Britannia Radio

November 24, 2008

Stick to the brief, Boris

Daily Mail, 24 November 2008

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has broken ranks with his own Conservative party by floating once again the idea of an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

He has announced that he will set up a study of the benefits of such an amnesty, on the basis that deporting those foreigners working illegally in Britain — thought to number some 400,000 people in London and 700,000 nationally — is ‘just not going to happen’.

An ‘earned’ amnesty for illegal immigrants who have lived in Britain for several years, he says, would allow them to earn citizenship and generate ‘hugely increased’ tax revenues.

Boris first proposed this when he was running for Mayor. He was slapped down by David Cameron, who said an amnesty would merely store up more trouble for the future.

It is, in fact, a proposal of quite staggering irresponsibility. The first and most obvious objection is that it rewards, and thus incentivises, illegality.

If people abuse our laws to come here and are then granted citizenship, this makes a mockery of that citizenship — whose first requirement, after all, is to obey the law of the land.

The Mayor says that citizenship in these cases will be ‘earned’. Oh really? How so, precisely? Such people will have done no more to earn it than a squatter ‘earns’ the right to a house he has broken into simply by living there.

Maybe the Mayor means they will have ‘earned’ it by the sheer length of time they have been living in Britain.

But this merely rewards those who have shown themselves to be most adept at beating Britain’s legal system.

Maybe he thinks they ‘earn’ it by working. So what would he do with those who are not working? Would they be deported — or would that also be ‘just not going to happen’?

He says there would be no amnesty for those with a criminal record. But what about those who are involved in the drugs and prostitution trades, but who don’t have criminal convictions?

And even if illegal immigrants are working and have no criminal record, since when does paid employment erase the illegal activity through which they arrived in the first place?

What kind of public ethics are these, for heaven’s sake?

An amnesty would prompt untold further numbers to try their luck at settling illegally in Britain. Boris would become the toast of people-traffickers around the world.

Britain is already regarded as a soft touch, a place where the authorities too often choose to accept unlawful entry as a done deal, and where illegal immigrants know that once on British soil they will almost certainly be able to melt away into society.

As David Cameron says, a so-called ‘one-off’ amnesty also inevitably creates demand for more.

This happened in Spain, where successive amnesties over 20 years were each bigger than their predecessors, having merely provoked yet more illegal immigrants to flock to Spanish shores.

Boris says there are obstacles to ‘mass deportations’ of illegal immigrants. The term ‘mass deportations’ is itself pretty loaded, since it sounds like ethnic cleansing. But these are people who have broken Britain’s laws to enter the country.

The idea that a nation which is thus abused cannot throw out its abusers is preposterous.

Yet that is precisely what lies behind the legal ‘human rights’ decisions which in so many cases have made deportation impossible.

Surely that monumental legal folly should be opposed on grounds of justice, national self-preservation and simple common sense. But instead, Boris wants Britain to resign itself to the folly and throw all those opposing principles under a London bus.

The Mayor’s new policy adviser Anthony Browne, who in the past has bravely courted opprobrium by opposing the rate of mass immigration, nevertheless supports an amnesty on the basis that deporting thousands of people who have settled in Britain and whose children go to British schools would be inhumane.

But this is to give in to a kind of moral blackmail. Any distress in such situations would be entirely the fault of the adults who have deliberately flouted the law to settle here.

It is precisely this kind of flinching from hard decisions, creating the perception that Britain will take the path of least resistance and legitimise illegal immigration because it is too squeamish and spineless to enforce its own laws, which fuels the tidal waves of foreigners to our shores.

Indeed, the Government is taking this to ever more absurd and invidious lengths by deciding that up to 400 foreign criminals who were wrongly released from British jails, instead of being deported — including some of the worst offenders — can stay in Britain on the grounds that deportation would breach their right to family life.

The wider context makes the Mayor’s position even more lamentable.

Official figures published last week revealed that Britain’s immigration crisis is even worse than was previously thought. Last year, the level of net immigration (the difference between immigrants and emigrants) reached 237,000, equivalent to the population of Wolverhampton.

Nearly two million immigrants — a fourfold increase — have swelled the population since Labour came to power.

This means Britain faces a population rise from 60million to 70million — a level which Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said should never be reached — well in advance of Whitehall’s predicted date of 2028.

These numbers are simply unsustainable. The public services cannot cope with them. Only last week Business in the Community warned that, in rural areas, public services were buckling under the pressure of mass migration.

That pressure is even greater in London and the South-East, where most immigration is disproportionately concentrated.

As the chairman of MigrationWatch, Sir Andrew Green, has estimated, an amnesty would add hundreds of thousands more people to housing waiting lists and cost the country some £500 million per year.

By contrast, Boris claims that regularising illegal immigrants who are already here would swell the Treasury coffers.

But the argument that immigration benefits the economy was destroyed earlier this year by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, which said there was no evidence that net immigration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population, and dismissed claims that immigration resulted in extra tax revenues.

The truth is that there are upwards of two million indigenous Brits out of work, while immigrants are arriving to do the jobs that welfare discourages claimants from doing.

The Labour Government has used mass immigration as a device to avoid reforming welfare and ending the dependency culture.

Surely in the current financial crisis it is even more important to get the British people working.

Yet Boris has chosen to undermine this position — just as he has also chosen to undermine the gathering, but still fragile recognition that Britain’s failure to deal with illegal immigration simply has to be addressed.

It is the failure of the mainstream parties to deal with this issue that is helping fuel support for the racist BNP.

What’s needed now are unambiguous measures to stop up Britain’s porous borders, including reversing the disastrous refusal by politicians and the courts to enforce immigration law. An amnesty would merely take us yet further down our current ruinous path .

The Mayor of London has no powers over immigration policy. Boris should end such unhelpful grandstanding beyond his remit — so reminiscent of his predecessor — and stick to his brief instead.