Immigration figures

I have rarely commented upon immigration because I really cannot be bothered with having to moderate all the comments calling me a racist that I would no doubt receive. However the debacle around the counting of immigrants has left me fuming. This government releases a figure of 800,000 for the number of foreign workers entering the UK over the past decade; within two days they have had to revise the figure up, first to 1.1 million and then to 1.5 million. Even the latter figure is only an estimate, in fact it has to be only estimate because this Labour Government stopped the procedure of counting immigrants back in 1997. Now it is all done by interview surveys; as Matthew d'Ancona
writes in the Telegraph reports "privately, very senior ministers say that the sample used to arrive at these estimates is so small as to be worthless". Now isn't that reassuring? Our Government doesn't know how many people have entered the country in the last 10 years. However they can state with great certainty that "immigration is good for the country", that "immigration increases economic growth", that "we need foreigners to do the jobs that British people are unwilling to do", that "Britain needs migrant workers to help pay for our pensions" and that "Migrants contribute a net £2.5 billion to the exchequer". Harriet Harman was spouting the same claims again on The Politics Show this morning as well as attacking the Conservative party as the "nasty party" and as racist. How do they know this, other than as an article of faith, if they do not know how many immigrants into the UK there have been? The 800,000, 1,1000,000, 1,5000,000 figure came under more scrutiny yesterday when the Telegraph reported a discrepancy of around 500,000 between the number of people granted work permits with the number of people issued with National Insurance numbers.


You might want to read this article from Migration News in 1998 and see what you think of the promises and predictions within it.

You might want to contrast the above with this article entitled "Free Movement: A Case Against Immigration Controls" that is on the "Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment" web site. This organisation describes itself thus "We are a multi-racial alliance of feminist community organizers, scholarly activists and health practitioners committed to promoting the social and economic empowerment of women in a context of global peace and justice; and eliminating poverty."

Another article you may wish to peruse is this from "Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls" by Teresa Hayter. I reproduce two extracts here to give you a flavour of the belief set of some people. First this, "New migrants must have not only the right to work, but the right to join trade unions, to employment protection, to go on strike and to vote, and they must have full access to all the benefits enjoyed by other citizens, including health care, education, unemployment benefits and social security. They must not be threatened with deportation if they attempt to assert their rights."
Second this, "Finally, it remains true that whatever the economic rationale for securing a cheap and compliant workforce through 'managed immigration', ultimately immigration controls are explicable only by racism. If governments merely wanted a compliant workforce they could allow employers to make free use of the vast reservoir of labour which now exists in the world because of centuries of imperialist theft, as many employers in the United states and elsewhere urge. It is perhaps conceivable that immigration controls could disappear under capitalism. Many disagree, believing that free movement of people will only become a political possibility once the capitalist expropriation of the wealth of the Third World, and the wars to enable this, end. But while the abolition of immigration controls may require a revolution, what is clear is that, as we said in our manifesto No One Is Illegal, to render them fair would require a miracle. There can be no such thing as fair or non-racist immigration controls. Immigration controls have their origins in racism, and they legitimate and breed racism. They are inherently discriminatory, since they exclude foreigners or outsiders. They need to be opposed in their totality."

I have read many times in various places the theory that the relaxation of immigration controls and the relaxed attitude to immigration increasing over the last 10 years is due to a feeling among our rulers and liberal intelligentsia that we should redistribute wealth to the poor in other countries by opening our borders to let some of them in to this country. I used to doubt the validity of such a theory; having read the above, maybe I should lend it more credence.


Further up this article I listed some of the statemnets that Ministers and others use to justify the levels of immigration into this country. If you would like to read the responses that the BBC and Channel 4 do not raise with the makers of such statements, then I recommend a trip to Migration Watch's FAQ page. Migration Watch is an organisation that was attacked for being racist and for scaremongering back in the first few years of this decade. Then they obtained under freedom of information rules the following email from one Home Office official to another sent on 29 July 2003: ”I have made this point many times before but can we please stop saying that MW migration forecasts are wrong. I have pointed out before that MW assumptions are often below the government actuary’s department’s high migration scenario.”

And here is a quote from an editorial in The Times of 23 August 2004:
”Once an electorate loses faith in the reliability of evidence on which decisions are made, no amount of persuasion can restore faith in the system. This would be the real damage of any Home Office version of the Office for National Statistics. And this is why Migrationwatch is right to raise the alarm.”


Don't forget that it was this Labour Government that confidently predicted that the number of workers who would come to this country from Eastern Europe to work would be 13,000. The actual number that have come since April 2004 is in fact 1,000,000.


Having read Migration Watch's rebuttals to the oft raised arguments in favour of immigration, what do you think now?