UCL Conservative Society

It’s Halloween and someone might be tempted to tell you a popular scary story these days. Into your perfect world or sunshine and roses came one day a dark and evil figure, known only as “the Immigrant”. The skies became clouded, jobs became scarce, kids weren’t safe, crime went up, your own language started sounding foreign and Santa was stopped at Heathrow airport immigration for political correctness precaution.

We grew out of ghost stories and we shouldn’t be buying this. Immigration from outside the EU should be tied to current explicit job demand that can’t be filled, language proficiency prior to arrival, civic education before or on arrival, background checks and the like. Intra-EU migration is a legitimate right, so we’ll just have to wait for the dust to settle and make sure law enforcement isn’t just an election slogan.

Those gentlemen advocating kicking immigrants out by the truckload and the-more-the-merrier would better explain that to the factory owners who’d lose labour, to the restaurant goers who won’t be served, to the supermarket customers confronted with empty shelves for lack of loading/unloading staff. The top 20 occupations for new arrivals are mostly manual labour, not City jobs.

Playing devil’s advocate here, but isn’t healthy immigration the market’s way to stimulate a country’s nationals to get education and training and move to higher-ranked jobs where they wouldn’t face stiff competition from mildly-skilled new arrivals? Isn’t it a stimulus for everyone to roll up their sleeves? “Son, you’ll have to learn a language even if you want to be a loading bay worker: your supervisor will be Polish.”

Fear of immigration is a sign of either fear of one’s own lack of skill and potential or distrust of law enforcement. There’s solutions to both, and they don’t include scare-mongering and immigrant-bashing. Exactly the kind of wrong stuff we’ve seen in Quebec recently. As Tories we should trust the market, ensure new arrivals have a job, a clean criminal record, know our country when they board their plane to Heathrow and, most important of all, recognise that immigrants are to be treated with the same respect we would expect for ourselves as nationals.

The problem’s not the immigrant, whether hardworking or lazy, but the political wonks and incompetent bureaucrats who can’t create any efficient reward and control systems because their head is stuck somewhere very dark. Get this message out and let all those worthy and entitled in!

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