In both Britain and the US, there's no easy answer to immigration

Like so much of what happens on Capitol Hill these days, attempts to find a solution have foundered on political infighting and point-scoring, with Republicans widely blamed for scuppering meaningful reform.

“This latest immigration debacle won’t help the party’s image, which is still recovering from the government shutdown,” thundered the usually sympathetic Wall Street Journal. “A party whose preoccupation is deporting children is going to alienate many conservatives, never mind minority voters.”

In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s failed run for the White House, the Republicans commissioned a report on why they had done so badly among the minorities. This concluded bluntly that the US’s 54 million Hispanics are not likely to vote for a party that doesn’t want them in the country. Without embracing comprehensive immigration reform, the report went on, the party’s appeal would “continue to shrink to its core constituencies only”.

The fact that the GOP will almost certainly do well in November’s mid-term elections, and may even take the Senate to add to its control of the House, doesn’t alter the big picture of a party struggling, much like the Tories in the UK, to come up with an immigration policy that makes any kind of political sense and answers the concerns of key voters.

In some respects, the British predicament is a very different one. The US already has quite tough immigration laws, with strictly enforced quotas decided largely according to merit and skill. Their debate is about what to do with illegal migrants. Around 13 per cent of the US population is foreign-born, of which, according to analysis by Pew Research, some 28 per cent are illegal immigrants, or around one in 25 of the total US population. The former cohort is somewhat higher than the UK equivalent, the latter substantially higher.

US experience demonstrates that even where the policies to limit immigration exist, they are difficult to enforce. The illegals keep coming, and the authorities seem powerless to stop them. Deportations increased significantly during President Obama’s first term, to around 400,000 a year, but this only temporarily contained the problem.

As fast as the new president could ship them out, the illegals came back in, and just lately the numbers have been rising again. To the extent that there is any correlation at all, it seems to be with the state of the economy, rather than the restrictiveness of immigration policy. In the early years of the Great Recession, the numbers eased off somewhat. With economic recovery has come early signs of a renewed surge.

If effective border control is always going to be problematic for successful economies, membership of the European Union, with its principled adherence to free movement of labour, makes it virtually impossible, especially for countries such as Britain with relatively accommodating labour markets.

Free movement of workers is one of the four economic freedoms, along with capital, goods and services, that the EU is meant to espouse. In practice, it is the only one that is consistently applied, for in most other respects, the EU is a protectionist racket whose purpose seems mainly to defend Europe’s social market model from the ravages of globalisation.

It scarcely needs pointing out that the two things are incompatible. You can have open borders, or you can have welfare; you cannot have both without giving rise to the sort of rabid social resentment we see throughout much of Europe today.

In this respect, comparisons with the US, which broadly upholds the four freedoms within its own borders but also has a relatively small social safety net, are meaningless. The EU aspires to be a United States of Europe, guided by some of the same principles, but in truth it can never be any such thing. The US is a single country, bound together by shared history and constitution; Europe is a collection of them, with very varied economic performance and standards of living. Graft free movement of labour on to such a construct and it is bound to end badly.

By the same token, the idea that Britain can regain control of its borders simply by leaving the EU is naive if US experience is anything to go by, and in any case, very much at odds with the open, free-market economy that Britain must always aspire to be.

As things stand, the Government’s immigration policy is a manifest stupidity. Unrestricted migration through the backdoor of Europe runs hand in hand with economically damaging limitations on migrant talent from elsewhere. Token restrictions on access to welfare are not going to address these anomalies.

As a country built on migration, America still has a very ambivalent attitude to illegals. Determination to uphold the law runs alongside a sneaking, culturally ingrained admiration for those willing to risk all for a better life, as well as widespread acknowledgement of the economic benefits that migration can bring. Many industries would be unviable without them.

Should illegals be given a pathway to citizenship, or does this merely open the floodgates to an even bigger problem? As the machinations of the GOP demonstrate, politically there are no easy answers.

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