London's migrants are proof of our success

Published in the Evening Standard

Watch out, here comes another one. Give it sixty seconds and there will be one more. By the time the hour is up there'll be sixty, a steady march of them that none of us can stop. Or to put it as plainly as the full-page advertisement that appeared in yesterday's Daily Telegraph: "A migrant a minute is entering Britain."

Well, it makes a change from the aquatic imagery usually deployed by the anti-immigration lobby: normally we're "flooded" or "swamped" by a "rising tide" of newcomers, as if the British Isles themselves were about to sink under the weight. The so-called Speakout campaign which paid for yesterday's ad have gone for a different, though equally doom-laden approach - the ticking clock, evoking a countdown to some terrible midnight.

Theirs is a howl of rage against the arrival into this country of hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans since the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004. To quote the ad: "Without a debate or vote in Parliament, our elected MPs have handed control of our borders to the European Union, allowing unlimited immigration into Britain from EU countries."

It would be easy to dismiss the Speakout crowd as a retread of the Referendum Party or UK Independence Party: the same strain of Europhobia is visible (along with some of the same people, like the millionaire former UKIP backer Paul Sykes). That prejudice is hardly allayed when you click onto the 'Who we are' segment of the Speakout website and learn the answer: "A group of northern businessmen."

But a metropolitan sneer at the xenophobic industrialists of Bradford and Barnsley is not good enough. For they are not the only ones discussing immigration as if it were a threat to be tamed. Just this week the very Labour government Speakout so despise showed the extent to which it too is wary of allowing too many newcomers to cross the British threshold. Immigration minister Liam Byrne trumpeted as great news figures showing applications for asylum down by 9%, to their lowest level since 1993. At the same time, Gordon Brown demanded immigrants undertake community work before they be allowed to become British citizens. Both were doubtless keen to divert attention from another new set of statistics, showing that some 579,000 Eastern Europeans have registered to work in Britain since their countries joined the EU in 2004 - a figure which ministers admit could, if anything, be a serious underestimate.

On all fronts the government acts as if Speakout were essentially right: that immigration is a problem and that if we can keep more people out, then that can only be good. Nowhere should that feeling be more pronounced than in London, the most diverse city in the country and a magnet for migrants.

Yet so far we seem to be managing. It is not our businessmen who are taking out full-page ads in the national press to denounce migration. On the contrary it has become a fact of London life, from the Polish deli on every street corner to the Lithuanian nannies at the school gate.

And the evidence seems to bear out what we see anecdotally. Last week [check] the accountancy group PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report showing that, far from acting as a drain on our economy, migrants have lifted it, boosting growth, keeping a lid on inflation and interest rates without undermining the jobs of those born here. That's partly because, simply put, the Poles and others are doing jobs native-born Brits either can't or won't do.

This is why supporting immigration is no longer the exclusive preserve of right-on types in Hackney. Survey opinion among the Economist-readers in the City and they too will make the case for open borders. Philippe Legrain, author of the rousing polemic, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, puts it well when he says that if Britain wants the kind of migrants Speakout would doubtless welcome - American bankers, say - then it has to have people who will "sell those bankers sandwiches and clean their houses."

What's more the Polish builders and Slovak plumbers are not on benefits, they work hard and most go home after a while. The proof of their economic impact is clearest when you consider that Britain was the EU country most open to immigrants in 2004 - and is now the best-performing economy in Europe.

Still, even if Londoners have come to see immigration in a new, more positive light, a question remains. Surely there will come a time when London, open and welcoming as it is, will simply reach its limit, a point at which it is unable to absorb any more people? Our roads are already congested, our Tube trains full, our housing in short supply and cripplingly expensive and our public services creaking under the strain. Put plainly, how much more can London take?

Legrain is unworried. His book cites the case of Israel, which in the 1990s saw its workforce increase by 15% within seven years, thanks to the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union. In British terms, that would be equivalent to an immigration wave of 6m people. Yet Israel coped, so that after the mass migration wages were higher and unemployment lower than before. "Economies are remarkably adaptable," says Legrain, and the capacity of cities to expand, as London has done steadily since 1980, is great indeed.

To ask whether public services in London could cope with extra immigration is particularly rich, given that our hospitals, buses and trains have long relied on immigrant labour. But it's also a strange question to ask. For London had a strained infrastructure even before this post-2004 surge of newcomers: the Tube was full back then, too. Yet Speakout were not speaking out then. Nor were those who now express fear for London's capacity to cope equally vexed at the decades of growth as the capital sucked in people from Manchester or Glasgow. It makes you wonder: is this concern over London's limits really that - or a disguised protest at an excess of foreigners?

Of course there are challenges for a big city absorbing more and more people. But we should see that for what it is: a problem of success. And if we really don't like it, there is an easy solution: we can become poor. No one will want to come and live here then.

Posted on March 1, 2007 05:47 PM

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