Is there such thing as a populist, compassionate immigration policy?

Labour’s strategy on immigration – at worst – appears to be to stay silent and hope no one notices. Since Chris Bryant’s brave (but somewhat troubled) speech in August, it’s as if the party wishes the issue would go away. It won’t. If Labour doesn’t find a way to connect with voters on immigration it will corrode the public’s trust in Ed Miliband’s ability to deliver real improvements in living standards and make winning in 2015 impossible.

Everyone knows that the public are angry about immigration. According to polling commissioned by Lord Ashcroft, 76% of people favour setting limits on EU migration. Only 17% think that immigration has created more advantages than disadvantages for the UK.  Nearly 40% of people report it being harder to find work because of competition from immigrants.

The attitude of liberal elites (including some in the Labour Party) towards this public opinion is often not just misconceived, but patronising. It is pointless and ineffective to make vague demands that Labour should make the “positive case for immigration” without specifics. Similarly, massively macro stats showing immigration’s impact on the national debt or the economy as a whole don’t play well on the doorstep. Even worse, glib comments that more and more Britons have moved to Spain will do nothing to convince people in Stevenage who are struggling to find a minimum wage job that immigration has helped them.

People in well paid professional jobs in London have no place lecturing low paid workers in Peterborough struggling on minimum wages, unable to find housing and suffering real terms income cuts that immigration is a positive for the economy as a whole. If you’re the type of person more likely to be being waited on in a restaurant by a Romanian than competing for a job with one – then it might be worth looking at your own position before waxing lyrical that educating people about the good bits of immigration is the answer to public fears rather than meaningful policy change.

Just as modern democratic socialists believe in free trade, with rules to make sure that the vulnerable are protected, so we need to develop policies on free movement and immigration that are fair to migrants and current residents alike.

If Labour wants to really connect with the popular mood on immigration – neither patronising macroeconomics nor seemingly xenophobic and insubstantial phrases like “British jobs for British workers” will do the trick. As Ben Shimshon from BritainThinks recently commented “For swing voters …, it’s ‘show’, not ‘tell’”. The little promises that Labour makes between now and 2015 can show whether the party’s priorities are with the rip off businesses eager to use migrant labour to continue to hold down wages, or with ordinary immigrants and British workers who want a fair deal. There are such things as compassionate populist immigration policies, but they might involve treading on a few toes.

Here’s a few policies that might go about doing that:

1. UK employment law rewards employers who hire and fire workers regularly. As long as a worker hasn’t reached two years continuous service they have no right to claim unfair dismissal. As many migrants change jobs regularly, this effectively means they have no protection at work in the UK. If a migrant worker is abused by an employer who refuses to pay him or her the wages that they are due, the employer can perfectly legally fire the worker for complaining. Labour should add to the list of “automatically unfair” employment offences which allow workers to sue their employer from day one.
2. Similarly, the Government should enforce minimum wage law and fully utilise and extend the sanctions under the National Minimum Wage Act. Since 1998 fewer than 20 employers have been prosecuted for breaking minimum wage law. If an employer is routinely paying either migrants or native workers them less than the minimum wage, they should face prison time.
3. Companies should be rewarded with National Insurance exemptions for employing people with poor previous employment records and who have been on out of work benefits in the UK. This would disproportionately favour workers who are already resident in Britain.