Immigration

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I join noble Lords who have spoken so far in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, on securing this debate. I, too, speak as an immigrant. When I arrived, I think the London School of Economics had to get a labour permit to allow me to work. All I can say is that it must have been very easy to get a labour permit in those days. As a matter of principle, I believe in the free movement of capital, commodities and labour. In the best of all possible worlds, there should be no restriction on immigration anywhere, and preferably not even passports. That having been said, we are in the situation that we are in. That used to be the liberal position: liberal with a small “l”. The big “L” people have been trapped, so they cannot express their desires.

As other noble Lords have given instances, I shall give the House an instance of how much people from abroad coming here as students helps us. I recently had the privilege of representing the Lord Speaker at a meeting of Speakers of G20 nations in Ottawa. The person heading the Chinese delegation sought me out and said how happy he was at Durham and Bristol. He was a solid-state physicist. He fondly remembered this country and talked to me enthusiastically because he had been able to come here to do his research and then go back. He is now the vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, and we have a friend of Britain because he was able to come here and research. That is the kind of intangible advantage that we have across the world because we are able to admit students freely. There was a panic under the previous Government, especially at the height of the recession when they were facing an election, and quite frankly we lost our nerve. Having built a very liberal immigration policy inside the European Union, noises began to be made about restricting immigration and how we had to explain to our core supporters that we are not actually in favour of immigration. We have to stop being apologetic about this.

Enough people have spoken about the advantages of immigration, but let me advance an argument that has not been made so far. The standard crude argument about immigration is that we cannot afford extra population in this country, that population is a burden and therefore some kind of Malthusian spectre will rise because our population will go from 60 million to 70 million and perhaps to 80 million by 2075 or whatever, and that is bad. Contrast that with the common debate going on in the global economy about China and India. Everybody is saying that China adopted a one-child policy and is prematurely about to have an ageing population. India did not adopt a one-child policy and is going to get a demographic dividend. The Malthusian spectre has turned around in the modern globalised economy and become a Malthusian blessing. The current state of the debate is that a larger population is not economically harmful. People are saying how much India will gain from the fact that it will have a young working population much longer than China.

In Europe, we have a stagnant, ageing population. One way out of it would be to encourage immigration. If we are going to make our dependency ratios better so that not my pension but the pension of my children is paid properly, we will need a different kind of economy with a much larger proportion of people in the working-age population than we are expected to have if we restrict immigration. From a macroeconomic perspective, the whole argument about immigration can be turned around because there is already evidence in the global economy that people are beginning to realise that countries with expanding populations—the United States, Brazil and India—will have an advantage over countries with stagnant or ageing populations. That argument could cogently be made. We can say that people should be free to come, leave and go where they like. We should be able to say that our future growth prospects depend very much upon having no limit on how our population can grow.

The point has already been made that if we could get reform of the benefits system, the incentive for British people to work would be greater, in which case immigration may settle itself according to the economic incentive of whether there are jobs here for immigrants. As the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said, nobody comes here for the weather; they come for the jobs. If we could alter the conditions of supply of British-resident workers, immigration might reach some kind of equilibrium. I beseech the Government to go back to their instincts and be much more free-market than they have been able to be. If it all goes wrong, they can blame it on me.