We can take control of immigration, but Brexit is not the solution

The way to address concerns is to guarantee high wages through the minimum wage, restore the contributory principle to the welfare, improve education, and privilege natives when it comes to public services. These steps can, and should, be achieved within the EU

Only one in five Britons say immigration has made their own life worse (Getty)

Of all the lunacies that have infected our politics in recent years, among the most stubborn is the idea that there is a conspiracy against the public to silence concerns about immigration. A full decade since Lynton Crosby made the phrase “It’s not racist to talk about migration” a signature of Michael Howard’s Tory general election campaign of 2005, we have still heard complaints during this referendum campaign that voters who are concerned about immigration are being censored.

This tendentious nonsense runs counter to all the available evidence. In truth, we have talked relentlessly about immigration – its growth, impact, costs and benefits – for several years. Newspapers, broadcasters and digital media have endlessly pilloried the Government for failure to get the numbers down. So let’s start by slaying that still-sacred cow of life in Britain: the pretence that you’re not allowed to talk about foreigners who want jobs and lives in this country. Quite the opposite obtains.

It is precisely because our national conversation is so obsessive on the subject that we get the findings revealed by Ipsos Mori this week which, while remarkable, are consistent with a pattern that has prevailed for many years. The polling company report that Britons are almost evenly split on EU immigration: 39 per cent say it has been good, while 42 per cent say it has been bad. Among Leave supporters, 19 per cent say immigration has been good, while 65 per cent say it has been bad.

And yet ask voters how immigration has been for “you personally”, and 51 per cent say it has made no difference, 27 per cent say it has been good, and only 19 per cent say it has been bad. As Bobby Duffy of Ipsos Mori put it: it is “remarkable that the single most important factor driving the Leave vote actually has only a direct, day-to-day negative impact on one in five of the population”.

Remarkable, perhaps, but all the surveys and polls on immigration for the past decade have pointed to this disparity. There is a simple explanation. The grievance that voters feel about immigration is not, for the most part, rooted in their particular local experiences, or the impact on their incomes and communities. Rather, public anger about immigration expresses a generalised – and understandable – anxiety about the pace of change in an era of rapid globalisation and technological innovation. The world is speeding up, and in doing so going away from millions of low-skilled workers and their families. It makes sense to find a cause – indeed, a scapegoat – for this woe, especially when the likes of Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are describing it so articulately. Contrary to the appalling ignorance of the British public, immigrants for the most part don’t take the jobs of natives, clog up public services (which, after all, they help to fund through their endeavours), or commit extensive crime.

This is the context in which to understand the prominence of immigration in the debate over the EU referendum. Vote Leave say we should “take control”. What this means is: slow the world down, so that it is more like yesterday, in which your life wasn’t disrupted by modern economic forces. But nobody can slow the world down, least of all by leaving the EU. Immigration from within the EU accounts for only half of net inward migration to Britain: leave the EU and it is not likely to fall dramatically. Nor is an Australian-style point system the solution: that country has higher immigration, in relative terms, than we do.

Does all this amount, as Justin Webb put it to Nick Clegg on Radio 4’s Today yesterday morning, to a counsel of despair? Isn’t it hopelessly defeatist? Not at all: it is called realism. The hyper-mobility of today’s world, in which people, ideas and capital zoom across the planet instantly, is irreversible. Other than becoming poorer, the only way Britain can reduce immigration is by much stricter border checks, a clampdown on students, and much more aggressive eviction of temporary residents. The Independent doesn’t think much of that sounds sensible.

Of course we have to address the concerns of millions of people who interpret change as loss, and see their neighbourhoods ruptured by an influx of foreigners. It is absolutely true that the failed mantra of multiculturalism has created ghettos in which some ethnic minority communities live entirely separate lives – sometimes, disgustingly, with attempted rival jurisdictions. Nor should the fact that immigration is good for our economy – boosting productivity, innovation and labour market flexibility – trump concerns about lost identity.

But we have to start from the world as it really is, not as we imagine it to be. Only a fifth of Britons say immigration has made their own lives worse. Immigration is very hard to control while our economy is growing in the modern age. And a brutal clampdown on immigration would deprive this country of talent that is precious, and criminalise the noble ambitions of people across the world. The way to address concerns about immigration is to guarantee high wages through the statutory minimum wage, restore the contributory principle to the welfare state, improve education for the poor, and privilege natives when it comes to public services. These practical steps can, and should, be achieved within the EU.

Yes, we should take control. That means addressing the true, long-term sources of fear and anxiety among the people of this great, open nation, and not pretending that by leaving the EU your wages will rise, the sun will shine, and England will win Euro 2016, all because Johnny Foreigner stayed away. That’s not how the world works.