By Michael Portillo (THE TIMES, 21/05/06):
Nobody expects a straight answer these days. Dave Roberts, director of enforcement at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND), told a committee of MPs that he had not the faintest idea how many illegal immigrants there were in Britain. The reaction to that naked truth was uproar. Maybe during our most recent stages of evolution human beings have lost the ability to cope with anything other than obfuscation.
Roberts was stating the obvious. Since some illegal immigrants entered clandestinely, we cannot know their numbers. Tony Blair made that point in the House of Commons a day later. He employed one of his favourite rhetorical devices by quoting Michael Howard who, as home secretary, had made the same self-evident observation.
Because the prime minister used a weaselly parliamentary trick to camouflage his ignorance, his performance was judged to be clever. Roberts remains condemned, like a man in a Bateman cartoon, for a serious lapse of decorum.
Roberts may be naive or simply an honest man. Perhaps he wanted to highlight the unreasonable position in which he and his colleagues are placed. The IND has never been given the resources needed to chase up asylum seekers whose applications fail, let alone to scour the country for people who arrive undetected on the back of a lorry.
Tony McNulty, the immigration minister, seemed to accept that there may be between 310,000 and 570,000 illegals in Britain. He said that it could take 10 years to process them if we dealt with 25,000 a year.
Even leaving aside his faulty arithmetic, it is a thoroughly misleading statement. We have no mechanism to track down those people and the government is not about to fund a massive increase in what it spends on such a futile exercise. Probably only about a fifth of those whose asylum applications have been rejected have been removed. The illegals will remain because deporting them is beyond the administrative capability of the authorities. One day those migrants will become citizens.
Even President Bush, not normally thought to be a political wimp, is allowing illegal entrants to stay. He pledged that they would have to pay a penalty for breaking the law, pay back taxes, learn English and “wait in line” behind the legal migrants. In weasel speak that means he is declaring an amnesty.
Our government has not been inactive or wholly ineffective. It has focused on processing new asylum applications more effectively. If would-be applicants see that their case will be dealt with quickly and there is some chance that they will be removed, they may try their luck elsewhere. Roberts was also right to say that the most efficient thing to do is to raid the premises of large-scale employers where you might catch a dozen illegals in one swoop.
For the future Blair puts his faith in so-called electronic borders and identity cards. But that is disingenuous. Are the police really going to ask us in the street to produce our papers? Will those who cannot prove their right to be here be marched off for deportation? I doubt it and even if it did happen the legal process in each case would remain cumbersome, the outcome uncertain.
I am no more convinced by the ideas put forward elsewhere in this newspaper by David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine. He calls for a sharper distinction between entitlements for British citizens and for those who are merely migrants. It is hard to see that working. Are the children of foreigners to receive poorer education or lower quality healthcare or be expected to live on below subsistence incomes? Apart from the injustices that we are rightly too squeamish to tolerate, it seems a poor recipe for good community relations or law and order.
Nor could such a formula be applied to the hundreds of thousands of Poles and other central Europeans who, as citizens of the European Union, come here with equal rights.
The Blair government worked hard to expand the EU to include them. The British middle classes have welcomed the newcomers as cheap but industrious workers in their homes and restaurants. A survey of Polish migrants published last week revealed that they believe their “whiteness” to be an advantage in getting work here. British whites probably feel little anxiety about migrants who look European and come from a mainly Christian country, especially as many will go home once they have made some money.
Given that there is little to be done about illegal immigrants already here and nothing that can be done about those who have arrived from EU countries in fulfilment of the government’s policy, it is dispiriting that politicians cannot be as straightforward with us as the commendably direct Roberts.
Blair’s diversionary tactic last week was to return to the issue of deporting foreign prisoners “automatically”. He seemed undaunted by the fact that only seven have been sent packing out of the 1,023 convicts identified a month ago who should have been considered for deportation at the end of their sentence. In the Commons Blair promised grandly that “those people, in my view, should be deported irrespective of any claim that they have that the country to which they are going back may not be safe”.
It was good tabloid talk and therefore simplistic to the point of dishonesty. It might seem self-evident that a person who has committed a serious offence here has forfeited the right to any of the protections of this country. But if the courts had good reason to believe that an ex-convict would be returned to his country to be beaten or electrocuted or to have his hand or his head cut off, they would not expel him. It is not entirely logical, since we do not concern ourselves much with the many who face such fates but happen never to have set foot in Britain. But once they have been here our politicians become responsible for them.
While the prime minister finds it convenient to attack the judges (and even his own human rights legislation), if he is honest with himself he knows that he would not want to see such a criminal returned in those circumstances either. It is a paradox that most politicians would rather take the risk of a foreign criminal reoffending in Britain than take responsibility for his barbaric mistreatment or execution back home.
David Davis, the Conservative home affairs spokesman, expressed astonishment at what Blair had said, probably because he, too, would balk at taking such a decision. David Cameron, the Tory leader, was less than sincere when he pledged to repeal Blair’s human rights legislation. Even if it did not exist, politicians would be faced with the same dilemmas and Cameron, no more than Blair, would not dispatch a man to be tortured or beheaded.
Last week Eric Forth died. He was a wonderfully politically incorrect Tory MP and he had real guts. I can just about believe that had he become prime minister he would have weathered the opprobrium and allowed deportation even in such harrowing circumstances. But Cameron and Blair are just posturing.
It is depressing that when the going gets tough (that is, when the headlines look ugly) both party leaders attack the ethos of human rights. Blair led us to think that enshrining human rights in law was a badge of honour worn by civilised nations and I, for one, had come to believe him. If the balance has tilted in a way that now irks him, he must at least recognise the key role that he played in that shift. It is undignified for legislators to attack judges for the consequences of the laws that they passed. Nor does it tie in well with Blair’s so-called respect agenda.
Cameron has broken his own good rule, which was to avoid saying things that reinforce the Tory stereotype. Instead he could have signalled a change in his party’s nature by a more thoughtful analysis of the quandaries we face. It would be amazing were a Tory government to abolish human rights legislation, and Cameron might as well have saved himself a future broken pledge.
Immigration is an emotive issue that makes our politicians less honest than usual. If you, like me, are unimpressed, you might spoil your ballot paper at the next election. Simply scrawl across it “Dave Roberts”.