Immigrants are good for us. Let them stay - and pay their taxes

Sign of success: Polish arrivals at Victoria station. Nothing defines a thriving metropolis more than the presence of migrant workers
13 April 2012

The Mayor, Boris Johnson, wants a government amnesty for the estimated half million illegal immigrants now living and (mostly) working in London. At the present rate of arrest and repatriation, he points out, "it will take the authorities over 60 years to remove the current number of irregular migrants". During that time, tens of thousands more will arrive. It is like trying to drain the English Channel with a spoon.

The Mayor is right. Immigration brings out the worst in politicians, and especially in the present immigration minister, Phil Woolas. It is an invitation to pander to tabloid bigotry as a cover for doing nothing.

Immigration everywhere is a function of two factors, the security of a state and the prosperity of its economy. It was the boom in London over the past 10 years that led the present Government, in effect, to abandon attempts to control entry beyond the most rudimentary border checks.

As a result, according to an interim report from the LSE published this week, the total of illegals rose from 430,000 in 2001 to 725,000 in 2007, of which 518,000 are in London, two-thirds of the national total.

Nothing so defines a successful metropolis as the presence of migrant workers. For all its ethnic problems, Johannesburg has been a booming city, just as Moscow, for all its political bombast, is becoming an economic basket case, with a declining population and hostility to immigrant workers.

London's offer of a safe berth to the frightened and the poor of the world, from the Philippines to Somalia to Zimbabwe to Colombia, is not a subject of shame but of pride. There is no doubt that London has benefited greatly from the presence of a large pool of incoming labour, from domestic service to catering, the rag trade and even the building of the Olympic site, where a third of the workers are said to come from overseas.

London has been a magnet, mostly for adult males, for the best part of a quarter of a century. From the Vietnamese of Kingsland Road to the Sikhs of Southall, they honoured the maxim of the historian of immigration, WHHutt, that "émigré victims of religious intolerance in the 17th and 18th centuries found freedom and prosperity in the lands to which they fled, but the nations that welcomed them gained more than proportionately".

Immigrants of all sorts are good for London.

However, that is not the full burden of the Mayor's claim for an amnesty. Woolas wants to kick the illegals out to make himself popular. Johnson has no particular desire to make himself unpopular, nor are many of London's half million illegals likely to vote Tory. But there is money at stake here.

The relaxation of immigration controls by Labour after 1997 was designed in part to reduce the burden on the Home Office and relieve the chaos at ports of entry. Once in the country, illegal immigrants wander to the places of ethnic settlement, mostly in London, where they then enter a twilight world.

Despite their economic productivity they are unlikely to pay taxes. Informal government estimates are that some £1billion in income tax is being lost this way. Illegal immigrants may be no particular burden on government social benefits and operate outside the remit of employment legislation or the police. But they are a burden on local services, notably schools and clinics.

Because they are illegal and do not appear on population statistics, they pay no income tax and rarely any council tax. Local authorities must look after them and their families, while being unable to claim government support for this cost.

This makes no sense. As one of the authors of the LSE study, Tony Travers, points out, "In America, illegals at least pay local taxes. In Britain, almost all tax is central. These half million are unlikely to go home. If they could be taxed and the places where they settle got grants to reflect their numbers, much antagonism towards them could be removed."

Half a million Londoners are de facto compulsory tax-dodgers. Their labour may be in demand but they keep what they earn and are a potential, if not actual, drain on public resources.

The Mayor wants to an amnesty "to maximise the economic potential of these people so they can pay their way". He does not want to be Mayor "of two categories of people in our great city, one group who live normally and another who live in the shadows, unable to contribute fully to the rest of society".

Were there any realistic way of repatriating illegal immigrants from a place with the size and complexity of London, there might be a lively debate over how to do it - at a National Audit Office estimated cost of £8billion. There is not. The one lesson of post-war Europe is that, short of a new Iron Curtain, national frontiers are porous.

Most countries' immigration policies are sophisticated games of bluff. They involve stringent controls on formal migrants and asylum seekers, with tests of political persecution, evidence of wealth or skill or family connection. They require diplomats to issue blood-curdling publicity of the appalling conditions and terrible welcome that will greet the hapless Afghan or Sudanese should he pass muster with the border service.

None of this has any effect. A tidal wave of population surges west from the Urals and north from the Magreb, responding to despair and deprivation, a wave that authority appears unable to resist. It seeps through every border, stowed on ships, clinging to trucks and trains, bribing and cajoling its way to its preferred destination. The best that can be said for British immigration control is that only the fittest seem likely to survive the venture.

The market in migrants is like the market in guns and drugs. Governments pretend they can control it. They talk big and wave a big stick, but in truth they are impotent. Having made it as difficult as possible for illegal immigrants to get to Britain, ministers should have an eye to the taxpayer as well as common humanity, and let them stay and pay taxes.

The option is not whether immigrants will return home. It is whether they are to be admitted to London's melting pot or left in no man's land. The latter is in no one's interest.

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