DynamicSpirit
Established Member
I would tend to agree but I also think it's disingenuous to pretend that ending Freedom of Movement is some unalloyed benefit when the rate of immigration has, if anything, increased since Brexit.
I would see that differently because the causes of the increase in non-EU immigration since Brexit don't seem to have anything to do with Brexit (other than that some of the increase in work visas granted might be explainable as employers recruiting from outside the EU where before they would have recruited for the same jobs within the EU - but since they'd have been recruiting anyway that can't explain an increase in total migration numbers). So the conclusion I draw is that we have a increase in non-EU migration that would have happened anyway, and therefore it's just as well that we were able to mitigate that increase by removing FOM.
You appreciate, I hope, that the the Government could cut immigration to somewhere around 50,000 per year tomorrow if it wished? It simply has to stop issuing visas. It won't, of course, because that would destroy higher education, and collapse the social care sector and the NHS.
Of course. But as you say the Government can't do that, and I would be appalled if it did: Aside from the impact on higher education, there's the question of things like people coming to join spouses that you cannot reasonably prevent without causing huge damage to people's lives.
And that's the dilemma we face. Immigration is too high, but it's made up largely of people who have very good reasons to come to the UK and who you therefore can't reasonably prevent from coming here. And in the context of Brexit, to my mind that confirms that FOM had to go: When you already have too many people who have strong reasons to come to the UK, you can't be adding to that by just opening the borders to anyone in the EU who feels like coming here, even though they actually don't have any existing connection with the UK or any legitimate reason that would satisfy our visa rules.
I think we should have a discussion about what level of immigration is desirable or sustainable (I'm not sure that the current level is sustainable in point of fact)
Yes I agree a discussion of what level of immigration is desirable would be good. It will also be difficult because it will inevitably lead to awful decisions about, now you'd decided X people/year is the maximum we can sustain, how do you decide who can come and who can't - in the context that, for any reasonable value of X, the number of people who desperately want to come here is likely to be many times X.