Immigration, Refugees & the EU

Immigration Series 001.

Originally posted on Facebook 21 June 2016

I am generally in favour of immigration. In 2004, when the EU expanded east, because the UK did not impose the transitional restrictions on migration adopted by Germany, France, etc, we attracted vast numbers of bright & motivated people, and we benefitted from their arrival. As well as being good for the UK, I think it was morally right to open up to people form former soviet satellites, particularly those like the Poles that had been allies during WW2. In the days of the USSR, the few who managed to escape were welcomed with open arms. To say that now the iron curtain was not keeping them in, we should erect barriers of our own, would be immoral.

The conservative manifesto commitment to cutting net migration to under 100,000 was a mistake in 2010, and I was glad that Boris Johnson as Mayor of London spoke out against restricting the skilled workers that the London economy needs. As over 2010-2015 the UK created more jobs than the rest of the EU put together, it is hardly surprising that EU migration swelled, and without it the economy would have suffered. Curry houses are hiring Romanian chefs because British people are not applying for the roles, the children of those that set up these restaurants often having gone to university & chosen law, accountancy or medicine rather than the family business. Unfortunately, one of the costs of the high levels of EU migration was a draconian clampdown on non-EU migration as the government tried to show they were not ignoring their 100,000 target. With net EU migration of c123,000 in 2013 and c175,000 in 2014, the 2015 election was fought with in an environment where even if we had a net zero non-EU migration, the 100,000 target was unattainable. I regretted Cameron’s decision say in his 2015 manifesto that his ambition was still to meet the 100,000 target, and am glad that he is not achieving his ambition.

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Were it up to me I would have very open borders, and I would have an EU debate focused on the things Cameron talked about in his 2013 Bloomberg speech: sovereignty & democracy. Unfortunately, as well as Cameron adopting his 100,000 net migration target, he focused his EU renegotiation on benefits for migrants. As well as being unsuccessful, this focus has resulted in a public debate that is in many ways anti immigrant. At the start of the campaign, I was concerned that the Leave campaign might be tainted by some of Farage’s unhelpful sentiments. I was hugely encouraged by the initial debate, in which Michael Gove made it clear that he was pro immigration, and that he wanted a fairer system in which professionals with job offers from the Indian subcontinent were not at the back of the queue behind unskilled and jobless Europeans. He might also have mentioned that our visa rules give no benefit/credit to an American with British grandparents, or that in some cases the illegitimate children of UK nationals are treated shamefully by our system. The open internationalist optimism of the Leave campaign, lead George Osborne to warn that ‘Brexit would mean more non-EU migration’. As Leave is talking about skilled migrants, Remain seems to be pandering to racism, suggesting that non-EU (possibly non-white) skilled immigration is less desirable than (inevitably white) EU migration. Even the Labour Remain campaigners fail to make a positive case for immigration. Hilary Benn talks of it being a price of being in the single market, rather than a benefit. In contrast UKIP’s Douglas Carswell has praised the many immigrants working in our heath service.

If we must have restrictions, and I accept that the public disagrees with me, and wants restrictions, then I think that the post-soviet bias in favour of newly liberated central and eastern Europe has had its day. Instead we should give priority to those with the skills the economy needs, and with British grandparents or even great grandparents. Lets regard our diaspora as people to be welcomed back.

What then of Asylum? The UK’s approach to Asylum seekers is immoral: because immigration staff are trying to hit targets, they do not always consider each case on its merits, and often look for excuses to ‘fail’ an applicant. For example, saying that someone persecuted for their Christianity was not genuine because they could not correctly identify the colour of the bible (underground persecuted churches do not have smart Oxford University Press editions of the bible), or could not recite the ten commandments (if the officials were churchgoers, they might place less emphasis on the book of Exodus, and more on the familiar short summary in the Prayer Book ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all they soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’).

How does loving our neighbours as ourselves translate into the area of Asylum? When people are bombed, driven out of homes and livelihoods, by war and/or tyranny, they deserve more than just our sympathy. A good starting point would be a foreign policy equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: First do no harm. However well intentioned our middle eastern interventions may have been, the fact is that we have managed to make Iraq a worse place than it was under Saddam, and Libya a worse place than it was under Gadaffi. That’s quite something,. and should make us very wary of future interventions. Parliament should be proud of stopping UK intervention against Assad in Syria, not least as a few years later the government is now talking about intervening against ISIS:l. Bombing Assad would have helped his opponents, principally ISIS, so it is just as well parliament stopped the first involvement that Cameron sought.

The primary focus of international supranational bodies should be the prevention of war, and ensuring that victims of, and those fleeing, war/genocide are helped. The UK’s approach of taking refugees from the camps on Syria’s border is a good one, albeit that the numbers we are taking are too low, and the process is horribly inefficient. Many of those fleeing are very capable professionals, they include Doctors, and should not be seen purely as a burden that we must shoulder out of compassion. They have the potential to help us, as did those that came to the UK fleeing Idi Amin in the 1970s.

I am generally pro Turkey, but no fan of the constitution-violating despot Erdogan. Under Erdogan, Turkey is not a safe country for those seeing asylum: when its border guards fire live rounds at refugees, they oppress their own Kurdish minority, they bomb Kurdish areas of Syria, and fund ISIS (not least by the president’s Brother buying ISSI oil). Turkey has its problems.

The EU's approach to refugees seems to exemplify its weaknesses in terms of a tendency to anti-democratic institutional 'solutions' and principle-free negotiations with unsavoury regimes.

While giving help to (and giving uk visas to) those on the Syrian border is ideal, I agree that we should also help refugees who have made it to Greece. This has the flaw that it may encourage people to make hazardous journeys, but they would not get onto the boats if they were secure and had bright futures without so doing. A humane policy by European governments would employ some of the many unemployed Greeks, and some of the asylum seekers themselves, to build new houses that would accommodate the refugees. And it would involve individual EU countries accommodating as many migrants as their populations would agree to. Instead of this we see the EU bullying Greece, and denying aid unless the government replaces its policy with an EU mandated one of strict registration and control. The Eurocrat response is to insist that the EU gains a new power: to allocate quotas of refugees to each country: quotas that voters could not influence, and democratically elected national governments would have no power to reject (or would face lunatic financial penalties for rejecting). The Eurocrats also want to use the crisis to create, at least for the Schengen area, an armed border police that would operate in member countries but would not be accountable to the governments of those countries. Armed forces stationed in a country, and answering to an external body, is too close occupation. What happens if people riot against EU-imposter austerity and want to leave the EU, how might the answerable-to-Brussels EU forces intervene? Even were this not to happen, an armed EU border force seems to have as its rationale keeping out the wretched of the world. Along the razor-wire strewn borders , we would not have prompt and fair assessment of asylum claims. International laws about asylum would be jettisoned in order to keep out even genuine refugees.

The same disregard for the protection of suffering displaced people is shown in the EU deal with president Erdogan of Turkey. The EU acts asif Erdogan is a civilised human-rights-respecting partner. Nothing could be further from the truth. Millions of his own population live in terror of him. He may welcome Syrians fleeing the war when they are Sunni, but Christians, Kurds, and Shia, can hardly expect even handed treatment.

The recent MSF expose of the EU's plan to offer similar deals to Egypt, and other dictatorships in Africa is shocking. The EU wants to cut the flow of migrants by giving these governments cameras and surveillance equipment so that they can track their citizens and prevent their escape. JFK called for the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall. Today's Eurocrats would have offered technology to make the wall more effective!

Some may think that such EU policies are merely the result of unfortunate 'bad choices', but I see them as another example of a remote elite living in a disconnected bubble, making grand policies as part of a vision so large that it has no room for the individual. The sort of person who says 'you can't make an omelettes without breaking eggs', confident that the eggs broken (people killed, lives ruined) will not be them, their family, friends, or even acquaintances.

Remembering that refugees are individuals, not just statistics, like remembering deployment of military force is condemning brave young men to die rather than being just a move in a global chess game, becomes more difficult the further the decision makers are from those affected. It was too easy for Cameron to want to invade Syria, but parliament's members with their connections to county regiments, and voters in general, saw it was not justified. If we had an EU army, controlled from the Eurocrat's bubble, the disconnection of decisions from the people would be far greater, and the consequences far worse, as soldiers were sent to die in pursuit of vainglorious projects. It is quite possible that, had the EU possessed its own army, it would have jumped in to a doomed war to keep the Crimea part of the Ukraine. At the moment NATO keeps the peace well, and when European governments want to act, they do so collaboratively. The existence of an EU army would give Brussels no benefits other than the ability to wage war without national governments needing to assign soldiers to the campaign. The EU does not like to be beholden to national governments, considering it infra dig, and 'inefficient'. Cutting out the national government middle-man may be the EU's idea of an 'efficient' process, but I find it difficult to believe that it would result in better decisions, and am very worried that it would cost lives & result in wars that are not supported by the peoples paying for them in blood and cash.

For me the key issue in the EU debate is democracy. Those that want to Remain are not necessarily anti democratic, but many view the lack of EU democracy as a side issue. Timothy Garton Ash in the early 1990s, when the EU was setting out criteria for new ex-soviet members, observed that the EU’s own institutional structure would make it ineligible for membership were it applying to join itself. For Tim, this was an amusing idiosyncrasy, it seems that Remain campaign is filled by others that also see this as a side issue. For me it is the central issue, not simply because I have spent 30 years having an unhealthy interest in politics, and care about the internal workings of institutions, but because I believe that the structural flaws result in bad decisions, wasted opportunities, wasted lives, and divisions. The Euro was supposed to bring prosperity and unity, it has instead killed southern European economies and if you read Greek papers describing the Germans, or German papers describing the Greeks, you will find anything but feelings of kinship. That the EU made a mistake is not the main issue, mistakes will always be made, but with the right structures they will be corrected. The EU's key flaw is that it's structure allows decision makers to persist with the Euro policy even when such and absurdly high price is being paid.

I believe that for an optimistic inclusive immigration policy that will be fair to everyone regardless of race, we should leave the EU.

For an asylum policy that does not involve amoral deals with dictators, and treats the displaced as individuals, Government should be as close as possible to the voters: we are naturally inclined to be generous to the innocent victims of war, but when the issue is dealt with by remote bureaucracies, they will inevitably tend to loose sight of the human element.

In the late 1980s, when I started reading Terry Pratchett's discworld novels, I assumed its cosmopolitan capital, Ankh Morpork, was based on New York. Now, when I read the stories to my children, I see London in the way that Pratchett describes cohorts of all kinds being co-opted into being useful citizens that rub along well with others, and are no longer defined by the tribal enmities that dominated their identities at 'home'. Of course we don't have vampires, dwarves, goblins, and trolls, but the similarity is the process of assimilation, In which ankh Morpork, without requiring them to lose their identities, becomes their home, and is strengthened by the product of their industry and talents. If London is to be the best city in the world, it needs the talents of the world, and can not be restricted to looking in its European 'back yard'. London as a global city needs an immigration policy open to the globe, it will not get this within the EU.

To my progressive friends that see The EU as a force for good, I suggest that the occasionally positive ends do not justify the anti-democratic means. Not only does it corral us into a 'white Europeans at the front of the queue' immigration policy, the growth of its 'competencies' is anti democratic and anti progressive.

What would have happened if Gay marriage had been subject to EU jurisdiction? We would not have it yet, we would buy, with perhaps a decade or more of delay in the UK, the ability to make its eventual adoption compulsory throughout the EU, even against the wishes of traditional Roman Catholic Poland. I hope that the Poles become more liberal on this front, but I don't think I should have any right to coerce them, and even if I wanted to do that, if the price of doing so was losing the UK's ability to allow same sex marriage, and having to wait until we had a qualified majority across the EU, the price would be too high. Let's live and let live, take back the ability to make our own decisions, and let others make their decisions. Let us lead on issues by setting an example of how our policy can be successful, rather than try to impose it on other nations against their will. And let us reject those that seek to impose their will against ours in matters that are internal to the UK. Let's co-operate with likeminded counties without being ruled by them, and let's be always aware of the law of unintended consequences.

Being more energy efficient is a good thing, but if you think the EU represents the whole known universe, you will adopt an energy policy that ends up not fostering energy efficiency, but outsourcing inefficiency. Port Talbot steelworks is closing because the EU prevents the UK government from compensating for the EU-regulation-driven higher energy costs that make Chineese steel cheaper. China does not produce steel with lower carbon emissions per tonne, nor is it energy efficient to move steel thousands of miles from China to Europe. The trade is (energy)tax driven, like a vast industrial duty free. As a sovereign country we would see the unintended effects of a well-meaning energy policy, and would compensate accordingly. The EU does not respond to popular democratic forces, and makes the mistake of failing to consider the rest of the world. Ok, green taxes on energy are not about migration, but they are another area where, like migration, the EU has an insular rather than a global focus, while realising the UK's potential requires it to raise its sights from its European back yard to the Global arena. Politicians may say that size matters in global negotiations, but look at the successes of Switzerland, it's people and economy thrive, even if (or, possibly, because) it's politicians are not the biggest beasts in global politics. David Milliband famously said that he wanted an EU foreign minister that would 'stop the traffic'. No doubt he imagined himself in that role, wanting the trappings of power enjoyed by the US president: motorcades, and vast security details. As for me, while I don't mind being delayed if Her Majesty requires one of her roads for a while, I certainly don't want politicians with ideas above their station getting in the way of my life. So I will vote Leave in the hope that, by having decisions made by those answerable to the voters, we will be ruled by decisions that at least try to make us prosperous, and that represent the best in us. For all its failings, I would rather choices were made by a UK PM, interrogated regularly & publicly at PMQs, than by jean Claude junker in the 'secret dark meetings' that he favours. Refugees can be inconvenient, the worst of us may hope they just go away, the best of us responds with humanity. Which process will give them better treatment? Cross examination of policy in the commons, where it is still unacceptable for a minister to lie to the house? Or leaving it to secret deals by Jean Claude 'when it gets really serous you have to lie' Junker?

Yes, there are risks. The U.K. could, at least briefly, succumb to siren voices urging insularity. I don't think that this would happen, but it might. However, I have no doubt that the British are, in their hearts, an open, welcoming, and internationalist people. We may take a false step from time to time, but overall, if given control, we will get it broadly right. We will choose, as Churchill said to de Gaulle, 'the open sea'. (And we might even rebuild the sadly depleted capacity of the Royal Navy)