Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension

Dave Robertson Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 700824 relating to suspending legal and illegal migration.

Before I begin my remarks, may I say what a pleasure it will be to serve with you in the Chair Dr Huq? This is a topic of real importance, which matters to an awful lot of people across Britain, but too often politicians fail to talk about it with the seriousness and depth it deserves. Views on immigration have become increasingly polarised in this country, and it is a sad fact that, at the close of today’s debate, I will receive hate mail, as I am sure many other Members around the Chamber will. Some will be from people who think that, because I am willing to talk about the rapid rise of immigration, I am somehow a racist, but some will come from people who think I am the worst example of “woke thinking”—whatever that is—and a soft touch who does not care about the country’s national security. Neither of those positions is right.

Actually, when I talk to people face to face—real-life people who are not in politics—very few hold either of those essentially polarised opinions. One thing I am really hoping for from today’s debate is that we can bridge that gap and start to talk frankly and fairly about this issue. Everybody in this room wants to make progress on it, and I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will bear that in mind and that we can have a positive and open discussion—a grown-up debate—which is what this country deserves.

When thinking about immigration, two things are clear to me. The first is the role that migrants have played, going back centuries, in making this country what it is today—the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Jutes, the Normans, the Flemings, the Irish, the Windrush generation, people from across the Commonwealth and countless others. It would be remiss of me not to go through that list and make particular mention of the contribution of the millions from across the Commonwealth, and further afield, who fought shoulder to shoulder with our soldiers in both the world wars in the last century—and not only that, but who helped win the peace afterwards.

The second thing we need to do, though, is to respond to that by saying that immigration has grown rapidly in Britain in recent years. In the years since the covid-19 pandemic, it has spiked dramatically, and I am sure it is clear to all of us in the Chamber—and certainly to the 219,000 people who signed the petition—that that is a worry for a lot of people. Voters consistently tell pollsters that immigration is one of the biggest issues we face, and the most recent survey by YouGov found that 69% of people think it has been too high over the past decade.

I think that the worry that migration figures have grown too quickly is what underpins the petition. When I mentioned that I was going to lead this debate, I spoke to somebody back home, and their view was that, because the petition starts with the, “Close the borders!”, I should just try to ridicule somebody. That is absolutely the wrong approach in this situation. When we look into the detail of the petition—the explanation for it and what the petitioner has written—actually, the real drive here is not trade or imports; it is very much immigration, and I really do not want to try to patronise anybody by picking on a particular point and making ridiculous comments about it.

Unfortunately, it has been a little more difficult than usual to prepare my introduction. When I have introduced petitions debates before, it has been my common practice that one of the first people I speak to is the petitioner themselves. It has been really valuable to speak to that person face to face, or via Zoom, to really see where they are coming from and, hopefully, build the speech around that. Unfortunately, the petitioner has not been able to respond to any of the requests for a meeting, so I have not been able to have that face-to-face discussion. However, I am going to do the very best I can to do justice to their petition and to talk about it in as much detail as possible.

The petition calls for a temporary halt to all immigration, both illegal and legal, for five years. That word “temporary” is important. The petitioner writes that

“our country is facing serious challenges both from legal and illegal migration”,

and argues that strong action is needed. That speaks to a sense that we have reached a moment of crisis. The petitioner is not saying “never again” or dismissing the contribution that migrants make to our society, but they are worried about where we are right now. To go back to my initial point about having a grown-up debate, it is important that we recognise that the petitioner is not saying, “No people who weren’t born here”; this is a response to the situation as they see it.

So where exactly are we? Since I have the opportunity to present this debate, let me present some facts to go around it. Since 2021, immigration to Britain has risen to unprecedented levels. In the 12 months to June 2024, net migration—the total number of people moving here, take away the total number of people who have left—was well in excess of three quarters of a million people. That is down on the previous year, but it is still vastly higher than the pre-pandemic estimate, which would have been closer to one quarter of a million.

Within the 1.2 million people moving to the UK, 5% were Brits who were living elsewhere and who came home. I do not think in a million years that the petitioner would say that people who were born in the UK did not have a right to come back—I do not think that that is the point of view the petitioner is coming from—but the numbers do count them as people who have immigrated to the UK, because it is an inward flow. Another 10% of those who came were from the European Union, plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, although more people from those countries actually left Britain than arrived here.

The vast majority, about 1 million people, were non-EU nationals. Almost half, about 400,000, came here to work; around 375,000 were students and roughly 150,000 were asylum seekers or people coming through specific humanitarian schemes—the Ukrainian and Hong Kong nationals schemes are great examples there, and I am sure there is widespread consensus about the importance of maintaining those safe and legal routes. Most of the remaining 100,000 or so people came for family reasons, and again I think most people would support people’s right to live a proper family life.

The petition talks about both legal and illegal immigration. The vast majority of people arriving in this country do so through standard legal routes, with a work permit, a student visa or some other type of permission. However, we all know that a large number of people come to the country through what the Government call “irregular routes”, most of them by crossing the English channel in small boats. Of those people, around 94% go on to claim asylum and around 70% are successful, which is a similar proportion to those arriving through other routes. In the year to September 2024, just under 30,000 people arrived in small boats; that figure is down by a third from a peak of more than 45,000 in 2022, but still much higher than we saw before that. In fact, it is 100 times—not 100%, but 100 times—higher than it was in 2018.

However we look at it, that is a really bad thing. The English channel may only be 20 miles across at its narrowest point, but in boats such as those we have seen people using to try to cross it, journeys can be extremely dangerous. It is one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet, and the crossing is very dangerous. By October last year, 2024 had already become the deadliest year on record for channel crossings: 69 people had died trying to reach our country. Those are lives that should never have been lost. The people who profit from those journeys are the organised criminal gangs that are prepared to put profit in the way of people’s safety.

Given that background, it is important that we debate the petition in full, in detail and openly. As part of the work behind writing this opening speech, I spoke to a wide range of stakeholders, who said that suspending migration would be possible as a policy choice, but that it would have impacts. That is also worth saying: it is potentially doable, but as legislators we have to go one step further and talk about what effect it would have. Before I carry on, I thank everyone who shared their time and knowledge to help to make this as informed and useful a debate as possible: the Centre for Policy Studies, the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

When we talk about the effects that introducing this policy might have, let us start with work. What would it mean for jobs and our economy to stop that immigration completely, even for just five years? Polling suggests that, right now, the only factor that worries Brits more than immigration is the economy, for obvious reasons. Therefore, thinking about the impact of immigration on jobs is a huge part of where the debate should be going.

One of the big worries voters have is that migrants take jobs that could otherwise be done by Brits, driving down wages in our economy. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that there is no fixed number of jobs in Britain and that, because we have the advantages of living in a liberal, free market economy, the number of jobs rises in good times, when people have money to spend, and in bad times—

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am loath to interrupt the hon. Gentleman’s short seminar on economics, but let me add my thoughts. Everyone has an economic value and an economic cost, and some people who arrive in Britain bring an economic value; indeed, some bring great value, such as people with skills that we need and so on. However, some people bring far more costs than value; for example, if they bring dependants, such as elderly relatives or young children, who need education or healthcare, they bring little economic value, which is not to say that they are not valuable people—they may well be. Therefore, in terms of the economic argument, is the hon. Gentleman as alarmed as I am about the high number of dependants —who bring no economic value to the country—that immigrants bring with them?

[Dave Robertson]

I was about to pick up on a couple of the right hon. Member’s points, but the major thrust of what he was saying was about dependants who do not bring any economic value. However, particularly if we are talking about dependants who are children, we have to consider the future economic value of having potentially amazing people coming to this country, with potentially amazing skills, who can deliver wonderful things for our country.

My wider point, on what migration means for the job market, is one that is worth discussing. Migrants do not take jobs from a fixed pool. The simple fact is that, when people migrate to the UK, they spend money. A rise in population can mean more cash in the economy and more money for businesses, allowing them to expand and create more jobs for those who have come to the UK. However, the reality is that the impact that migration has on the economy is quite small. Overall, migrants make our GDP bigger—that is a fact—but not by a vast amount. Migration is not a silver bullet to create more jobs, higher wages and boom times, which is pretty unsurprising if we think about it: if immigration did do all that, I do not think that as many people would be as worried about it as they are.

The other thing that comes up when we talk to people about this issue is wages. Although migration may have an impact on GDP, they are interested in what it does to the wages that people can earn? For the most part, looking across the economy as a whole, all the measurements say that the answer is very little. The impact is difficult to measure—it is such a small value that it is difficult to put a number on—but experts find that wages are not substantially higher or lower because of migrants.

Most of us know, however, that people’s understanding of the economy is not about a number written on a spreadsheet somewhere that an economist is looking at; it is about, “Do I have a job?”, “Does it pay well?”, and, “Do I have enough to get by?” The one place where immigration does have an impact is on the lowest-paid workers. For those people, it has an admittedly small impact, but it does depress pay ever so slightly. That is very easy for us to say, but if people are struggling to make ends meet anyway, any impact on their wages in the wrong direction is a big deal.

Beyond that, if we are to talk about immigration, jobs and the economy, we have to talk about what sectors of the economy rely on migrants. Many sectors and lots of industries in our economy struggle to fill jobs with British workers. The ones that I would single out, though, are seasonal agricultural work, such as fruit picking, and care work. Those are two sectors where migrants make up a big share of the workforce.

To look at care specifically, in England, which is where I will start, carers are often paid less than they could get working in a warehouse for one of the large internet companies—I will not name the one that begins with an A—as a delivery driver or in the local supermarket. That can make care work unattractive to people. People who want to be carers do it not only for the pay at the end of the month, but because they enjoy looking after people who need their support and help—older, disabled or other vulnerable people. As a result, almost one in five carers in the UK is a migrant worker and, for them, the wages are better than they might get at home.

It is interesting to compare that to Scotland and Northern Ireland, where there are far fewer migrant carers. That is because wages for carers are higher in those areas, so they are attracting more British workers and there is less of a drive to employ migrant workers. The Migration Advisory Committee reckons that raising the wages of carers by £1 an hour would make the job much more attractive to English workers, beating out those other jobs that currently pay more. That is where we can talk about this being a policy choice. It is down to any Government to make these policy choices. They could choose to do the investment—it would be about £2 billion a year—that would enable that to happen, but it would potentially leave unfilled jobs in other key sectors, or leave other areas unable to find the labour they needed.

I have a few points to make before I shut up and let other people contribute. I think it is important that we talk about public services. Immigration will have an effect on them. Everybody recognises this; it makes an obvious difference, with more people registering for doctors and dentists, needing hospital treatment, sending their children to school, and using other public services. However, it also means more people paying tax to pay for those things, so it is not quite a “good or bad” argument; it is one that we have to have in the round.

If we look at the figures, we see that some migrants, particularly those highly paid migrants mentioned by the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), tend to pay more in tax than they take out by using those services. However, in other areas the impact is not offset in quite the same way, and having more people just makes things harder. Housing is the most obvious example. We know that we have a housing crisis in the country; there is broad political consensus about that. Rents are rising, and people are paying eye-watering sums to own a house. It is becoming much harder to get out of the private rental sector and on to the housing ladder. Because migration increases our population, it means more competition for homes and potentially even higher prices. The irony is that, in the short term, we need skilled construction workers to come here to start building the homes, because we have a gap in those skills in Britain, but if the population rises faster than we can build housing, it will exacerbate the crisis.

Earlier I spoke about the number of people coming to live in the UK on student visas, and I think it is important that I go into a bit more detail on that now. Some of us, and some people I have spoken to, may not consider international students to be migrants, but that is how they appear in the numbers, which show that almost a third of the migrants to this country last year came here to study. The international education strategy set by the previous Government aimed to increase the number of international students studying in the UK to 600,000 by 2030. Those students pay higher fees, which helps to pay for the world-class research universities that we have in the UK—one of the things that I am sure all right hon. and hon. Members are very proud to support. International students make up roughly a quarter of all students in British universities—up from closer to 10% all those years ago when I was a student. At some of our universities, though, the share is much higher. International students make up more than half the total at Imperial College London, University College London, BPP University, Coventry University and the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton.

The number of international students is already starting to fall, because they are no longer allowed to bring dependants with them or switch to a work visa before the end of their course. Applications were down by almost a third last year, which means we have another difficult choice to make: either raise the fees that British students pay to help to balance the books, or potentially remove funding from the university sector, which is so important to the economy and to our soft power. Cardiff University has already announced plans to cut 400 jobs and axe courses because of fewer international student applications, so this is already starting to have an effect. Fewer international students could result in some institutions going under.

The final point that I want to make is about culture. This is a much more difficult issue to tie down, but a lot of voters talk to us about the culture that people bring with them, and the potential impact of high levels of immigration on British culture and the kind of country that Britain is. I think all of us know that there are lots of versions of Britishness and that trying to tie down a definition of that word would take longer than the three hours we have for the debate today. There are people in this country who are totally chalk and cheese, whom we love and we loathe. There are different groups—those who really identify with others and those who really do not. Again, we could spend a long time talking about that idea on its own. None the less, at the same time there is a shared sense of what it means to be British. That is not just about where somebody was born, or the colour of a passport; it is something much more fundamental—something that people share. It is fuzzy and hard to define, but we do know it.

For lots of people in this country, Britishness is not the only part of who they are, whether they are a third-generation immigrant or somebody newly arrived here. It is not a zero-sum game, where people must only be British and nothing else. It is perfectly legitimate for people to feel British-American, British-Canadian, British-Nigerian, British-Indian or British-Pakistani. Dual nationality and the variety of approaches that people have brought to the country have resulted in amazing developments in the last centuries. That is something that a lot of us want to celebrate, but while a lot of people see that the vibrancy, the new cultural ideas, the new foods and music and the different businesses on the high street are great, there are some who feel hesitant and that things are moving too fast for them.

I believe that when we get to know people who seem a bit different, we tend to find that we have a lot more in common with them than we first thought. Breaking down barriers and getting to know our neighbours can result in people feeling closer, with a stronger sense of community, but if that work is not done and people feel unable to break down the barriers, they may feel more isolated, distant and nervous, and that their community is changing in ways that they did not agree to and cannot control.

I feel the need to say that a minority—and it is a minority—of people in this country have views on race and immigration that we should all condemn. There are, unfortunately, some people who will try to use debates like this to further their own poisonous ends. There are also in this space many people who feel nervous discussing such matters—nervous about being dismissed as being racist, even though they are not coming from a place they consider to be racist. That is why I return to my initial point: let us have a grown-up discussion, talk about this in the round and recognise that not everybody starts from the same place. Let us also recognise that if we want to get this right—and people do want to get this right—we will have to build consensus, build bridges and work with everybody in our community, whether that is the settled population, different parts of the settled population, migrants, expats or anyone else.

There is clearly a mood in the country that immigration is too high. That tells us something about how Brits feel about our country. It speaks to everything that the UK has to offer that so many people want to make their lives here and share in our Great British values, but it is hard for some people to feel proud and optimistic about that when they look around and see shut shops, when jobs in their town, city or village do not pay well despite long hours, when they cannot see a doctor or a dentist, and when they cannot afford to pay their rent or even dream of buying a house. Fixing those problems is hard and complicated. Ending immigration is a policy choice the Government could choose to make, but it will not be a silver bullet that will fix all those issues. Any Government who made that decision would have to do so with full knowledge of the potential impacts, some currently unseen.

This petition, more than anything, demonstrates the fear about where we are right now. Change is needed. People are really eager to see Members like us, who have the opportunity to speak about this subject, talk about it in a way that, hopefully, moves the country forward.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

I remind Members to stand if they want to speak, so that we can work out who is going next.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Tice]

The right hon. Member makes a splendid economic point, which I was coming on to, because this is basic economics. If we have a labour shortage, employers have one of two choices. They can either say, “I need to pay higher wages”, which reflects what the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) was indicating earlier. Or, if they cannot afford that labour, they will essentially be saying, “I need to invest in capital equipment, which is more productive”, and that is what happened: in the ’80s and ’90s, businesses were investing in capital equipment. That is why we became ever more productive and why we got richer. That is the key thing.

From a legal migration standpoint, if we implement it well, with the highly skilled and highly trained going to where they will contribute to various sectors, it is a good thing and hugely welcomed across the country. That takes us back to where I think things were some 25 to 35 years ago. Done badly—like anything in life—we end up with problems. That is why we have ended up in the situation we are in: because of the failures of the previous regime.

That is the issue of legal migration. With competence of delivery, it should be sortable, but the British people are very anxious about the pressures on housing and public services, and that is driven by the pressures of population growth. The challenge for this Government is to try to deal not only with the huge problems that they inherited, but with the potential population growth. In a sense, if the Government said, “Well, we can’t cope with population growth, because we need to deal with the current challenges”, that might make life easier for them. Otherwise, the Government will be constantly chasing their tail and might never catch up.

That brings me to the issue of illegal migration. I would have thought that we could all agree that if something is illegal, we should stop it. In many ways, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about having to do something well: one has got to be competent, and occasionally it requires a bit of courage.

Interestingly—credit where credit is due—under the Labour Administration in the 2000s, we had significant numbers seeking asylum and we had significant illegal immigration, which was then not on boats but in lorries and vans and such, and the Government were doing a good job. They were catching people and saying, “Thank you very much for your application, but you are an economic migrant and have come here illegally. We are going to thank you but say no, you can’t stay.”

The Government were removing some 40,000 people a year and were assessing asylum applications in two to three weeks, with a couple of weeks for an appeal. The decision was made and either the person stayed or returned. In 2004, I think, the acceptance rate for asylum seekers was about 18% to 20%. That percentage is now somewhere in the 70s.

We have a history of being able to do things well. I think that is what the British people want.

[Dave Robertson]

I note the hon. Member’s comments about how things worked in the ’80s and ’90s. For most of that time I was not very old, but to his point about asylum success rates being different then and now, in both of those decades the UK was subject to the European Court of Human Rights, so does he agree that if there has been a change, it is probably not because of the Court?

[Richard Tice]

I think the fact was that the Government were assessing people quickly and promptly. I suspect that what we did not have back then—I may be wrong, and if so, I stand corrected—is a huge industry of lawfare that had grown up, as it has now, but I could be wrong on that. I think it comes back to the issue of competence.

Having been stopped from coming illegally primarily in lorries, people are now coming on boats. What the previous Government utterly failed to do, having had no strategy whatsoever, was stop the boats. There is a history of other nations stopping the boats, and the tragedy, as a previous speaker said, is that by not stopping the boats, people are dying. Last year was a record year—I think the figure of 69, give or take, was mentioned.

The current policy is the worst of all worlds. It is my opinion, having studied it and read it in great detail, that the 1982 United Nations convention on the law of the sea gives us the legal right to pick people up out of boats and safely take them back to France. Under that same treaty there is a legal obligation on our good friends the French to do exactly that. They have a legal obligation that they are failing to fulfil. We know that it works because the Belgian authorities pick up boats that try to leave its shores. They take them back and the whole thing is stopped very quickly. What that requires is competence and political courage, which we have not seen anything of in the last six years by either Government.

The Government have a strategy at the moment, and I hope that the Minister will address it in his remarks, which is to smash the gangs and pray that that will stop the boats. But the evidence so far—some seven or eight months into this Administration—shows that the numbers are some 20% higher than in the comparable period. We know that last year some 36,000 people came across on the boats.

This is costing the country billions and billions of pounds. It is quite hard to get a sense of how many billion, because it is being spent in so many different ways, but it is costing the country billions of pounds. It has also led to the destruction of thousands and thousands of jobs in hotels across the country in the hospitality sector. It has also put significant extra pressure on housing: some 150,000 have come across on boats; very few have been returned. There was that successful return of four people to Rwanda at the cost of many hundreds of millions of pounds. The question for the Minister is: how long will the Government carry on with this policy of smashing the gangs before accepting that it is not working and that it will not work? That is a very important question that I have previously asked the Secretary of State, and we are still waiting for an answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dave Robertson]

It has been a pleasure to take part in this debate with you in the Chair, Dame Siobhain. I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for coming along today and contributing. This is obviously a hot-button issue across the country, and we should value having so many contributions from Members representing a wide range of constituencies, parts of the country and political persuasions.

I thank all Members for the way the debate has been undertaken. There is always a risk on highly charged issues such as this that we lose the debate a bit and, on both sides, descend into behaviours that do not befit the best history of the House, but that is not where this debate went.

This is a complex topic, and given that the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) espoused the benefits of migration and the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) discussed the issues that drive people’s concerns about immigration, we can see that Members from both sides of the House have made this a considered debate. I hope that every single one of the petitioners looks at it with interest and sees that everybody has put a lot of time and thought into it. We all want to see some movement, if not to the same place, then in the same direction—there is widespread agreement on the need to deal with the crisis in the channel. We should applaud that, although we will have to wait and see quite how much of that makes it on to the front pages of the Daily Mail, the Express or The Guardian tomorrow.

I again want to address the petitioners. We are here on their behalf, and I really hope they are listening, watching and reading Hansard, and are aware of how seriously all parties take this issue, even if we do not agree with the outcomes suggested in the petition.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 700824 relating to suspending legal and illegal migration.