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Britain needs immigrants. According to the Office for National Statistics this week, Britain’s “indigenous” population in the 2030s will be static and ageing. Growth in population will be buoyed only by immigrants, their number predicted to rise by 5 million over the next seven years. Thank goodness, surely, for them.
As this debate lurches back into public discourse, it is cursed by the ease with which xenophobia delivers political gain. The fact is that Britons have turned massively in favour of immigration over the past half century. In the 1950s and 1960s, roughly 80%-90% wanted it to stop. Then the inflow was under 250,000 a year and Enoch Powell could forecast “rivers of blood”. Net migration was below zero.
In 2023, immigration into Britain was estimated in excess of 1.2 million, yet public opposition to immigration was down to 40-50%. It had risen in the run-up to Brexit, when it was the lead factor in the leave vote. It fell back as EU workers vanished, but opposition rose again last year as non-EU small boat arrivals gained daily publicity. Even then, fewer than half those polled said it should be reduced.
Figures can prove almost anything. What is significant is that where most immigrants settle – in and round London – is both the most productive part of Britain and where opposition to them is weakest. In London, over a third of the current population was born abroad. Public opinion certainly resents the immigrants’ claim on the NHS and welfare, but it welcomes them, often overwhelmingly, as professionals (notably doctors) and as care, hospitality and farm workers.
For my part, I know only that many of the services I use, for building, cleaning, transport and eating out, are overwhelmingly supplied by immigrants. Diversity is a feature of most major world cities. I note that the states with high immigration levels – the US, Britain, Germany and France – are also among the most prosperous and most free.
None of this really matters. It is all but impossible for a liberal country to prevent enterprising, often desperate, people from penetrating its borders. When the Boris Johnson government stifled the supply of short-term EU workers under a hard Brexit, long-term non-EU workers simply replaced them in even greater numbers. Recent limits on foreign students and their dependents have diverted visas towards particular skills. But it is hard to see such diversion aiding state sectors now chronically understaffed.
In other words, immigration into Britain may need more vigorous regulation, but it is not going to stop, nor should it. Global population mobility is like the climate crisis. It can be mitigated but not easily reversed. If two successive leaders of Britain’s Conservative party can have immigrant backgrounds, it is hard to argue that Britain can not adjust.
What matters is how to handle the continued toxicity of immigration on domestic politics. The issue has proved a gift to extremists in all the west’s “receiving” nations, from the Scandinavian countries and Germany to the US. Immigration as code for race is a gift to America’s far right, just as a side-effect of immigration, identity politics, is to the left.
Research by the Oxford thinktank Migration Observatory shows that the British public is ready to welcome newcomers to its economy and even to its communities. But there is a proviso. The welcome is not unconditional. The relentless publicity given to “immigrant crime” – actually no worse than “homegrown” – reflects a sense that hosts expect higher standards of “guests”. Bursts of reported criminality, as recently with Albanian drug gangs, appear to come in phases of migration rather than reflecting underlying national cultures.
Many countries now have protocols based around conditional inclusion and good citizenship. Effort needs to be made to reduce the clash of cultures between Britons and some immigrant groups – such as on issues of gender. This should surely be met other than with the ludicrous Home Office “hostile environment” citizenship test, with questions such as “when is Saint David’s Day?” and “which two houses fought in the Wars of the Roses?”.
Few on either side could complain at the deportation of recent immigrant criminals or at an insistence on some acceptance of an immigrant “charter”. Those intending to settle permanently in a new land could surely be required to learn of its popular festivals, beliefs, traditions and codes of conduct. Community discipline matters, or should matter. Such a charter – which might also be given to second-homers arriving in distant villages – should be seen as part of the migration ritual.
Merely deploring British immigration is no longer meaningful. It is the crudely concealed politics of emotion. We cannot stop foreigners wanting to come to Britain, but we can regulate it and turn it to our advantage. We can handle it.
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Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
