Silent Majority Speaks

BRITAIN'S FULL!

By Roger Godsiff, Labour MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath - Daily Mail, Feb. 1, 2005

In this stark and controversial warning, a Labour MP speaks out to reveal the true cost of our immigration shambles

A fortnight ago a man came into my Birmingham constituency surgery. "Mr Godsiff, do you think you can help me? I want to regularise my residency in Britain," he said. So I asked him how long he had been living in this country."Eight years," he replied. I then inquired as to what basis he had first arrived here. "As a visitor."

That single case encapsulates the current mess of our immigration system. In this culture of institutional chaos, someone who comes to Britain as a visitor can stay here for eight years without a single question being asked by the authorities about his status.

No doubt my constituent could have remained here for years longer without any official challenge. And this example is hardly unique. Most inner-city MPs would have similar stories. It is largely because of this shambles that immigration has become such a concern to the public. And it is one that politicians cannot afford to ignore.

So the Government is talking about another crackdown on abuses in the asylum process, while next week the influential think-tank, the John Smith Institute, will propose the introduction of a green card immigration system similar to the one which operates in the U.S.

Racism

Michael Howard appears to be resorting to ever more unworkable and outlandish proposals, including a quota system for refugees, and the use of some distant offshore facility - its whereabouts so far unnamed - for the processing of asylum applications. Yet, right across the political spectrum, the debate on immigration has been bedevilled by two factors.

The first has been the influence of political correctness which has led to a reluctance to talk openly about the subject for fear of accusations of racism. But such an anxiety, while perhaps understandable, should have no part in a politician's thinking. To avoid addressing this issue is a dereliction of our public duty.

The second problem has been the disastrous lack of official information about the true nature of immigration into this country. For more than three decades, governments of both sides have wilfully refused to collect reliable data on numbers of immigrants. As a result, the debate is based on perceptions, not reality. And in such an emotional atmosphere, the xenophobic extreme Right, led by the BNP - which is so expert at exploiting public fears - has the upper hand, since none of its vile sloganising can be contradicted by hard facts.

It has been precisely to draw the poison of the BNP that I have been pressing government to institute a proper method for recording both entries and departures from this country, something which is disastrously lacking at present.

Every year, more than a million people enter Britain perfectly legally from countries with which we have pre-entry visa arrangements. They arrive mainly to visit relatives, to take up short-term employment or to study. Every year, as an MP, I ask the Home Office how many of these visitors return home. "We do not keep such statistics," the Home Office always replies.

Absurdity

I find that official indifference astonishing. What the immigration authorities are admitting is that they do not have a clue how many people are settling permanently in this country. They simply do not keep track of what happens to the vast majority of overseas visitors.

It would be so easy and cost-effective to establish the kind of operation that exists in South Africa or the U.S., where passports are screened both on entry and exit. But the Home Office here has always refused to do so, purely on grounds of costs. The absurdity of this stance is that other government departments and town halls have to pick up the mounting bill for immigration and asylum mess caused by the Home Office's cheese-paring.

It is sometimes argued that we should not worry too much about numbers, since Britain economically benefits from mass immigration. Now, as the MP for one of the most multiracial constituencies in Britain, I know better than most the contribution newcomers have made to my city and my country. Both Birmingham and Britain would be far poorer - financially, culturally and socially - without them.

But I also recognise the huge strain that unrestricted, unrecorded migrant growth is placing on communities, including those from ethnic minorities. Indeed, many of those who complain most vociferously in my constituency about uncontrolled immigration are those from Muslim, black and Asian backgrounds, who see at first hand the intolerable pressure that is now being placed on services such as housing, social care and education. They feel that, in the current remorseless focus on asylum seekers, their own needs are being sidelined.

On top of the dangers of social division, the economic arguments for further mass immigration are just as flawed. It is true that in Britain, as in most European countries, we have a declining birth rate, which means that we need an increase in the working population to support growing numbers of pensioners.

But the solution to the problem is surely to introduce a more flexible retirement age, allowing people to work longer, rather than removing any controls on immigration. Of course, in the long-term, such a move brings no real economic dividend since immigrants also become pensioners and thereby increase the burden on the state.

I find it bizarre that we should be seeking more migrants from the developing world when we are already members of a European Union of some 250 million people, in which there is already free movement of labour. Moreover, there is a strange moral contradiction between our provision of aid to the developing world, and our enthusiasm for creaming off the most gifted young people from such countries to work in our own public services and industries.

Every time we recruit a bright nurse from Africa, or an IT engineer from Asia, we are depriving those regions of part of their own human capability. It would surely be far better for us to use the resources in British universities to train the best of the coming generations in the developing world so they can go out and help their own societies rather than exploiting their skills for our own ends.

Clandestine

The morality of mass immigration is also undermined by the fact that much of it is carried out in a sinister, clandestine manner by people-traffickers, who realised 15 years ago that there is more money to be made out of transporting human misery than in peddling drugs. It is, therefore, absurd to pretend that there is anything enlightened in propping up this vile trade.

In Birmingham, we have worked tirelessly over the past 30 years to establish good race relations. There were serious difficulties in the early 1970s when a climate of fear and suspicion existed. But that has been replaced by a mood of tolerance and cooperation.

Yet now, this hard work could be put in peril by our failure to manage immigration properly. That is why all of us who are determined to foster racial harmony must demand a fairer, less shambolic system. Otherwise, the real xenophobes and racists will triumph.