Immigration: what does it mean for the nation?

**When the new government was formed in May 2010, the Prime Minister signalled his intention to reduce immigration ‘from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands’ per year. **

He claimed that immigration had got out of control under Labour, when hundreds of thousands of Eastern European migrants moved to Britain under EU freedom of movement laws. But is this a bad thing, and are low migration numbers even desirable?

Immigration is presented as a ‘zero-sum’ game by many. If a foreign worker takes a job that means a British worker cannot have it. But this fails to take into account the constantly changing nature of the job market. Just as advances in technology mean the nature of work changes, the job market is not static and there are not a fixed number of jobs. According to some estimates, immigration from Eastern Europe bolstered to UK economy to the tune of £2billion at the end of the last decade. More growth and more prosperity mean more jobs for all.

The only real problem with this migration was that the fabled Eastern European work ethic even included a willingness to work for less than the UK National Minimum Wage, set at a far higher level than it is in Poland, for example. This can therefore be said to lead to an ‘undercutting’ of British workers who, rightly, wanted to be paid the still quite ungenerous minimum wage. However, it would be facile to blame the migrants for this: the real culprits are unscrupulous employers who are willing to exploit this cheap labour, and the answer lies in proper enforcement of the law.

This leads me to the current focus of the argument: the current fear in sections of the right-wing press and politics of the seemingly forthcoming hordes of Romanians and Bulgarians, which has uncovered a thinly-veiled hatred of Romany people in many sections of the press.

The Prime Minister has callously suggested limiting access to the NHS for immigrants (so I assume that means routine operations would be denied them, causing unnecessary suffering?) and UKIP’s hilariously cartoonish leader, Nigel Farage, has painted Romania and Bulgaria as a kind of dystopia from which its residents cannot wait to escape. His by-election candidate in Eastleigh, Diane James, has gone one further by saying another reason for restricting this migration is to ‘stop Romanian pickpockets’ (because of course gypsies are essentially untrustworthy, right?)

But here’s the thing: the Romanians and Bulgarians are already here. Under freedom of movement, they have been able to come to this country since 2007. The only difference the end of the soon-to-be-lifted transitional controls will make is to allow them to get National Insurance numbers, so they can be put on payrolls and paid the minimum wage, rather than being stuck as self-employed and ‘undercutting’, where the key problem started in the first place. The lifting of the controls will make any problems better, not worse. With immigration, sometimes the myths fail to match the reality.