Once more the politicians have promised something they have been unable to deliver, and this time we cannot hide behind the excuse of distant European elites.
Not that this is a specifically British problem. To a greater or lesser extent, nearly all “high income” economies are suffering from the same failure to control both legal and illegal migration.
In Europe, it’s already reshaping the political landscape, laying waste to the traditional centre ground as it goes. The same thing could yet happen here.
Britain’s Labour Party may be well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls at present. But even with the UK’s first past the post electoral system, which hugely favours the two biggest parties, Labour will surely, in time, wither just as comprehensively as the centre-Left has done on the continent if it fails to address these concerns.
The standard defence of relatively free movement across borders has long been that, despite the pressures imposed on infrastructure and social cohesion, the addition of new skills and younger blood that immigration provides is bound to be economically beneficial in the long run.
This may once have been true. France’s loss was England’s gain when highly skilled Huguenots fled across the channel from the late seventeenth century onwards to escape religious persecution. More recently, the same was true of Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin.
Yet in an age of mass migration from almost everywhere, positive stories like these are much harder to come by. If truth be told, much migration has become more of an economic cost than a benefit.
Economies grow in two ways – either through population growth or productivity gain. It is only the latter form of growth that advances living standards.
If population growth through migration leads naturally to productivity gain, then there would still be an economic case to be made for it, but sadly this no longer seems to be true. To the contrary, very high levels of net immigration over the past twenty years have gone hand in hand with a marked fall off in productivity gain.
Britain’s poor productivity record has many different causes, admittedly, but if the old orthodoxy on the benefits of migration were correct, you would expect to see at least some positives in terms of innovation, work ethic and entrepreneurialism.
Worse still, changes in the mix of immigration, in part brought about by Brexit, has further magnified the economic negatives.
One of the great ironies of today’s record levels of migration is that they seem to have done little or nothing to ease Britain’s acute labour shortages. It is partly to address these shortages that so many work visas are being handed out, particularly in social care, the health service and hospitality. But to little avail.
The latest Office for National Statistics data show net migration of around 750,000 last year, compared to roughly 220,000 in 2019, yet vacancies are still close to record levels.
Today’s vast increase in the number of migrants is moreover entirely driven by non-EU nationals. The upsurge comes from humanitarian visas, international students, and dependents.
