Stella Tsantekidou column: ‘Labour can’t rebuild trust without honesty on migration’

“The Right distorted reality with the untrue things they were willing to say; the Left distorted reality with the true things they were unwilling to say”. 

Olivia Nuzzi deployed this sentence in American Canto to capture the dominant analysis of American politics. It serves equally well as a diagnosis of the UK’s migration debate. 

Reading all the exasperated articles about Labour’s attempts to tighten the asylum system, I am reminded of Paul Collier’s phrase ‘policy-based evidence’ to describe the tendency to decide the policy you find more palatable first and work backwards to find supporting evidence.

According to Gallup polling from 2021, 900 million people worldwide would like to migrate, given the opportunity. Of these, 34 million said moving to the UK is their first choice. The UK’s list of ‘unsafe’ countries for rejecting an asylum claim and deporting someone back includes two thirds of the world’s population, excluding G7 and EEA countries. This becomes a problem when, for example, people come on a student visa and then apply for asylum once that visa expires. 

READ MORE: Stella Tsantekidou ‘Is factionalism for losers or is pluralism for wimps?’

The ostrich response is that all these people won’t try to come to the UK if applying for asylum were made easier, followed by accusations that one is insinuating immigrants are dishonest. Well, some can be. I know many Greek immigrants who got fake marriages to get American citizenship. By all means, please do not start treating all Greek immigrants suspiciously now that I have shared my community’s secret. But equally, don’t gaslight people when they tell you of evidence that immigration and asylum systems are being abused. Just say that you don’t think it is a big deal. It usually isn’t; borders were never perfectly observed, and we all have illegal immigrants somewhere in our family trees. But in the UK, it has reached the point where it causes existing problems to compound: our services are oversubscribed and our housing stock is limited. Investment and building take time. 

Cultural integration is also more difficult when the influx of people is more sudden, larger and from countries with existing settled diasporas in the UK with different religions and poorer language skills than previous waves of immigration. That encourages ‘parallel communities’ not just on ethnic and religious lines, but also on class lines, with richer cohorts barricading themselves in gated communities, private schools, corporate healthcare plans and offshore tax havens. 

I agree that talking about immigration incessantly makes our voters feel sad, and our members feel like ‘we are the baddies now’. Bringing it under control won’t fix our biggest problems (energy, housing, infrastructure, industrial strategy), but that does not mean it is not an issue for Labour voters. 

On the legal migration side, a world in which people believe migrating is the only avenue to a better life is not something to promote. I have often thought about whether moving to the UK made my life better or worse, and it’s hard to quantify. Generally, migration makes migrants better off financially, but that benefit is offset by great psychological distress and disconnection. You only have one life to live, and no matter how much technology has made communication easier, the reality is that migrants tear one part of themselves permanently in the sometimes-futile search for something better. 

We also rarely hear about those left behind, about how difficult it is to rebuild a community when all of its young and able people abandon it, as happened in Haiti when it lost 85% of its educated working-age population. A liberal party may find it unconscionable to dictate to people what to do with their own lives. But it is my experience that the screen-based world is making people feel like they are missing out on abundance by not risking everything they have to move away from their parents. However,  that is not always the case, and it is dishonest to give people fake expectations. 

Fixing our asylum system has no perfect solutions. Given we don’t have the power to compel human behaviour or our market overlords, there are only bad ones. 

If you open up routes for anyone who could file a successful asylum application, you will find yourself responsible for housing and caring for millions of people at taxpayers’ expense, in a state that has already shown how overstretched it is. 

Continue with the current lottery system, and you are only helping those who are strong and well off enough to make the journey, or those lucky enough to have family members who have already made the trip. Wait for Reform to get into government because you failed on all fronts, and see them act with populist vengeance while you keep the smug but impotent satisfaction that it wasn’t you who did all these bad things to all these innocent people. The left consistently picks the third option. 

I was recently invited on the podcast of a right-wing journal that hosts the kind of views that the sort of young man (its staff is entirely made up of men) who identifies with the Nick 30 ans meme on Xitter reads and is further convinced the social contract is broken (correct) and only Nigel Farage can bring about the radical change needed (God help us). For that audience, the left’s reactive position on refugees (we will take care of people on our doorsteps) equals a proactive position (we should encourage people to leave their countries). But the left never asked for ‘mass migration’.  If anyone penned ‘mass migration’ in their Santa letter, it was surely big corporations that benefit from nonunionised, cheap labour and more consumers. Open borders is a Koch brother’s policy, as Bernie Sanders once said.

The left never said we want a world where half of the world’s poor feel like their only refuge from poverty and war is to abandon their homes. The left said “don’t bomb people’s houses and deal with climate change before it makes their land unlivable” (that creates refugees), and don’t force free market capitalist policies that benefit the rich more (because that keeps people poor and dependent). The left didn’t get its way, so despite the benefits of capitalism on alleviating absolute poverty and the relatively peaceful period the planet has been experiencing compared to previous centuries, inequality is widening. It is the income inequality in particular that drives immigration. 

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The left-wing position, then, when these three conditions were not met (enable people to live in peace, safety and prosperity) became, ‘well, now they are here, we will help them.’  

It is an honourable position when you have a person in front of you asking you to help them stay, or get in. In fact, it is the most civilised, and the one immigrants like me recognise as the most British. 

But at the policy level, I find it not only unrealistic but also slightly manipulative when my comrades do not want to address the cost-benefit axis of their positions on migration and asylum. 

Keir Starmer sounded clumsy and awkward when he made the island of strangers speech, and our Labour MPs did not get into politics to tell desperate people they can’t help them find shelter, no matter where they are from. But it is dishonest to pretend that there is an immigration policy that benefits everyone and damages no one, whether it is the immigrants already here who get stigmatised by the influx of people allowed to abuse the system, the natives who are asked to share an ever-decreasing share of public resources, or the people left behind in other countries. All immigration and asylum policies are difficult.  

I am saying this to the safety and limited audience of my LabourList column, not because I want my party to start resembling the monstrosity we are fighting – far from it.  I say it because I don’t think we are being more benevolent or caring about the long-term fortunes of people from poor or war-torn countries if we are not acknowledging practical obstacles to helping them. 

Right-wingers love digging up that essay young lawyer Keir Starmer wrote about immigration controls being racist. Philosophically, it is true. We should dream of a future of open borders and frictionless movement for everyone. However, a comet may fry us to extinction before that, as so far it is the birth of the ‘nation state’ (despite its inelegant connotations and its fortuitous composition) that has given us the most peaceful period in European history. 

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It is a miracle that it is now unfathomable that Germany would ever invade France, or Italy would invade Greece. As menaced as the EU may be as an institution, it has absolutely achieved its aim of bringing a European identity into life. The best way to celebrate these achievements is by ensuring that the Prime Minister who decides how to implement asylum and immigration policy is not someone who made Nazi salutes in high school, but the one who wrote idealistic, Tory rage-baiting, open borders essays. But by denying that migration and refugee resettlement at the current scale have had economic and social costs, we are not repairing the delicate net of social trust that we hope to keep in place for the next generation. We are overloading it till it snaps. 

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