At just the time that the government is calling on the private sector to create jobs, they are negotiating in secret an agreement between the EU and India that would allow an unlimited number of Indian specialists to do work in Britain that has not been first offered to British workers. This could well blast a hole in Britain's immigration controls - that is the conclusion of a paper issued today by Migrationwatch. The EU/India Free Trade Agreement due to be signed in December will permit Indian corporations to transfer specialist staff to EU countries, notably the UK, without any upper limit on numbers. This has potentially serious implications for Britain: This Agreement could, of course, present very serious problems in implementing a cap on economic migration to which the coalition government are committed. The concessions under it would have to be operated outside any cap or the level of the cap would have to be adjusted to allow for demand for Intra Company Transfer visas from India. There may be scope for a minimum salary but such conditions are notoriously hard to enforce. Commenting, Sir Andrew Green Chairman of Migrationwatch said, ‘It is time the government came clean about what is in this agreement. It looks as though the Indians are about to drive a bullock and cart through Britain's immigration system despite government talk about creating jobs in the private sector. There is no point in a limit on economic migration if specialists from India are excluded from the cap by a separate agreement. British IT workers are already suffering the impact on jobs of tens of thousands of Indian IT staff working in Britain; we already have 48,000 unemployed British IT specialists.’ Sir, David Aaronovitch's article "The solar lamp lights the way Britain must go" (21 October) was simply bizarre. He completely, and perhaps even deliberately, misrepresents the aims of Migrationwatch. We have said since our foundation nearly nine years ago that we favour migration in both directions as a natural part of an open economy. We recognise too that Britain would be a poorer nation without immigration - but that is not the same thing as mass immigration. Far from lacking intellectual curiosity as he implies, we have had the curiosity to look beyond the platitudes and to investigate the facts. We have also had the courage to publicise conclusions that conflict with the views of the liberal elite but which, being true, resonate widely with the public. Aaronovitch's rather contrived personal attack is yet more evidence that the left realise that they have lost the argument on the scale of immigration. A poll conducted by the previous government last February found that 77% wanted to see immigration reduced and 50% (of the total) wanted it reduced "by a lot". For our part, we wish to see net immigration reduced close to zero so as to stabilise the UK population at about 65 million. To describe this as "pessimism bordering on paranoia" is simply ridiculous. Aaronovitch says that “We are facing a clarifying moment - either this way or that way. Choose.” Indeed so. Either we shut our eyes to the implications for the future of our society of mass immigration or we choose to take action to reduce it as the public so clearly wishes. This is not a matter of pessimism, but of realism. The IPPR has recently published a critique of Migrationwatch's recent report on the likely future impacts that immigration would have on primary and secondary education in the UK. Their critique does not attempt to challenge our main point – namely that mass immigration of 3 million over the last 12 years is likely to add 0.5 million to the school rolls in the next five years and 1 million in the next ten years. It ignores some significant and authoritative evidence that we used in our report, and makes a number of observations that are unsupported by evidence. IPPR ”Migrationwatch ignores the fact that migrants make a significant contribution to the public purse – a significant number of taxpayers are migrants”. No. We have not ignored the contribution that migrants make to Government revenues as taxpayers, but we believe that it less significant than IPPR and others claim it is because their calculations are based on the same ‘questionable approach’ criticised by the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords in their 2008 report: This Committee reported: Determining whether immigrants make a positive or negative fiscal contribution is highly dependent on what costs and benefits are included in the calculations. Government claims that the exchequer consistently benefits from immigration rely on the children of one UK-born parent and one immigrant parent being attributed to the UK-born population – a questionable approach. But even using the Government’s preferred method, the fiscal impact is small compared to GDP and cannot be used to justify large-scale immigration. For a full discussion of this important issue, Chapter 5 of the House of Lords report is worth reading. In addition, our calculations of the costs of educating children of migrants were based on very conservative assumptions, excluding for example any costs of pre-primary education and the additional costs imposed by the particular challenges entailed in educating migrant children – which are significant, and which were ignored in the studies purporting to demonstrate the fiscal benefits of migration mentioned by the IPPR. IPPR “Key groups of migrants who have arrived since 1998 (which is the focus of the Migrationwatch report) have significantly higher employment rates – migrants born in new EU member states, for example, have an employment rate of 82.9 per cent”. IPPR are presumably referring to the employment rate of nationals of the A8 group of countries who began to enter the UK in substantial numbers in 2004. It is true that this large group of migrants has a higher employment rate than UK-born members of the labour force, but 80% are at or near the minimum wage so they pay very little tax. IPPR “In claiming that migration will create demand for additional school places, Migrationwatch doesn’t take account of the fact that the number of births to UK-born mothers is generally falling – a significant number of the children born to migrant mothers might be expected to simply fill school places that would otherwise be empty”. No. Births to UK-born women in England and Wales in 2009 were 6,000 less than in 2008, but they are not ‘generally falling’ as the IPPR claim. In every year but one since 2003 such births have risen – in 2003 they totalled some 506,000 and in 2009 around 532,000. But, even if there is spare capacity in some primary schools, it is clear from section 4 of our paper that this is not generally in Local Authority areas that have experienced the highest rates of immigration and where demand for places is already significantly greater than capacity – a situation that is projected to become more severe over time.
Press Release
EU Deal Means British Jobs for Indian Workers
25 October, 2010Letter
Sir Andrew Green's letter sent to The Times on 21 October, 2010. An edited version was published today.
25 October, 2010Responses to Critics
Immigration and Education; response to the IPPR
24 October, 2010
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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