Badly handled immigration can be a problem

Maya Goodfellow says Labour’s leadership is treading the UKIP-Tory path ‘by accepting that immigration is a problem at all’. This view is clearly shared held by a significant number of party members, so let me give a few reasons why she and they are wrong.

Badly handled, immigration can be a problem. A sharp increase in a local population does put additional pressure on public services; the need to house more people can change local areas as, for example, family housing is converted into HMOs; a rapidly expanding labour force does change local labour markets with lower wages and greater insecurity. Too rapid change can undermine the sense of neighborhood and community in areas that would otherwise be positive about a slower rate of migration.

How much is too much is, of course, a difficult call. But Southampton’s population of 210,000 in 2001 was joined by 30,000 newcomers in the next six years – more than all migration since 1948. The pressures are still felt, and the issue is the sheer number of people, not the individual migrants themselves.

For some reason, this issue makes the left abandon its normal critique of free markets and unscrupulous business. The exploitation of agency workers that characterizes migration is driven by profit, but the change in the labour market that enable them to do so reflects the size of the available labour force. Without recognizing this, we end up prioritising the profit seekers’ interests over those of both the existing and the migrant population.

The transformation of our private housing stock is driven by profit-seeking landlords. But to raise concerns is said to be pandering to UKIP. In other contexts, we say it’s not just how much growth there is but who benefits. But on this issue we are asked to accept that migration is an unqualified boon, even if all the benefits go to middle class Londoners and all the costs fall on provincial working class communities.

And our migration tends to tangle up our values, too. Public support for social security the NHS and social housing depends on rules that are seen as fair. For the vast majority of people that means people paying in before they can take out, with additional help for those who can’t. These are the values on which Labour built the welfare state, even if we’ve sometimes lost sight of them in recent years. Trying to bring free movement entitlements into line with these values is not treading the UKIP path; it’s asserting our own historic values. The numbers involved in benefit claiming is not the real concern for most voters; it’s the sense that paying child benefit to children who will never live here are rates well above their own governments is simply unfair.

We can’t simply wish these problems away. We can do much more to tackle unscrupulous employers and agencies, but we can’t wish all the problems away by legislating for higher wages. We can regulate landlords, but exploitation is easier when demand is higher. We can tackle housing shortages, but the number we need rises as the population increases and rapid immigration makes it more difficult. We can make real progress on all these issues, but it will be much easier if immigration is properly and fairly managed.

None of this means that all immigration is wrong – though I know that some people will prefer to knock down that straw man instead of engaging with what I say. It just there is no reason why immigration should not be approached with the same Labour values we apply to other issues. Yvette Cooper’s speech yesterday did not call for an end to migration, withdrawal from the EU or an end to movement within the EU. It simply applied Labour values of fairness, solidarity, international cooperation and opposition to exploitation to this crucial issue.