Forty years ago, the British Conservative MP, Enoch Powell, precipitated a furor when he warned that immigration threatened to destroy the British way of life. That Powell was thinking in the main of dark-skinned immigrants from the former British Empire, from the Caribbean, from the Indian Subcontinent and from East Africa, has never been in doubt. This austere Cambridge scholar was an old-style Western imperialist whose chief appeal was to British racists nostalgic for the days when the white man ruled supreme at home and abroad.
A wild-eyed demagogue, Powell was in many ways a menacing figure. What limited the harm caused by his inflammatory speeches was the decisiveness with which the British political establishment disowned him. The Conservative prime minister of the early 1970s, Edward Heath, made it clear that Powell’s xenophobic politics formed no part of mainstream Conservatism. Apt to remark that all political careers end in failure, Powell himself finished up a brooding presence on the margins of British public life. The riots involving disaffected black youths that afflicted Britain during the 1980s may have convinced him that he was someone without honor in his own land, but with the passage of time fewer and fewer people took his premonitions of disaster seriously.
For multiracial Britain became an inexorable reality, and by this stage may be accounted a comparative success; certainly, Britain seems to have made a better fist of integrating its ethnic minorities than has its near Continental neighbor, France. However, immigration is once again a hugely emotive issue in Britain, and for reasons that perhaps have more to do with sheer numbers than in previous times. The fact is that immigration into Britain has reached a record level, dwarfing that which alarmed Enoch Powell. Every year the population of Britain is reckoned to be expanding by at least 342, 000 people, with much of the expansion concentrated in the southeast of England, which, with its booming jobs market, has become one of the world’s most densely populated regions. It is ironic that hostility to immigrants is now not uncommon among the British blacks and Asians whom Powell was so anxious to repatriate.
If public feeling about immigration is running unusually high at present, it is because it has become bound up with the related issue of “bogus asylum-seekers”, which is in turn bound up with the threat of terrorism and whether the British state is able to control its borders. Large numbers of foreigners are believed to be working in Britain illegally. The admission that it cannot specify how many has played no small part in undermining public faith in the managerial competence of the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Getting a grip on the problems posed by immigration and asylum-seekers, bogus or otherwise, will be not least among the headaches inherited by Blair’s successor.
The sometime British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Andrew Green, presides over the nongovernmental think tank Migrationwatch UK and has for several years been arguing that immigration into Britain is out of control. Green presents himself as a public-spirited citizen with no political agenda, though it is hard to see how his campaign to get an annual limit imposed on immigration could be other than political. The website of Migrationwatch brims with seemingly well-documented facts and figures and when Green himself addresses the media he does so in the firm but courteous fashion of a well-briefed civil servant. Now the Labour MP and former minister, Frank Field, has joined the debate, in effect endorsing Green’s position. Likewise insistent that the present scale of immigration is unsustainable, Field maintains that Britain is in danger of becoming nothing but a “global traffic station” for migrant workers. Green and Field alike are calling, as a matter of urgency, for a proper national debate on immigration. One of the things such a debate would need to address is the question of how Britain, with its rising population of pensioners and dwindling numbers of young people, is going to be able to support itself without a sizable long-term presence of foreign workers; it is a question of broad relevance to affluent Western societies.
At the root of this latest phase of immigration is Britain’s de-regulated economy that has turned the country into a magnet for foreign labor. The truth is that Britain’s reliance on foreign labor has become institutionalized; the other week it transpired that one of the key departments of the British state, the Home Office, had been employing illegal aliens as cleaners, even as the new Home Secretary, John Reid, was pledging to take a stern line over such matters.
In London, it is a question whether the city would be able to function at all if measures were taken to end, or even reduce, its dependence on foreign workers. Not that any such measures seem likely. It has after all been government policy to let the market determine the relationship between capital and labor; it may be, too, that the process whereby cheap foreign labor drives down wage levels is regarded not without official favor. In other words, the British government has been turning a blind eye to the burgeoning influx of foreign workers. Ministers may talk tough about national security and promise to crack down on illegal immigrants, but their actions, or rather inactions, belie their words. To stand at a crowded London bus stop where it sometimes seems that the only language not being spoken is English is to wonder just who the politicians think they are fooling.
Since the accession to the European Union of former Eastern Bloc countries, large numbers of Poles have come to Britain, perfectly legally, to take advantage of the country’s employment opportunities (with unhappy consequences for Poland which is being robbed of the services of vital workers trained at Polish expense.) It is the specific issue of accession country immigration that occasioned the intervention by Frank Field. Believing that the figure of East European immigrants is massively higher than was anticipated, Field speaks with foreboding about the potentially dangerous political consequences of hundred of thousands of people arriving in Britain every year. It is true that in deprived areas where there is a queue for public housing, the extreme right-wing British National Party is capitalizing on the resentful belief of locals that immigrants are receiving preferential treatment from the authorities.
Yet it is safe to say that few enter the debate on immigration without being fundamentally prejudiced about the issue in one direction or the other. Some react to immigration as if it is a disease ravaging the national substance. Others — like the Labour Party treasurer, Jack Dromey, who believes that Britain ought to declare an amnesty on behalf of existing illegal workers — think that immigration has enriched the United Kingdom in every possible way. What the future holds regarding this most vexed of issues is difficult to forecast. The question whether present immigrant numbers are compatible with Britain’s creaking infrastructure, its shambolic transport system and dearth of affordable housing, is a genuine one. Still, it is not guaranteed that the British economy will continue to boom; an economic downturn would make Britain less of a magnet than it currently is. Only one thing seems certain, and that is that on immigration British politicians will continue to strike ambiguous attitudes. Foreign workers may be forgiven for thinking that Britain’s message to them is: “We want your labor — it’s just you we don’t want”.
