Economic immigration will remain a problem until we stand up to the EU
The Government is doing nothing to prevent economic immigration from becoming worse
7:00AM BST 14 Aug 2013
184 Comments
SIR – Philip Johnston is absolutely right in his criticism of Chris Bryant, the shadow immigration minister, and Labour's hypocrisy on the subject of immigrant workers (Comment, August 13). However, what is most worrying is that the Government is doing nothing to prevent the situation from becoming worse.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, trumpets statistics showing that net immigration is falling, while maintaining that nothing can be done about the majority of economic immigration because we are bound by EU rules.
She also claims that predictions about the scale of the influx of Bulgarians and Romanians from 2014 onwards were grossly exaggerated.
Unfortunately, official predictions of the likely impact of opening our borders to the eight eastern European nations which joined the EU in 2004 were exceeded by at least 640 per cent; so why should we assume that 2014 will be different?
What we need is a pragmatic and practical solution: tell Brussels that we simply cannot afford to allow unrestricted access by EU states.
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