"Indeed, in my view mass migration and the management of immigration is now the greatest challenge facing all European governments. We have to get away from the notion that anyone who wants to talk about immigration is somehow a racist."
          John Reid, Home Secretary, speech at DEMOS, 9 August 2006.

Most developed countries have an immigration policy, usually because of two main concerns. First, there is the sheer weight of numbers. The more crowded the country, the more necessary is an immigration policy. The UK is already one of the most densely populated parts of the world, with double the population density of France and eight times that of America. England, on its own, is more densely populated than India. The consequences for house prices, traffic jams, school places, wages, and hospital waiting lists are there for all to see.

The second concern is the impact on the culture. We are a free people whose heritage of liberty rests on moral equality, reciprocity, toleration, and applying the same law to 'the favourite at court, and the country man at plough' (as Locke put it in the seventeenth century). We are entitled to take into account whether or not newcomers share our commitment to freedom. If they dislike democracy and prefer authoritarian government, advocate second-class status for women, despise the West because it is 'decadent', and are inclined to violence, perhaps they should consider living in a more congenial country. All free peoples are entitled to protect their institutions by ensuring that newcomers share their ideals.

How much should we worry about the wear and tear on the social fabric and pressure on public services that immigration brings? Some say that we should put aside our concerns altogether because immigration benefits the economy? But is the economic gain completely clear-cut? In reality, immigration produces both economic winners and losers.

The latest official statistics are for 2005, when net migration into the UK was 185,000. However, these figures do not fully reflect the increase in migration from the ten countries that joined the EU in May 2004. According to the Home Office Accession Monitoring Report, there were 579,000 applicants to the worker registration scheme from May 2004 to December 2006. About 82% were aged between 18 and 34 and came here to work, with some 97% applying for full-time work. Worker registrations are not a measure of net migration, because we do not know how many have gone back, but it is the best figure we have.

Immigration can also lower the wages of native workers. On any controversial topic it is common to find armies of academics arguing about the facts. Studies of the effect on wages of immigration are no exception and some researchers claim to find that immigration reduces wages and some that it does not. The most convincing studies show that the evidence has been that an increase in the supply of unskilled labour leads to a fall in wages for the low paid. For example, a study of the impact of migration into the USA between 1979 and 1995 by George Borjas of Harvard University, concluded that immigration had reduced the wages of unskilled workers (those without American high-school diplomas) by five percentage points.

A UK study for the Low Pay Commission looked at the impact of immigration between 1997 and 2005 and concluded that the arrival of economic migrants benefited workers in the middle and upper part of the wage distribution, but placed downward pressure on the wages of workers on lower levels of pay. Over the period, wages at all points of the wage distribution increased (presumably reflecting the growth rate in the economy as a whole) but Professor Dustmann and his colleagues from UCL concluded that wages in the lowest quartile would have increased faster without the effect of immigration. They estimated that for each one per cent increase in the ratio of immigrants to natives in the working age population there was a 0.5 per cent decrease in the wages of the lowest tenth of workers.

Among the hallmarks of a decent society is the possibility that the least fortunate can realistically hope for success through sheer hard work. We expect people who may never earn more than a modest income to work hard if they can. But are they not entitled to ask for a fair chance? Allowing an unchecked flow of workers from overseas is harmful to the members of society who can least afford it.

The net inflow of migrants in 2004 (223,000) was the equivalent of adding the population of a town like Nottingham, and the unprecedented influx of newcomers from overseas has inevitably had an impact on the availability of housing. Over the last few years average prices of new homes for first-time buyers have increased sharply, often putting home ownership out of their reach. Immigration is not the only cause, and the tendency to live in smaller households has played its part, but no honest voice denies that immigration is a major factor. Moreover, immigration can be controlled, whereas the rate of family breakdown and the desire to live alone are not so easily influenced by the Government.

Between 1996 and 2004 net international migration has averaged 140,000 a year, when the Government's household projections, which are used to estimate the demand for housing, were based on 65,000 per year. As the respected think tank, MigrationWatch UK has shown using the Government's own figures, over the same period the housing stock fell short of household formation by 370,000 and about 70% of this shortfall was due to additional immigration. There has been an impact on social housing too. Between 1997 and 2005, 167,000 additional social and local authority homes were built. Over that same period, in addition to immigrants, 216,000 people were given asylum or exceptional leave to remain. This figure alone exceeds the number of social homes constructed.

A more measured system of immigration control is long overdue. We need to ensure that specific skill shortages can be met from outside the country, but can any case at all be made for mass immigration?

Notes

1 Borjas, G., Heaven's Door, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.