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No foreigners please, we are British

Over the coming months, Britain will see what Immigration Minister Liam Byrne has — with a touch of hyperbole — hailed as the “biggest shake-up of the immigration system in its history.” The biggest shake-up or not, it is clearly driven by a desperate attempt by the Labour Party to seize the initiative on what is likely to be one of the key issues on which the next general election will be fought. And, probably, won or lost.

If the proposed package of reforms goes through, as it appears likely, Britain will have become virtually a fortress by this time next year, with entry for non-European Union nationals restricted to those who have “something to offer Britain” and are seen as “key contributors” to British economy — such as people working in financial and public services, the IT sector and education and business.

A government document, setting out the details, says: “Employers should look first to recruit from the U.K. and the EU before recruiting migrants from outside the EU. The system should therefore be focused primarily on bringing in migrants who are highly skilled or to do key jobs that cannot be filled from domestic labour or the EU.”

There will be no place for low and non-skilled workers under the new regime dealing a blow to hundreds of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who come every year to take jobs that do not require special skills. So, no more Indian and Pakistani chefs, waiters, cleaners and taxi drivers, thank you. (For those interested in statistics, some 12,000 unskilled people from non-EU countries — mostly Asia and Africa — came to the U.K. last year.)

In the brave new “non-EU-immigrant-free Britain,” even casual visitors such as tourists and people visiting their U.K.-based relatives will face restrictions. The period for which they are allowed to stay in Britain will be reduced from six to three months; and British families sponsoring relatives abroad will be required to deposit a £1,000-cash bond which will be forfeited if their guests overstay.

The centrepiece of the new regime is an Australian-style points system which, officials make clear, is designed to keep out the “unwanted” immigrant. In future, all non-EU applicants will be judged on a sliding “points” scale to determine their eligibility. Those with higher skills and qualifications will earn more points — the number of points progressively declining for those with low or no skills.

Getting a student visa will also become more difficult and time-consuming. This is bad news for Britain’s cash-strapped universities at a time when they are desperately trying to woo foreign students who pay up to four or five times more than their domestic peers for the same courses and are regarded as cash cows, contributing some £five billion to the British economy every year. Universities U.K., which represents Vice-Chancellors, has already protested saying the new rules are likely to make Britain a less attractive destination for foreign students costing universities millions of pounds in lost fees.

Officially, the proposed shake-up has been justified on the ground that the present system is too complicated and open to abuse. The new rules, it is claimed, will be “simpler, clearer and easier to enforce,” besides offering the “best way of letting in only those people who have something to offer Britain.”

Fair enough. Every country has a right to decide who to let in and who to keep out. And so does Britain. But that tells only half the story. What really lies at the heart of these “reforms” is the competitive politics of immigration with Labour and the Tories trying to outdo each other in appearing to be in tune with the public mood. It is all about sounding tougher on “protecting” the national borders from illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers. For, therein lie the votes in the current climate of hostility to further immigration.

The anti-immigrant mood, once confined to the xenophobic fringes, has now become mainstream with surveys showing that most Britons believe that their country has been “swamped” by too many foreigners and the time has come to put up a “house full” board. It has been fuelled by alarming (supposedly “independent”) studies about the negative impact of immigration on everything from the rise in Britain’s population and its changing demography to the crime situation.

One recent survey, widely reported in the media, claimed that Britain’s racial profile was changing so rapidly as a result of the growing immigration population that in many cities native white Britons were likely to be reduced to minorities over the next 30 years. We were presented with a picture of a future Britain dotted with towns taken over completely by Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants. Although its author, Ludi Simpson of Manchester University, insisted that he was not being alarmist, any native Briton reading it would be justified in inferring that his country is in danger of being run over by foreigners.

And now consider this front-page splash in The Daily Telegraph (Dec. 17): “English is minority language in 1,300 schools.” The newspaper cited “official” data to highlight the adverse “impact of high levels of immigration on the education system” with native English-speaking children being heavily outnumbered in many schools by children who do not speak English. Teachers’ unions were reported as saying that educating a non-English speaking child could cost as much as £30,000 a year extra. The report, then, warned that the “rising number of foreign pupils without a decent grasp of English” was “undermining” education standards.

Indeed, pick up any survey and immigration tops the list of issues that people say they are most concerned about though they deny that this has anything to do with racism. They believe that immigrants are taking away local jobs, and putting intolerable pressure on the already fragile public services. Some also see them as a threat to the British “way of life” and community “cohesion.”

It is all too easy to blame the usual suspects like the Tories, the racist British National Party and right-wing tabloids for fuelling such negative perceptions of immigrants. But the Labour Party’s own record on the issue in the past 10 years that it has been in power does not inspire confidence. First, instead of fighting its critics politically by highlighting the social and economic benefits of immigration, it chose the easy option of keeping up with the Joneses in pandering to the lurid tabloid headlines. This was compounded by its poor management of the problem on the ground.

The system was in such a shambles in the early years of the erstwhile Blair government that it appeared as though it had lost the plot altogether with no idea of who was coming into the country and who was leaving. This left the field open for wild estimates creating an impression that Britain had become a “soft touch” for economic migrants from around the world.

Perhaps the biggest mistake was settling asylum-seekers, many of whom did not speak English or had little knowledge of local culture, in poor white working class areas already suffering from high unemployment, housing shortages and poor public services. It proved a recipe for disaster as the local population resented the arrival of newcomers whom it saw as a burden on the already scarce resources. The resulting tensions were cynically exploited by the BNP to win a series of local elections, some in traditional Labour strongholds, by portraying itself as the sole saviour of white Britons.

In the past two years or so, the BNP has emerged as a formidable electoral factor in local politics solely on the back of a virulent anti-immigration campaign. The Labour and Conservative parties, rather than responding politically to the challenge, are instead bogged down in a bidding war over who can outflank the BNP on the issue. Several Labour MPs, prompted by a fear of losing the next election if they are not seen to be tough on immigration, have started sounding like the BNP.

It is against this backdrop that the “biggest shake-up in history” is taking place. With Labour’s public ratings at their worst since it came to power in 1997 — trailing the Tories by 13 points at the last count — and Gordon Brown fast acquiring the reputation for being the most crisis-prone Labour Prime Minister of recent times, the government is relying heavily on its new immigration package to regain ground.

But with Tories promising even tougher measures, including a cap on the number of immigrants who should be allowed to come into Britain every year, and most people still doubtful about Labour’s competence to manage immigration (much the same way as people do not trust the Tories on economy), the debate is far from over yet.

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