure from personal experience that this happens). Nor will wages rise or even remain steady if immigration continues at the present rate.

    As for housing (and jobs, welfare and education) to say that 4-5 million extra people arriving between 1997-2014 makes no important difference is a simple refusal to face facts.
    Take away those 4-5 million and we should not have a housing shortage, which I will remind you only dates back twenty years or so. Before then housing in London was within the reach of average earners to buy with rents reasonable on London wages.

    The truth Mr Lindsell, is that the native British, and the white working class in particular, have had inflicted upon them what they consider to be a calamity, the material effects of which have reduced their lives both morally and practically. If you doubt that, start advocating a referendum on mass immigration. Hold such a referndum and then you will get your answer.

  2. The central point about mass immigration is that it changes the nature of a society. It is a form of surreptitious conquest. That is the primary objection. The obnoxious effects of pressure on jobs, pay a, housing, health and welfare are important but secondary.

    Labour’s proposals would do nothing to address the primary objection, nor much to alleviate the ills of the secondary objections. For example, most jobs are today what they have always been, low-skilled or unskilled. It is not lack of education which is the reason for many Britons not being able to get jobs, but the employment practices of employers, including public service ones, who positively discriminate against British workers by employing agencies which recruit only from abroad or foreign gangmasters who only use people of their own ethnicity.

    As for housing, with net immigration running at nearly 300,000 per year and millions in the country already unable to find permanent and adequate housing, no government will be able to reduce the overall shortage if immigration continues at anywhere near its present level because they will not be able to build fast enough.

    As for the green measures, on the basis of past experience these will be expensive pie-in-the-sky vanity projects.

    The proposal for 20,000 nurses will be largely met by immigrant nurses because Britain does not train enough. That will increase the immigrant pressure.

    In short, the labour proposals are a poorly thought out mess.

    1. Thank you for your comment

      I agree that migration’s effect on the ‘nature of society’ is important – that’s why I suggest Labour (and other parties) put much more effort into linguistic education and more cultural integration of migrants. This conforms with the thinking of Paul Collier in ‘Exodus’, for example, which looks at how the key determinant of sustainable migration is the rate of normalisation versus diaspora insular buildups.

      I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘surreptitious conquest’? Conquests require a degree of intentionality and coordination that cannot be identified in multi-country migration over such a long period, with no clear political or strategic aims. I imagine the voters to whom Labour is trying to appeal would disagree with your characterisation, as indeed would most migrants.

      You note that employers “positively discriminate against British workers by employing agencies which recruit only from abroad or foreign gangmasters who only use people of their own ethnicity”. Miliband’s speech explicitly raised this problem, saying companies that recruited from non-EEA countries would have to provide an equal number of apprenticeships for young Britons. As I explain above, his other measures should (if they work as intended, which I appreciate is a sizable ‘if’) mean that non-British workers are paid the same and work to the same standards as Britons, meaning they do not have a competitive advantage through exploitation. If this is the case then increased migrant employment could only be down to the preferences of UK customers and employers – i.e voters.

      You’re probably right that more needs to be done on housing – I believe my colleague is working o a housing paper at the moment, out in the next few months. Again, if you accept Labour’s premises that in itself migration is not a bad thing, and that the negative symptoms such as wage deflation and cultural conflict can be alleviated, then the housing shortage is just another symptom – if a major one. Migration is indeed a factor in our population growth but not the only cause: we’d have a serious housing shortage without migration, potentially without as many builders to address it.

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