John Humphrys asks: how likely is David Cameron’s new immigration bill going to work?
David Cameron has told the House of Commons that the “centrepiece” of the Queen’s Speech was a new immigration bill which would “ensure that this country attracts people who will contribute and deter those who will not”. How likely is it to work?
Immigration has been a hot political issue for decades but never more so than in the last ten years. Governments of all parties have suffered electorally because many voters have thought them too soft on the issue. This sense of the established parties being incapable of dealing with it has contributed, perhaps more than any other issue, to the rise of UKIP as a political force.
The Prime Minister clearly hopes that his new proposals will turn immigration from being a vote loser into a vote winner for his party. In his speech to MPs at the beginning of the new session of parliament on Wednesday, he said: “Put simply, our immigration bill will back aspiration and end the legacy of the last government, where people could come here and expect something for nothing.” Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said his party would study the proposals before making up its mind about them.
The government wants to crack down on illegal immigrants by increasing the fines on companies that employ them. The bill will deprive illegal immigrants of driving licenses and make it easier to deport immigrants who commit crimes. Private landlords will be forced to check the status of would-be tenants as a means of detecting illegal immigrants. And immigrants who are here on a short-term basis will be required to “make a contribution” to the cost of any healthcare they may seek from the NHS.
But how are such measures going to be enforced? It seems that the government does not yet know. Vince Cable, the business secretary, spoke in a subsequent interview of “checks of various kinds” being put it place but acknowledged that the details were still up for discussion. Making them effective may prove difficult.
The example of requiring short-term immigrants to pay for healthcare illustrates the problem. How is a doctor faced with someone needing treatment supposed to behave? Simply asking to see a passport will get the doctor nowhere since passports are easily forged. As this country does not have identity cards (and the coalition government explicitly rejected the last Labour government’s plans to introduce them), there is no obvious way that a doctor can tell whether someone asking for medical help is a British citizen who is entitled to it or a foreigner trying to get (in Mr Cameron’s words) “something for nothing”. In any case many doctors will think it is not their business to spend time trying to discover someone’s status in order to see whether any money can be got for them; the doctor’s job is to treat anyone who has a need.
Similarly, private landlords may feel they are not equipped to decide whether a would-be tenant is an illegal immigrant or not and that so long as the tenant provides adequate assurance that the rent will be paid that’s all the landlord should be required to worry about.
Some people will see in these proposals an implicit admission by the government that its own officials are incapable of rooting out illegal immigrants and that the job is being foisted on to the public. The obvious extension of this would be to ask everyone to be vigilant about immigrants in the hope that they would then report those suspected of being illegal.
Such a policy would be similar to the encouragement government has given to so-called “snoopers” to tip the wink to the authorities if they believe someone is receiving welfare benefits they may not be entitled to. The argument in favour of such a policy is that knowledge lies on the ground and that only by asking everyone to share in the business of seeking out those who are cheating the system (be they benefit scroungers or illegal immigrants) can the system itself be made watertight. The argument against it is obvious: encouraging people to spy on their neighbours is likely to raise community tensions.
Sceptics of the government’s new proposals will see them as little more than a way of diverting attention from the main issue regarding immigration numbers. It is the sheer scale of immigration over the last decade or so that has raised the political temperature of the issue. Immigration from EU countries is not something any government can do anything about, since all EU citizens are entitled to work wherever they want within the European Union. That will apply to Romanians and Bulgarians from next January and no one knows how many will take advantage of it to come here. The government has made no promises about whether its new bill will be in force by then.
Unable to do anything about EU immigration, the government has based its overall immigration policy on pledging to reduce total net immigration to “tens of thousands” a year, compared with much larger numbers when it first came into power. It can claim some success in this but critics of the policy point out various problems with it.
The most obvious one is that, by definition, the government has much less control over net immigration than it does over the gross figures, simply because the net figure takes into account the number of people emigrating, which the government certainly can’t control. But the government has also been criticised for the way it has sought to reduce net immigration. In particular it has cracked down on the number of foreign students coming into the country on the grounds that it believes many of them are bogus students with no intention of studying and every intention of disappearing into the wider population to seek work. But universities and colleges complain that this has made it difficult to attract legitimate foreign students who are great money-earners for the country.
All politicians discover that it is one thing to announce a policy but quite another to make it effective. In the coming months we shall see whether the government will succeed in its aim of encouraging the immigrants it wants and deterring those it doesn’t. And that may determine whether or not immigration goes on being such a hot political potato.
What’s your view?
- Do you share the Prime Minister’s view that too many immigrants have come here wanting “something for nothing”?
- Do you think the proposals he has outlined in the government’s new bill are likely to be effective in dealing with illegal immigrants?
- Specifically, do you think plans to get doctors to make sure short-term immigrants contribute to the cost of their healthcare and to require landlords to check the status of would-be tenants can be made to work?
- In general, do you think the public at large should be recruited to look out for illegal immigrants?
- Do you think the government’s policy of trying to reduce net immigration is a good one?
- Do you think it has been too tough in trying to restrict the number of foreign students coming to Britain or not tough enough?
- And do you think that immigration has, overall, been a good thing or a bad thing for Britain?
