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RADIO 4

CURRENT AFFAIRS

ANALYSIS

AN OPEN DOOR TO DISASTER

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED

DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Kenan Malik

Producer: Richard Vadon

Editor: Nicola Meyrick

BBC

White City

201 Wood Lane

London

W12 7TS

020 8752 6252

Broadcast Date: 18.03.04

Repeat Date: 21.03.04

CD Number: PLN 410/04VT1011

Duration: 2737

Taking part in order of appearance:

Suke Wolton

Tutor in politics at Regents College, Oxford

Nigel Harris

Emeritus Professor of Economics at

University College London

Geoff Dench

The Institute of Community Studies

Andrew Simms

Policy Director, New Economics Foundation

Sarah Spencer

Director of Policy Research at Oxford

Universitys Centre on Migration

David Coleman

Professor of Demography at Oxford

University

MALIK:Forget all that hoohah about benefit tourists. From 1st

of May, Britain will welcome with open arms anyone from the new

EU countries who wants to work here. Why? Because its good for

the economy. So why not lay out the welcome mat for the rest of

the world, too?

WOLTON: What is the reason we have too few houses in Britain?

Its because we have too few builders at the moment. What is the

reason that we dont have enough NHS resources at the moment?

Well we have too few NHS workers. Its true. We do not have

enough doctors, we do not have enough nurses. Everybodys

crying out for plumbers at the moment. We do not have enough

people in Britain. Thats the reason that everybodys complaining

that we dont have these things Its not that we dont have the

things we want; its that we dont have the people to make the things

that we need.

MALIK:Suke Wolton, tutor in politics at Regents College,

Oxford. Its not the economy, stupid, its the people. We havent got

enough of them. So lets open the door and let them all in. But

whatever happened to the idea that its the job of a government to

decide who we want in the country and how many?

WOLTON: I think its one of those things which its a mistake to

pretend that you could master it. Nobody says oh were going to

master the stock market today, oh were going to have it clear that

the FTSE index is going to stay in a certain way. Nobody would be

so foolish. I think the same has to be said about immigration

controls. There are two ways of looking at factors that affect

immigration and theyve been broadly sort of identified as well as

pull factors and push factors push factors being things that affect

people in their country of origin and why they might move; pull

factors being what happens here in Britain and how that affects

whether people move and stuff. All studies so far that have been

done on how migration is affected have shown that pull factors are

minimal in terms of actually affecting whether people come to Britain

or not. The only thing that is important really in terms of peoples

migration is the economy and the state of the job market

MALIK:For all the bitter debates about immigration and

asylum, no one disputes the idea that we should control the flow of

people into this country. No one, that is, apart from a few brave

souls who want to think the unthinkable and scrap controls

altogether. Are they mad? No, they say, not only is controlling

immigration impossible but also undesirable. Nigel Harris, Emeritus

Professor of Economics at University College London.

HARRIS: The world is moving towards a single economy, a

single world economy, that means in theoretical terms integration of

capital and trade and ultimately labour. Governments at the

moment control the borders and theyre trying to accommodate the

need for increased mobility through increased regulation. What that

means is when Britain needs more software programmers, they set

a particular target and invite people to come into the country. They

cant possibly predict in that field any more than they can in any

other field what demand is likely to be. The result of that was that

they caught just as the numbers were increasing, the dot-com

boom collapsed. There were a whole lot of people who came in and

were stranded or had to go out and so on. So I dont believe

governments can plan labour demand and so they cant operate a

regulatory system,

MALIK: Are you not placing great faith in the ability of the

free market to regulate labour flows?

HARRIS: Certainly more than I invest in governments. I mean

those are the two options, arent they either governments or free

markets and between that the free market is much better than

governments in regulating labour supply and demand.

MALIK:The debate about whether of not these should be an

open door to immigrants is not a debate between left and right. On

the one side, we find free marketers holding hands with

campaigners for immigration rights in demanding the freedom of

movement across borders. On the other side, you may find

conservatives, left wing activists and, of course, racists all making

the case for tighter curbs on immigration. The critics of the open

door seem to have not just public opinion but commonsense on their

side. After all, the state may not be very good at matching labour

supply and demand. But do we really want to leave it all to the

market?

DENCH: I think the impact would be really quite devastating

because Im sure from the contacts that Ive had, the research

Ive done that there are absolutely millions of people who would

want to come in and would be prepared to live in a very low

standard of living in order to be here and have a chance to live

here, and that this would create tremendous conflicts and

difficulties with the labour market.

SIMS: I think the argument for complete open borders would be

the argument for a complete free market per se. It would be the

argument that there should be no barriers to the movement of

either trade or finance or people. I personally think, given the

state that the world is in and given the great disparities that exist

within the world, that if you did that it would be a recipe for chaos.

MALIK:Geoff Dench of the Institute of Community Studies,

based in East London, and Andrew Simms of the New Economics

Foundation. The logic of their argument seems indisputable. Open

the door to everyone and everyone will walk in. So how does Nigel

Harris respond?

HARRIS: Well thats a reasonable fear. But you ask the

same question about internally what is to stop people coming

to London. Nothing. people come into London and leave without

restriction. The same would in principle be true in the world

MALIK:But the wage differential between Beijing and

London is far greater than a wage differential between

Manchester and London, so would not it be more likely that say

Chinese cockle pickers come to Britain because even if theyre

only earning a pound a day, as is alleged, theyre still earning

more than they would back home?

HARRIS: Yes, yes, thats the correct point except that the

costs of getting here are so high that people by and large cant

do it. I mean leave aside the fact that the overwhelming majority

of people dont want to leave their homes, even though you

would think on the face of it they ought to want to leave their

homes because their homes are so awful. And the real value of

what they earn here is vastly increased when they go home. But

in fact the overwhelming majority of people dont want to move

and, even more, they dont have the costs of moving, so moving

from China to Britain is such an extraordinarily fraught and

expensive operation that relatively few people do it.

MALIK:These days the cost of a Easyjet fare will take you

from Budapest to Luton, and its not much more to fly in from

Beijing. Immigration only becomes expensive when its illegal

and you have to pay traffickers to smuggle you across borders.

Make all immigration legal and it becomes dirt cheap. Of course,

immigrants suffer more than simply a financial burden. They

have to leave their family behind, uproot themselves from all that

is familiar, often facing hostility in their new country. This is why,

in relative terms, very few people actually migrate. Nevertheless,

the idea that high cost will stop people coming through an open

door seems a bit of a hit and hope policy. Supporters of open

borders argue, though, that its when you impose controls that

you create the problems of mass influx. Suke Wolton.

WOLTON:If the borders were more open people would be able to

go back and forth more easily and they would be able to say, No

this is not a good situation, this is too much hardship, or I would

rather be with my family, or Ive done some Ive been here for a

harvest, Ive been here for a particular season, I wont stay the

winter, Ill go home.

We have a situation now which once people have risked their lives

to enter into a country and then risked their constant discovery

finding work, theyre in a position of extreme vulnerability and they

can be easily exploited. But they also dare not go home

Whereas if we did the opposite and had the border more

permeable and people able to travel backwards and forwards, we

could have a situation where people are able to assess what the

situation is, perhaps work for a few months, then go back, then

come back again, come back you know and decide for themselves

which country they want to be a citizen as a positive decision rather

than as one which they have to do because theres no other way

round it.

MALIK:The evidence suggests shes right. In the 1950s many

immigrants to Britain were single men who expected to return home

to their families within a few years. When the government decided to

impose controls the first immigration act came into force in 1962 -

there was a surge of people trying to get in before the door closed.

And temporary migrants had little choice but to settle here and bring

their families over. In America, millions of Mexican agricultural

workers who had migrated with the seasons were forced to settle

permanently (and illegally) when the US government imposed

controls on their movement.

But what about the impact on local workers? Uncontrolled

immigration must surely make it more difficult for locals to find jobs.

And if employers have a constant supply of cheap labour, it must

force down wages of British workers. Not so, says Nigel Harris.

HARRIS:There were up to two hundred econometric studies

done in the United States in different localities at different times in

order to try to detect whether there was a decline in wages or an

increase in unemployment of native workers as a result of a

significant in-flow of immigrants and in general they could find no

trace whatsoever. And that is because the immigrants are moving

into the jobs that the native workers wont do. Theyre not

competing. Of course thats not true all the way through the

software programmers are competing, the doctors are competing

but in terms of unskilled workers, which is where many of the fears

are expressed, they arent competing. Furthermore, the immigrants

are doing jobs which are necessary for the productivity of higher

skilled workers to be realised If there arent porters and cleaners

and laundry workers and all the rest of it, the hospital breaks down

and the doctors and nurses cant do their work.

MALIK:This might seem counterintuitive but it appears to be

empirically watertight. A Home Office study published last year

concluded that the perception that immigrants take away jobs from

the existing population, or that immigrants depress wages of exiting

workers, do not confirmation in the analysis of the data. Indeed,

Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation suggests that

without immigration, local workers and communities would in fact be

worse off.

SIMMS:Our research and a lot of other research shows that

people who come to this country display much greater

entrepreneurial flair. So even if they begin by doing the dirty,

dangerous and difficult jobs, theres a lot of evidence to show that

new immigrants to Britain display huge amounts of energy and

initiative and go on to make much larger contributions to the wider

economy.

Where first or second generation immigrants in this country are

active in the local economy, youre seeing increases in the level of

average wages in those areas and youre seeing increases in the

general availability of employment opportunities and jobs. So

actually theres a huge lot of myths that we have to shoot down that

there is a kind of one for one substitution of jobs with people coming

in with people already living here that is simply not the case as

weve already said Immigrants coming to this country are doing

jobs that otherwise simply would not get done on the one hand and,

on the other hand, because of the way that they are on the front line

of breathing life back into communities that otherwise are very often

dying, theyre actually bringing new opportunities.

MALIK:But why dont local workers want to take the jobs that

immigrants eventually fill? Its true that by European standards

Britain has a low unemployment rate. There are nevertheless a

million people on the dole, a figure we used to consider as high.

Geoff Dench of the Institute of Community Studies.

DENCH:If you use immigration to solve the problem of filling

jobs that people dont want to do, you create throughout the

economic system an incentive not to take certain jobs seriously, just

to regard them as things that can be done by people coming in from

outside. And this doesnt solve the problem because those people

then come in. Theyre rightly, treated as full citizens with choice of

what they want to do themselves. And their children wont want to

do those jobs, so that youre setting yourself into a position where

you constantly need new immigrants in order to balance your

economy and I think that the overall indirect effects of this are very

harmful to the economy

MALIK:In effect youre suggesting that the kinds of jobs to

which migrants are attracted now could easily be filled by local

workers, yet we know that migrants are attracted to Britain

precisely because locals dont fill those jobs. So are you

suggesting that local workers should be forced to fill the jobs they

dont want to do?

DENCH:Its not a matter of forcing people. I think its more a

matter of restoring some sense that these jobs are important; and

if theyre seen as important, then there are local people who are not

working who would do them What is needed is much more sense

that all jobs are important in the economy and maybe they need

different conditions of work, different levels of payment, different this

or that, but theyre all important and that there is a sense in which

respect is owing to all of the people who play a part in the system. I

think that this is whats gone wrong.

MALIK:Respect is certainly important. But can it really be

bought by excluding immigrants? Any more, for instance, than we

can turn cleaning into a respected male profession by banning

women from the workforce? The fact that immigrants are usually

forced to take low status jobs does not mean that without

immigrants all jobs would be high status.

Yes, we need to improve work conditions for those at the bottom.

But there can be no denying Britains need for immigrant labour.

Take construction. The trade magazine Building estimates that the

industry needs 80,000 new workers a year, largely to replace people

who are retiring. There are currently 500,000 vacancies in the South

East alone. Yet, only 18,500 apprentices are coming through every

year. Even a coercive workfare system under which the unemployed

are frogmarched from the dole office to the building site will not

make up the shortfall. Many employers, on the other hand, like the

current regime of immigration controls, because it gives them a

large pool of illegal workers upon which to draw. Workers, in other

words, without rights or protection.

The answer to these problems, many argue, is for the government

to manage migration in a more active fashion. Sarah Spencer is

Director of Policy research at Oxford Universitys Centre on

Migration, and an advisor to a number of government committees.

SPENCER:The challenge for government is to create legal

channels which first of all ensure that anyone who has a human

right to come, can come - that we dont divide families, that we

provide protection to people facing persecution and, secondly,

legal channels which match labour migrants to the job vacancies:

the skill vacancies that we have and the vacancies for low-skilled

jobs, so that the people who are coming in can move into jobs and

make an economic and social contribution. If the controls are too

tight, then there will be huge incentives for people to come and stay

illegally. If the controls are not there at all, if we had open borders,

then more people would come than there were jobs to go around

and that would create tensions on the ground, so the trick in

managing migration is to try and get that balance right.

MALIK:Who could possibly argue with that? Except that if the

legal channels were broad enough to allow anyone to enter who

wished to, it would effectively be an open door. If they were narrow

enough to exclude many potential immigrants, it would require

heavy policing and recreate the problem of illegals. Thats the

dilemma of managed migration. Sarah Spencer again.

SPENCER:Any government which offers the public perfection,

which suggests that it control numbers absolutely is only going to

disappoint and further sap public confidence in the governments

ability to manage migration in their interests. Migration is inherently

anarchic, if you like. The best that a government can offer is that it

will seek to manage migration through many different policy levers,

including enforcement, in order to channel it where its going to do

most good and create the least difficulties.

MALIK:The government has taken such ideas seriously

enough to set up a Managed Migration Section in the Home Office.

David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University, isnt

impressed.

COLEMAN:I dont think that a managed migration policy is really

feasible in the way that the government envisages it for all sorts of

reasons the main one being that I think that a managed migration

policy is a kind of verbal improvement over a migration situation

which is not properly under under control.

I think that the general issue of relatively rapid growth of populations

of foreign origin is one which is troubling all of Europe to varying

degrees and not just Britain. I think its a problem for a variety of

reasons. Its a problem because some of those populations bring

with them very distinct cultural habits which create difficulties for

themselves and for any welfare state in which they are situated Im

thinking of large family size, of low workforce participation, of low

levels of education and all of that. That is more a question of

immigrants rather than of people born in Britain, although obviously

the numbers are so large it gets transmitted to the second and third

generation in Britain and also throughout Europe where these

problems are quite widespread.

MALIK:The debate about the economic benefits of migration,

David Coleman suggests, misses the point.

COLEMAN:I think given that I feel that the economic benefits of

migration are marginal then it is indeed the social and

demographic dimension which is important There are no benefits

accruing to population growth or population size it is quite clear

looking at all the different populations of western Europe. This is by

British historical standards a very large increase indeed.

The net inflow of people into Britain last year was around 150,000

that doesnt sound to me such a great number in a population of 60

million. It would comfortably fit into two millennium stadiums. So why

are you so worried by it?

A hundred and fifty thousand, it seems to me, is a very large number

indeed it means that you have to build effectively a city the size of

Oxford every year to accommodate the additional population. And

this is very big news indeed. It would not take very long at that rate

to cover the greater part of the South East of the country where of

course the majority of immigrants go to live there not going to the

highlands of Scotland they are not going to Northern Ireland.

Itll make the Southern part of the country very, very powerfully

overcrowded and, quite independently of issues of culture, simply in

terms of numbers it is something which no one planned for, no one

intended, from which no good consequences will come and which

will produce some really very serious problems indeed for the whole

of the appearance and structure of the Southern part of the country.

WOLTON:I have heard this before. I have always found it

difficult to understand because every time I take a plane anywhere

and I look down on Britain all I can see is green and theres just lots

of green. So I dont really see the preoccupation with Britain being

overcrowded.

MALIK:Suke Wolton.

WOLTON:I think there is a problem with lack of housing, but then

I think thats largely been caused by lack of having builders. I think

actually weve got lack of people that are able to do the things that

we need being done. We need the people in order to have the

resources in hospitals, we need the teachers to be able to teach in

the schools. Its these sort of workers that we lack so crucially at the

moment and if we dont have more people then we cant do those

and that is when we feel tight and thats when we feel

overburdened.

MALIK:What do you say to those people who say that if you

had increased immigration, continued population growth, what youll

have is more overcrowding in inner cities, more congestion, etc it

will reduce the quality of life, the quality of life is bad enough as it is,

it will increase population, it will deteriorate even further

WOLTON:If that were the case then wed have people coming to

us saying you cant possibly live in the city centre of London. But

the city centre of London has the highest property prices, so

evidently people do want to live in the city centre of London. If you

thought that living in a place which was crowded was awful, then

surely nobody would want to live in New York or Manhattan? I just

dont see any evidence for saying that we dont like living next door

to somebody.

MALIK:Theres a difference, of course, between living cheek

by jowl in Mayfair or Manhattan and living cheek by jowl in Bethnal

Green or Brooklyn. And thats the problem of continued large scale

immigration: not so much an overcrowded island, as the

concentration of newcomers in areas which have the greatest

problems with a lack of resources. The dilemma of an open door

immigration policy is that people can be a burden as well as a

benefit. Theres no guarantee, even if we welcome thousands of

new builders into Britain, that new houses will be built. That takes

political will, as well as people. But, then, if we were less obsessed

with stopping people coming in, perhaps we could think more clearly

about the kinds of policies needed to make life better for those

already here: policies to increase house building, provide the right

kinds of training and ease integration. For Geoff Dench, though, the

costs of immigration will always be too great.

DENCH:I think its impossible to run a country properly unless

you give some reward and some stake for loyalty to the system. The

elite denies really that there is any such thing as national legitimacy,

that there is a country that has got a heritage of interests and people

and their antecedents have worked within it and have some

legitimate stake in it. And I think its this denial that there is any sort

of national stake that ordinary people themselves feel that creates

the biggest misunderstandings between ordinary people and the

government at the moment.

MALIK: Are you saying that the problem isnt immigration as such

but the fact that immigrants are accorded the same rights as

everybody else in the country to housing, to jobs and so on?

DENCH: Yes, I mean that does make a tremendous

difference because it means that there are all sorts of extra

incentives for them to come. Theyre not coming in the way that

migrants would have done a few generations ago to really

struggle for a few years to start building up a small stake in the

country themselves so that they can bring people in and this

was what brought out the strongest contributions from

immigrants to the country and indeed to other countries. But if

they can come and immediately get access to the resources on a

basis of equality with other people, then this tremendously

increases both their motivation to come and the tensions with

people whose families have been living here for a long time

afterwards.

MALIK: Would you argue then for a two-tier employment

system, welfare system and so on?

DENCH:Its very difficult to do that. Once youve got a

welfare state to have different different grades of citizens and

all of the various discriminations that arise from that, especially

given that the majority of the people coming will be racially

different from the people who are already here, I mean of itself is

likely a thing to promote all sorts of conflicts. And I think it in

many ways is better to think in terms of trying to limit the volume

of movement at any time, have a continuous flow in all directions

but not to have a massive flow at any time because its the

volume of the flow, I think, that creates the problems.

MALIK:Its true that many people feel they have no stake in

the system. A disenchantment that runs particularly deep within

many white working class communities, the kind of communities

Geoff Dench wishes to defend. But can one really build a sense of

inclusion simply by excluding others? After all, pre-immigration

Britain wasnt exactly a working class paradise. David Coleman

insists though that mass immigration has transformed Britain for the

worse.

COLEMAN:I think generally speaking its a problem of the rights of

the ordinary people of Britain whove first of all been promised time

and time again that the situation would not develop and it has. It is

a question of the as it were dethronement of what they take to be

their national identity and their history - because, after all, there are

now substantially growing areas in many of our major cities which

are in some important respects rather more like foreign countries

than those of the ordinary English domestic scene. Theyre not

parts of the country where most English people will want to go.

MALIK:Immigration has clearly brought about major changes

to this country, creating in some white communities a well of

resentment and a nostalgia for the old pre-immigration Britain. Yet,

even had Britain not been the destination for large scale

immigration, British society today would have been vastly different

from that of half a century ago. And there still would have been

those for whom England had ceased to be England. For whom

increasingly large parts of the country had ceased to be the kind of

country which they had been brought up in and in which they felt at

home. This is really not an argument against open door immigration

specifically, but against all large scale social change. And for Suke

Wolton, theres more than one way to change a society for the

worse.

WOLTON:If we step back and think well what is it that were

trying to hold onto, whats important about being British, well I

can list lots of things that I hold to be important and are worth

hanging onto. I mean I suppose one of the most clear examples

for me you can give today is I would have thought that one of the

things we should uphold in British tradition is the right of habeas

corpus, the right not to be detained without trial. This is exactly

what David Blunkett in the name of upholding immigration

controls has now taken away in Britain. That is a significant

change to our sense of what we mean to be British in terms of

our rights to freedom and I think its very important that if we think

that its important to be British that we uphold what is right

what weve learned about being British i.e. our upholding our

right to be free and weve just lost that.

MALIK:The debate about open door immigration is not about

whether we want to hold onto certain values but which ones?

Control over borders or the protection of civil liberties? Continuity in

the social landscape or a dynamic economy?

Open borders would be a leap into the unknown, and might prove

an open door to disaster. Controlling immigration is the safe option.

But we also know that it doesnt really work. Tens of thousands of

illegal immigrants still enter the country every year.

Controlling immigration is neither as easy nor as sensible as it might

first appear; an open door policy is not as outrageous as it might

seem. Both embody different visions of the kind of Britain in which

we want to live. Both pose a raft of practical problems. The trouble

is, given our current obsession with keeping people out, theres little

chance of a reasoned discussion about which might be better.

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