Immigration

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, we should all thank my noble friend Lady Valentine for securing this essential and timely debate, because things are about to go badly wrong if we do not listen.

The speech of my noble friend Lord Rowe-Beddoe contained a succinct breakdown of the figures, and it has very much reinforced what I have been thinking. The trouble is that we are speaking the language of control about something that we cannot control. The trouble is that we are conflating three different sets of things and movements.

The first is the free movement of EEA and A8 nationals around the European economic area and the wider area. We have to allow that because we are now part of Europe. It is not really migration; it is the free movement of people moving their residency, possibly temporarily or possibly more permanently. We have to accept that this is like being part of the United States of America and we do not have rights to keep them out. They are not immigrants in the traditional sense of the word. Including them in the figures causes confusion because they are the larger part of the figures. When the newspapers say, “All these horrible foreigners are here”, they are very often talking about people who have every right to be here, as we have every right to move to their countries as well.

As for the other two categories, I shall describe the first simply as economic migrants—people who want to better themselves. Bringing them here does not seem to offer any particular attractions up front, but they can offer benefits. If we allow them to work and do not set up artificial barriers, they can contribute and fill essential jobs at the bottom of the economy. They also help their own their countries with the remittances they send home. I think that these remittances are much more effective than the foreign aid that we try to disseminate downwards through central Governments. It creates energy at the bottom end of those countries, on top of which the middle classes in those countries can build an economy—which probably destabilises dictators at the top. So I am not against economic migrants but I realise that that is probably the area in which we need controls. Such migration uncontrolled could cause a lot of instability.

Most speakers have concentrated on the third area and I should like to do the same: the movement of talent and talented people—people in the cultural, creative, artistic and scientific spheres—as part of what we call the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is not, as some think, about people doing business online but about the movement of people with creative knowledge in the arts and sciences generating wealth and business. That is the knowledge economy and free movement is essential to it. Britain needs to become a brain magnet and bring people here. It would be absolute lunacy if we had a crude, crippling cap rather than seeking to create centres which bring together the talent that creates and nurtures new ideas and businesses.

Some good points have been made about the fact that we often do not have people with the right skills to support those with the creative ideas so that those ideas can be turned into something that you can do, use or whatever. Creative people—because skill is creative in itself, I include people who may be using their talent with their hands—are impatient and will move to wherever the pool of other talent is. When you have lost them, you have lost the entire centre. Our people—British-born people whom we think of as native —will move, too. We saw this in the 1960s. We will suffer a brain drain. We will not be a brain magnet, but will watch them all going away. Other people will follow and many will not come back—well, not until they retire, when they can be a burden on the state again.

How on earth did the Government arrive at a figure of 24,100? Did they just throw darts at a board? I do not understand it. According to one newspaper, they have just accepted 135,000 failed asylum seekers as a preliminary to dealing with the backlog of 500,000—although they are not sure how many duplicates there are—and in order to clear a big anomaly in the system. We are going to deal with that, and I am not saying that we should not do it that way: I do not want to get drawn into that argument, because it is one of the ways in which we will probably have to do it, or else every aeroplane and ship will be clogged up with people returning to countries that do not want them.

How did the Government choose 24,100 people whom we are going to use to grow our wealth? We have a huge debt crisis and are told that the Government want to nurture SMEs as the engine of growth in the future. We also do not want to lose the big companies that are already employing people and that will move terribly easily abroad if they have to. Now we have certificates of sponsorship, which are limited. Here I declare an interest that was drawn to my attention. I sit on the advisory board of a New Zealand company that wishes to come over here and set up a research unit, aided by the Welsh Government, because there are some highly attractive deals. One chap has just been doing a PhD at Swansea University. He is a Chinese speaker from Hong Kong. He is working on search engine technology for China. He has been working for the company already and we would like to get a certificate of sponsorship. I have no idea whether we will get it or not, but the New Zealand company will move its research department abroad if we do not. That would be absolute lunacy. On top of that—talk about sledgehammers cracking nuts—two people came down for half a day to go through all the paperwork of our policies on this and that, our P60s and P45s, and to examine the workforce that does not exist yet. It is lunacy. Is that a good use of government money? We must make this more sensible.

The briefing from the House of Lords Library was hugely useful. It contained many studies that showed the cultural and economic benefits of immigration. We in this Parliament should think strategically, leading the Executive to go the right way. The coalition has inherited a lunatic socialist idea of control. We need to put incentives like taxes in place in order to nurture creative talent. If we want to discourage people, we should change the benefit system, which we are doing. We must do something more positive to get out of the debt crisis than stopping talent from coming here.