If you said to me, would I like to see over the next ten years a further five million people come in to Britain and if that happened we’d all be slightly richer, I’d say, I’d rather we weren’t slightly richer, and I’d rather we had communities that were united and where young unemployed British people had a realistic chance of getting a job.
I think the social side of this matters more than pure market economics.
I've long hated the word "communities", because most people no longer live in "communities". Eastenders and Coronation Street, societies where neighbours work together and go down the same pubs and shops may suit the needs of soap opera writers, but in the real world, we don't live like that any more. We really haven't lived like that since the late 70s when car ownership took off and we had more choices. People are far more atomised in terms of work, rest and play, and anything you do is not going to change that because in reality, that's how people want it.
To talk of "united communities" ignores the fact that people unite when they have to or want to, and I don't believe that the "social side" matters that much in those situations. OK, when we had actual communities, things like trust mattered more. You couldn't go stiffing the bloke who lived 3 doors down from you. But when you have people moving around the country for work, what difference is there between a Pole and a Welshman?
I'm not against the idea of restricting people based on economics - that if you don't, people will come here to live on benefits, but I have problems with the idea of the "social side", because I've generally got on just fine with all the immigrants I've met, whether Polish, Pakistani or American. What's the concern about the "social side"? That we'll end up being ruled by Sharia Law? If history teaches us anything, it's that the effect of the majority in an area is far more powerful on the immigrants than vice versa. What's the biggest effect on the white population of Asians coming to the UK? We now have lots more people who are good at programming? We have replaced fish and chips with chicken tikka masala? But on the other side, the impact has been far greater. Indian households have adopted western attitudes to sex and marriage. Sure, they may still get married at the Sikh temple, but they probably chose their husband, and probably had boyfriends growing up, unlike their mothers.
And as for getting young, unemployed people into a job, you do that by reforming the benefit system. People from Eastern Europe shouldn't stand a chance with applying for service jobs compared to British people for whom English is their first language but there's lots of them in Starbucks and Costas. The problem is simply that a lot of people won't take a minimum wage job when they can live on benefits.
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