Immigration, Immigration, Immigration

Ben Wildsmith

The unanimous view of people who bang on incessantly about immigration is that they are not allowed to talk about immigration.

Like spherical cats mewling for second breakfast, they have no sooner put the phone down after calling Talk Radio to complain about small boats, than they are back on Facey claiming that Sadiq Khan will have them jailed for eating smoky bacon crisps.

So, today’s news that net migration has dropped to 171 000 from a high of 944 000 in 2023, including a 50% drop last year would, you might think, be greeted by recreations of the Silver Jubilee and an outbreak of celebratory roundabout painting.

Nope. It doesn’t work like that. There is an entire political culture based on validating unfounded fears about immigration and it isn’t going to shut up shop just because the supposed problem is demonstrably disappearing.

Immigration is Elvis and Nigel Farage its Colonel Tom Parker – re-releasing Blue Christmas every year, long after the King’s lips had quivered their last.

Monomaniacal bores used to exist outside the general political conversation. You’d hear them knocking insistently on the window, with psychological need drooling down their cagoules, and resume your discussion with no more than pitying disquiet.

The algorithmic age, however, has ushered them on to our timelines in numbers that seem to suggest their obsessions are perfectly natural.

The rise of a purity cult on these islands is so at odds with the history of them that it should be laughable.

Online wrangling about what constitutes the ‘real’ Welsh, ‘authentic’ British, ‘indigenous’ Scots etc. might be explainable as the paranoia of populations under siege in a globalised economy, but that doesn’t erase the nonsensical unpleasantness of it all.

The idea that we’re all tethered to strips of land like those horses you see tied up on traffic islands in Cardiff is a gruesomely insular notion. ‘We’, because such nonsense relies above all on the construction of arbitrary exclusionary groups, didn’t thrive in the past by fearfully peering through a crack in the curtains for outsiders.

The chaotic ingress and egress of people, goods, and ideas was so profitable for imperial Britain that it was protected by force. So, to claim that our current impoverishment is due to a reduction in stumplike family trees is a bleak, incestuous fantasy that appeals only to profound unhappiness.

That unhappiness is the authentic element of anti-immigration rhetoric. People are being screwed; we have every right to be incensed by the decline in our standards of living.

Transnational capital, unregulated automation, and corporate homogeneity have turned much that we loved into a soulless wasteland of joyless consumerism, unfulfilling work, and diminishing returns for those doing it.

Keir Starmer’s willingness to legitimise the narrative about immigration being the cause of this discontent was a political error from which his successor must learn.

Challenge

Ben Brindle from the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, interpreted today’s figures for the Guardian.

“Today’s data illustrate a challenge the government faces, namely that the categories of migration it would most like to reduce are the ones least amenable to policy. As a result, migration of groups that make positive or broadly neutral economic impacts – such as skilled workers and partners of students – is down, while asylum-related migration remains high.”

All those flag-draped press conferences in which Starmer assured people that he ‘understood’ their concerns about immigration have led to a Pyrrhic victory of epic proportions. By pursuing a goal of reducing the headline figure on immigration, the government has succeeded in deterring high value immigrants from coming here to contribute.

What’s worse is that Starmer & Co. haven’t done this out of a mistaken belief in the policy, they know right well that the UK benefits from legal immigration. It has been done because the government is unwilling or unable to make a compelling case against anti-immigration rhetoric.

In the same way that Labour folded and accepted Thatcherite economics it has allowed Farage to own the narrative on immigration.

Betrayal

Not only was Labour’s rebranding as the party of dull union-jackery a betrayal of its principles, it was pointless. Voters who professed ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration have already moved on to ‘legitimate concerns’ about Islam and begun flirting with remigration, as hawked by the Restore Party’s Rupert Lowe.

No reduction in immigration figures will ever satisfy them, it’s just their thing.

The rest of us are left with an older, less skilled workforce and a ruling party having to reinvent itself two years on from the general election.

Our Senedd election proved that, here at least, the majority are not swayed by paranoid fairy tales. Attempts to make the campaign about immigration, when the outcome could not affect it, ran aground.

That result, and the fate of Keir Starmer, should be a lesson to any supposed progressive.

Lie down with dogs; get up with fleas.