Asylum and the far right

Across Europe and beyond, governments are struggling with the question of how to manage immigration.  In the UK, this manifests itself in a fixation on how to stop the small boat crossings of the Channel.  In Germany, a tightening of boarder controls.  In the US, an attempt to build a wall.  All of these responses are driven by the far-right’s simplistic and aggressive anti-foreigner rhetoric.  In an attempt to placate the far-right, centrist governments have shifted their policies rightwards.  This only results in the legitimisation of the far-right discourse.  Voters who by inclination are centre-right move further to the right – on the basis that if anti-immigrant language and legislation is legitimate, why support the paler imitation and not the real deal?

We saw this failure of placation in the UK in 2016 when David Cameron, in an attempt to regain control over the right-wing of the Tory Party, offered a referendum on EU membership.  What happened was that the UK left the EU (to its own detriment) and the Tory Party lurched further to the right, making itself all but unelectable in the process.

Leaving the EU brought an end to the free movement of labour – remember those Polish plumbers?  Ending free movement was also supposed to solve the immigration problem.  But in 2022, the net immigration reached a record high of 750,000 legal migrants as employers sought to replace the departed EU workforce, with 2023 only slightly lower at 686,000. If this level of immigration had caused high unemployment in the UK, there might be a legitimate economic case to make for limiting immigration.  But the unemployment figures for the UK have remained low (4.1% in July 2024) and there are still nearly one million vacancies in the UK labour market.  Those two sets of figures demonstrate that immigrants fill jobs in the UK that would otherwise be left vacant, in the process contributing to the country’s economic growth and tax-take. Immigrants are also less likely to claim unemployment benefit (https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-labour-market-an-overview/).

Looking over the horizon, the UK’s population is ageing and the birth-rate is dropping.  The closure of primary schools bears witness to this (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly559jnd2zo) and the current UK birth-rate of 1.49 babies/woman is well below that needed to maintain a stable population without immigration (https://www.ft.com/content/bd3d01b3-32a7-45d0-b06b-42e8eef70cfb).  As the population ages and more people enter retirement (and live longer in retirement), the UK will need an increasing birth-rate to ensure there are enough workers to keep the economy stable (or growing).  Since the UK’s birth-rate is not increasing, the only way to maintain a stable old age dependency ratio is through immigration.

An obsessive focus on reducing immigration UK universities is economically and socially harmful – as UK universities are finding to their cost.  UK Governments have included foreign students in immigration figures.  In an effort to reduce those figures, the previous Government banned foreign students from bringing their families to the UK.  As a result, foreign student numbers have plummeted, depriving UK universities of vital revenue, meaning that many universities are in severe financial difficulty as a result ( https://www.ft.com/content/0aca64a4-5ddc-43f8-9bba-fc5d5aa9311d).

The answer to tackling immigration is not to send immigrants to Rwanda (or Albania) or to ‘stop the boats’ – and in any case, given the legal immigration figures quoted above, the 30,000 or so immigrants who cross the Channel in small boats fades into insignificance.  If the government really wants to ‘smash the gangs’, the best way to do so is to destroy their business model.  The gangs can charge extortionate amounts to bring desperate people to the UK because they have a monopoly - there is no other route.  If, instead of focusing on destroying boats, the government directed its energy towards the creation of safe asylum routes, backed up by a well-funded and efficiently-run system in which claims were processed rapidly (and asylum seekers allowed to work whilst their claims were being processed, filling vacancies in the UK economy and in the process contributing to economic growth and consequently, a higher tax take and better investment in the UK’s public services) the demand for illegal entry routes would drop dramatically as the dangerous cross-channel routes were replaced by alternative safer, quicker, legal routes. 

In addition, if the Government also reverted to its pledge to allocate 0.7% of GDP to overseas development, it would also begin to help create economic conditions in origin countries that might make taking the perilous journey to the UK seem less attractive.

Immigration is far from a new phenomenon. People have moved from place to place in search of a better (or different) way of life for as long as human kind has existed. What has changed is people's perceptions of the scale of immigration. War, famine and climate change have and will exacerbate immigration. Unless we find a better way to handle it and cease using dehumanising and negative language to talk about immigration, the far-right will continue to make political hay out of other people's intense suffering: that will fuel racial divides and threaten community cohesion.

Governments cannot simply sit by and allow that to happen. They have a responsibility to their populations. Clearly, uncontrolled immigration has an impact on social cohesion, which is only aggravated by a failure to invest adequately in a country’s public services.  But, as well as creating safe and secure legal migration and asylum routes, Government, instead of pandering to the far-right’s narrative and language (which serves only to legitimise their anti-foreigner discourse and further aggravate social tensions) has a responsibility to actively speak up about the value, benefit and advantages of immigration.

Migrants are simply other humans who are seeking a better way of life. We could all do with pausing and reflecting that, but for the grace of God, those desperate people placing their faith in flimsy boats could be us and our families. The economy needs migrants and politicians should have the courage to stop dehumanising them and instead recognise and celebrate the value they can bring to our society.