Anti-immigration policies – even if dressed up as ‘an Australian-style points system’ – are not the answer

As labour shortages and the loss of outside investment start to bite, the economy would start to underperform and the poor would suffer

To cut annual net immigration from last year’s total of 333,000 to 100,000 a year would require very tight restrictions (Getty)

The Leave campaign’s new immigration policy sounds awfully familiar. “An Australian-style points system” has become the preferred way of opposing immigration without actually saying that we do not want so many foreigners here.

It also has the advantage of being unspecific about how such a policy would work. The statement issued today by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel and Gisela Stuart said nothing about whether family reunions or students would be restricted further than they already have been. All it said was: “Such a system can be much less bureaucratic and much simpler than the existing system for non-EU citizens.”

All we can surmise, therefore, is that to cut annual net immigration from last year’s total of 333,000 to below the target of 100,000 a year would require very tight restrictions on people coming both to work and to study – assuming that family reunions cannot be reduced significantly without breaching people’s human rights.

Such restrictions would without doubt have a dramatic effect on the UK economy. We accept that the wages of some of the low-paid are likely to rise in the short term. That was what Lord Rose, the former chairman of Marks and Spencer who heads the Stronger In campaign, was mocked for admitting. What a depressing indictment of the referendum campaign that was. If only the two campaigns could admit that the decision the nation is asked to make in three weeks’ time is a complex one, requiring the weighing of positives and negatives on both sides.

Yes, some low wages would rise – maybe in some cases even more than the rises in George Osborne’s so-called National Living Wage. They might rise in higher-paid shortage occupations too, because immigration for work would have been cut almost to zero.

But then the trouble would start. As labour shortages and the loss of outside investment start to bite, the economy would start to underperform and any temporary gains would soon be wiped out. The consensus among economists is surprisingly clear: the only question about the effect of Britain leaving the EU is precisely how much poorer we would be. And if the country as a whole is poorer, it is likely that the burden of that loss would in the end fall harder on those least able to afford it.

If that were not damaging enough to our long-term interests, any attempt to restrict further the number of students coming to the UK would make matters worse. British universities have been one of the success stories of recent decades. They are a world-beating export industry and a shining example of the soft power of personal networks and intellectual influence. The leaders of our best universities think that the present Government has already gone too far in preventing recent graduates from working here. Further restrictions would not be in the national interest.

The Independent has consistently championed the benefits of free movement of EU workers and of limited immigration from outside the EU. The recent net immigration numbers are both a symptom and a cause of Britain’s economic success. Anti-immigration policies – whether or not they are dressed up in the cliché of “an Australian-style points system” – would make Britain a smaller, more mean-minded, less successful country.