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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS

ANALYSIS
AN OPEN DOOR TO DISASTER
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Kenan Malik
Producer: Richard Vadon
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
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Broadcast Date:
Repeat Date:
CD Number:
Duration:

18.03.04
21.03.04
PLN 410/04VT1011
2737

Taking part in order of appearance:

Suke Wolton
Tutor in politics at Regents College, Oxford
Nigel Harris
Emeritus Professor of Economics at
University College London
Geoff Dench
The Institute of Community Studies
Andrew Simms
Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Sarah Spencer
Director of Policy Research at Oxford
Universitys Centre on Migration
David Coleman
Professor of Demography at Oxford
University

MALIK: Forget all that hoohah about benefit tourists. From 1st
of May, Britain will welcome with open arms anyone from the new
EU countries who wants to work here. Why? Because its good for
the economy. So why not lay out the welcome mat for the rest of
the world, too?
WOLTON:
What is the reason we have too few houses in Britain?
Its because we have too few builders at the moment. What is the
reason that we dont have enough NHS resources at the moment?
Well we have too few NHS workers. Its true. We do not have
enough doctors, we do not have enough nurses. Everybodys
crying out for plumbers at the moment. We do not have enough
people in Britain. Thats the reason that everybodys complaining
that we dont have these things Its not that we dont have the
things we want; its that we dont have the people to make the things
that we need.
MALIK: Suke Wolton, tutor in politics at Regents College,
Oxford. Its not the economy, stupid, its the people. We havent got
enough of them. So lets open the door and let them all in. But
whatever happened to the idea that its the job of a government to
decide who we want in the country and how many?
WOLTON:
I think its one of those things which its a mistake to
pretend that you could master it. Nobody says oh were going to
master the stock market today, oh were going to have it clear that
the FTSE index is going to stay in a certain way. Nobody would be
so foolish. I think the same has to be said about immigration
controls. There are two ways of looking at factors that affect
immigration and theyve been broadly sort of identified as well as
pull factors and push factors push factors being things that affect
people in their country of origin and why they might move; pull
factors being what happens here in Britain and how that affects
whether people move and stuff. All studies so far that have been
done on how migration is affected have shown that pull factors are
minimal in terms of actually affecting whether people come to Britain
or not. The only thing that is important really in terms of peoples
migration is the economy and the state of the job market
MALIK: For all the bitter debates about immigration and
asylum, no one disputes the idea that we should control the flow of
people into this country. No one, that is, apart from a few brave
souls who want to think the unthinkable and scrap controls
altogether. Are they mad? No, they say, not only is controlling
immigration impossible but also undesirable. Nigel Harris, Emeritus
Professor of Economics at University College London.
HARRIS:
The world is moving towards a single economy, a
single world economy, that means in theoretical terms integration of
capital and trade and ultimately labour. Governments at the
moment control the borders and theyre trying to accommodate the

need for increased mobility through increased regulation. What that

means is when Britain needs more software programmers, they set
a particular target and invite people to come into the country. They
cant possibly predict in that field any more than they can in any
other field what demand is likely to be. The result of that was that
they caught just as the numbers were increasing, the dot-com
boom collapsed. There were a whole lot of people who came in and
were stranded or had to go out and so on. So I dont believe
governments can plan labour demand and so they cant operate a
regulatory system,
MALIK:
Are you not placing great faith in the ability of the
free market to regulate labour flows?
HARRIS:
Certainly more than I invest in governments. I mean
those are the two options, arent they either governments or free
markets and between that the free market is much better than
governments in regulating labour supply and demand.
MALIK: The debate about whether of not these should be an
open door to immigrants is not a debate between left and right. On
the one side, we find free marketers holding hands with
campaigners for immigration rights in demanding the freedom of
movement across borders. On the other side, you may find
conservatives, left wing activists and, of course, racists all making
the case for tighter curbs on immigration. The critics of the open
door seem to have not just public opinion but commonsense on their
side. After all, the state may not be very good at matching labour
supply and demand. But do we really want to leave it all to the
market?
DENCH: I think the impact would be really quite devastating
because Im sure from the contacts that Ive had, the research
Ive done that there are absolutely millions of people who would
want to come in and would be prepared to live in a very low
standard of living in order to be here and have a chance to live
here, and that this would create tremendous conflicts and
difficulties with the labour market.
SIMS: I think the argument for complete open borders would be
the argument for a complete free market per se. It would be the
argument that there should be no barriers to the movement of
either trade or finance or people. I personally think, given the
state that the world is in and given the great disparities that exist
within the world, that if you did that it would be a recipe for chaos.
MALIK: Geoff Dench of the Institute of Community Studies,
based in East London, and Andrew Simms of the New Economics
Foundation. The logic of their argument seems indisputable. Open
the door to everyone and everyone will walk in. So how does Nigel
Harris respond?
HARRIS: Well thats a reasonable fear. But you ask the
same question about internally what is to stop people coming
to London. Nothing. people come into London and leave without
restriction. The same would in principle be true in the world
MALIK: But the wage differential between Beijing and
London is far greater than a wage differential between
Manchester and London, so would not it be more likely that say
Chinese cockle pickers come to Britain because even if theyre
only earning a pound a day, as is alleged, theyre still earning

more than they would back home?

HARRIS: Yes, yes, thats the correct point except that the
costs of getting here are so high that people by and large cant
do it. I mean leave aside the fact that the overwhelming majority
of people dont want to leave their homes, even though you
would think on the face of it they ought to want to leave their
homes because their homes are so awful. And the real value of
what they earn here is vastly increased when they go home. But
in fact the overwhelming majority of people dont want to move
and, even more, they dont have the costs of moving, so moving
from China to Britain is such an extraordinarily fraught and
expensive operation that relatively few people do it.
MALIK: These days the cost of a Easyjet fare will take you
from Budapest to Luton, and its not much more to fly in from
Beijing. Immigration only becomes expensive when its illegal
and you have to pay traffickers to smuggle you across borders.
Make all immigration legal and it becomes dirt cheap. Of course,
immigrants suffer more than simply a financial burden. They
have to leave their family behind, uproot themselves from all that
is familiar, often facing hostility in their new country. This is why,
in relative terms, very few people actually migrate. Nevertheless,
the idea that high cost will stop people coming through an open
door seems a bit of a hit and hope policy. Supporters of open
borders argue, though, that its when you impose controls that
you create the problems of mass influx. Suke Wolton.
WOLTON: If the borders were more open people would be able to
go back and forth more easily and they would be able to say, No
this is not a good situation, this is too much hardship, or I would
rather be with my family, or Ive done some Ive been here for a
harvest, Ive been here for a particular season, I wont stay the
winter, Ill go home.
We have a situation now which once people have risked their lives
to enter into a country and then risked their constant discovery
finding work, theyre in a position of extreme vulnerability and they
can be easily exploited. But they also dare not go home
Whereas if we did the opposite and had the border more
permeable and people able to travel backwards and forwards, we
could have a situation where people are able to assess what the
situation is, perhaps work for a few months, then go back, then
come back again, come back you know and decide for themselves
which country they want to be a citizen as a positive decision rather
than as one which they have to do because theres no other way
round it.
MALIK: The evidence suggests shes right. In the 1950s many
immigrants to Britain were single men who expected to return home
to their families within a few years. When the government decided to
impose controls the first immigration act came into force in 1962 there was a surge of people trying to get in before the door closed.
And temporary migrants had little choice but to settle here and bring
their families over. In America, millions of Mexican agricultural
workers who had migrated with the seasons were forced to settle
permanently (and illegally) when the US government imposed
controls on their movement.
But what about the impact on local workers? Uncontrolled
immigration must surely make it more difficult for locals to find jobs.
And if employers have a constant supply of cheap labour, it must

force down wages of British workers.

Not so, says Nigel Harris.

HARRIS: There were up to two hundred econometric studies

done in the United States in different localities at different times in
order to try to detect whether there was a decline in wages or an
increase in unemployment of native workers as a result of a
significant in-flow of immigrants and in general they could find no
trace whatsoever. And that is because the immigrants are moving
into the jobs that the native workers wont do. Theyre not
competing. Of course thats not true all the way through the
software programmers are competing, the doctors are competing
but in terms of unskilled workers, which is where many of the fears
are expressed, they arent competing. Furthermore, the immigrants
are doing jobs which are necessary for the productivity of higher
skilled workers to be realised If there arent porters and cleaners
and laundry workers and all the rest of it, the hospital breaks down
and the doctors and nurses cant do their work.
MALIK: This might seem counterintuitive but it appears to be
empirically watertight. A Home Office study published last year
concluded that the perception that immigrants take away jobs from
the existing population, or that immigrants depress wages of exiting
workers, do not confirmation in the analysis of the data. Indeed,
Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation suggests that
without immigration, local workers and communities would in fact be
worse off.
SIMMS: Our research and a lot of other research shows that
people who come to this country display much greater
entrepreneurial flair. So even if they begin by doing the dirty,
dangerous and difficult jobs, theres a lot of evidence to show that
new immigrants to Britain display huge amounts of energy and
initiative and go on to make much larger contributions to the wider
economy.
Where first or second generation immigrants in this country are
active in the local economy, youre seeing increases in the level of
average wages in those areas and youre seeing increases in the
general availability of employment opportunities and jobs. So
actually theres a huge lot of myths that we have to shoot down that
there is a kind of one for one substitution of jobs with people coming
in with people already living here that is simply not the case as
weve already said Immigrants coming to this country are doing
jobs that otherwise simply would not get done on the one hand and,
on the other hand, because of the way that they are on the front line
of breathing life back into communities that otherwise are very often
dying, theyre actually bringing new opportunities.
MALIK: But why dont local workers want to take the jobs that
immigrants eventually fill? Its true that by European standards
Britain has a low unemployment rate. There are nevertheless a
million people on the dole, a figure we used to consider as high.
Geoff Dench of the Institute of Community Studies.
DENCH: If you use immigration to solve the problem of filling
jobs that people dont want to do, you create throughout the
economic system an incentive not to take certain jobs seriously, just
to regard them as things that can be done by people coming in from
outside. And this doesnt solve the problem because those people
then come in. Theyre rightly, treated as full citizens with choice of
what they want to do themselves. And their children wont want to
do those jobs, so that youre setting yourself into a position where

you constantly need new immigrants in order to balance your

economy and I think that the overall indirect effects of this are very
harmful to the economy
MALIK: In effect youre suggesting that the kinds of jobs to
which migrants are attracted now could easily be filled by local
workers, yet we know that migrants are attracted to Britain
precisely because locals dont fill those jobs. So are you
suggesting that local workers should be forced to fill the jobs they
dont want to do?
DENCH: Its not a matter of forcing people. I think its more a
matter of restoring some sense that these jobs are important; and
if theyre seen as important, then there are local people who are not
working who would do them What is needed is much more sense
that all jobs are important in the economy and maybe they need
different conditions of work, different levels of payment, different this
or that, but theyre all important and that there is a sense in which
respect is owing to all of the people who play a part in the system. I
think that this is whats gone wrong.
MALIK: Respect is certainly important. But can it really be
bought by excluding immigrants? Any more, for instance, than we
can turn cleaning into a respected male profession by banning
women from the workforce? The fact that immigrants are usually
forced to take low status jobs does not mean that without
immigrants all jobs would be high status.
Yes, we need to improve work conditions for those at the bottom.
But there can be no denying Britains need for immigrant labour.
Take construction. The trade magazine Building estimates that the
industry needs 80,000 new workers a year, largely to replace people
who are retiring. There are currently 500,000 vacancies in the South
East alone. Yet, only 18,500 apprentices are coming through every
year. Even a coercive workfare system under which the unemployed
are frogmarched from the dole office to the building site will not
make up the shortfall. Many employers, on the other hand, like the
current regime of immigration controls, because it gives them a
large pool of illegal workers upon which to draw. Workers, in other
words, without rights or protection.
The answer to these problems, many argue, is for the government
to manage migration in a more active fashion. Sarah Spencer is
Director of Policy research at Oxford Universitys Centre on
Migration, and an advisor to a number of government committees.
SPENCER:
The challenge for government is to create legal
channels which first of all ensure that anyone who has a human
right to come, can come - that we dont divide families, that we
provide protection to people facing persecution and, secondly,
legal channels which match labour migrants to the job vacancies:
the skill vacancies that we have and the vacancies for low-skilled
jobs, so that the people who are coming in can move into jobs and
make an economic and social contribution. If the controls are too
tight, then there will be huge incentives for people to come and stay
illegally. If the controls are not there at all, if we had open borders,
then more people would come than there were jobs to go around
and that would create tensions on the ground, so the trick in
managing migration is to try and get that balance right.
MALIK: Who could possibly argue with that? Except that if the
legal channels were broad enough to allow anyone to enter who

wished to, it would effectively be an open door. If they were narrow

enough to exclude many potential immigrants, it would require
heavy policing and recreate the problem of illegals. Thats the
dilemma of managed migration. Sarah Spencer again.
SPENCER:
Any government which offers the public perfection,
which suggests that it control numbers absolutely is only going to
disappoint and further sap public confidence in the governments
ability to manage migration in their interests. Migration is inherently
anarchic, if you like. The best that a government can offer is that it
will seek to manage migration through many different policy levers,
including enforcement, in order to channel it where its going to do
most good and create the least difficulties.
MALIK: The government has taken such ideas seriously
enough to set up a Managed Migration Section in the Home Office.
David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford University, isnt
impressed.
COLEMAN:
I dont think that a managed migration policy is really
feasible in the way that the government envisages it for all sorts of
reasons the main one being that I think that a managed migration
policy is a kind of verbal improvement over a migration situation
which is not properly under under control.
I think that the general issue of relatively rapid growth of populations
of foreign origin is one which is troubling all of Europe to varying
degrees and not just Britain. I think its a problem for a variety of
reasons. Its a problem because some of those populations bring
with them very distinct cultural habits which create difficulties for
themselves and for any welfare state in which they are situated Im
thinking of large family size, of low workforce participation, of low
levels of education and all of that. That is more a question of
immigrants rather than of people born in Britain, although obviously
the numbers are so large it gets transmitted to the second and third
generation in Britain and also throughout Europe where these
problems are quite widespread.
MALIK: The debate about the economic benefits of migration,
David Coleman suggests, misses the point.
COLEMAN:
I think given that I feel that the economic benefits of
migration are marginal then it is indeed the social and
demographic dimension which is important There are no benefits
accruing to population growth or population size it is quite clear
looking at all the different populations of western Europe. This is by
British historical standards a very large increase indeed.
The net inflow of people into Britain last year was around 150,000
that doesnt sound to me such a great number in a population of 60
million. It would comfortably fit into two millennium stadiums. So why
are you so worried by it?
A hundred and fifty thousand, it seems to me, is a very large number
indeed it means that you have to build effectively a city the size of
Oxford every year to accommodate the additional population. And
this is very big news indeed. It would not take very long at that rate
to cover the greater part of the South East of the country where of
course the majority of immigrants go to live there not going to the
highlands of Scotland they are not going to Northern Ireland.
Itll make the Southern part of the country very, very powerfully

overcrowded and, quite independently of issues of culture, simply in

terms of numbers it is something which no one planned for, no one
intended, from which no good consequences will come and which
will produce some really very serious problems indeed for the whole
of the appearance and structure of the Southern part of the country.
WOLTON: I have heard this before. I have always found it
difficult to understand because every time I take a plane anywhere
and I look down on Britain all I can see is green and theres just lots
of green. So I dont really see the preoccupation with Britain being
overcrowded.
MALIK: Suke Wolton.
WOLTON: I think there is a problem with lack of housing, but then
I think thats largely been caused by lack of having builders. I think
actually weve got lack of people that are able to do the things that
we need being done. We need the people in order to have the
resources in hospitals, we need the teachers to be able to teach in
the schools. Its these sort of workers that we lack so crucially at the
moment and if we dont have more people then we cant do those
and that is when we feel tight and thats when we feel
overburdened.
MALIK: What do you say to those people who say that if you
had increased immigration, continued population growth, what youll
have is more overcrowding in inner cities, more congestion, etc it
will reduce the quality of life, the quality of life is bad enough as it is,
it will increase population, it will deteriorate even further
WOLTON: If that were the case then wed have people coming to
us saying you cant possibly live in the city centre of London. But
the city centre of London has the highest property prices, so
evidently people do want to live in the city centre of London. If you
thought that living in a place which was crowded was awful, then
surely nobody would want to live in New York or Manhattan? I just
dont see any evidence for saying that we dont like living next door
to somebody.
MALIK: Theres a difference, of course, between living cheek
by jowl in Mayfair or Manhattan and living cheek by jowl in Bethnal
Green or Brooklyn. And thats the problem of continued large scale
immigration: not so much an overcrowded island, as the
concentration of newcomers in areas which have the greatest
problems with a lack of resources. The dilemma of an open door
immigration policy is that people can be a burden as well as a
benefit. Theres no guarantee, even if we welcome thousands of
new builders into Britain, that new houses will be built. That takes
political will, as well as people. But, then, if we were less obsessed
with stopping people coming in, perhaps we could think more clearly
about the kinds of policies needed to make life better for those
already here: policies to increase house building, provide the right
kinds of training and ease integration. For Geoff Dench, though, the
costs of immigration will always be too great.
DENCH: I think its impossible to run a country properly unless
you give some reward and some stake for loyalty to the system. The
elite denies really that there is any such thing as national legitimacy,
that there is a country that has got a heritage of interests and people
and their antecedents have worked within it and have some
legitimate stake in it. And I think its this denial that there is any sort
of national stake that ordinary people themselves feel that creates

the biggest misunderstandings between ordinary people and the

government at the moment.
MALIK: Are you saying that the problem isnt immigration as such
but the fact that immigrants are accorded the same rights as
everybody else in the country to housing, to jobs and so on?
DENCH:
Yes, I mean that does make a tremendous
difference because it means that there are all sorts of extra
incentives for them to come. Theyre not coming in the way that
migrants would have done a few generations ago to really
struggle for a few years to start building up a small stake in the
country themselves so that they can bring people in and this
was what brought out the strongest contributions from
immigrants to the country and indeed to other countries. But if
they can come and immediately get access to the resources on a
basis of equality with other people, then this tremendously
increases both their motivation to come and the tensions with
people whose families have been living here for a long time
afterwards.
MALIK:
Would you argue then for a two-tier employment
system, welfare system and so on?
DENCH: Its very difficult to do that. Once youve got a
welfare state to have different different grades of citizens and
all of the various discriminations that arise from that, especially
given that the majority of the people coming will be racially
different from the people who are already here, I mean of itself is
likely a thing to promote all sorts of conflicts. And I think it in
many ways is better to think in terms of trying to limit the volume
of movement at any time, have a continuous flow in all directions
but not to have a massive flow at any time because its the
volume of the flow, I think, that creates the problems.
MALIK: Its true that many people feel they have no stake in
the system. A disenchantment that runs particularly deep within
many white working class communities, the kind of communities
Geoff Dench wishes to defend. But can one really build a sense of
inclusion simply by excluding others? After all, pre-immigration
Britain wasnt exactly a working class paradise. David Coleman
insists though that mass immigration has transformed Britain for the
worse.
COLEMAN:
I think generally speaking its a problem of the rights of
the ordinary people of Britain whove first of all been promised time
and time again that the situation would not develop and it has. It is
a question of the as it were dethronement of what they take to be
their national identity and their history - because, after all, there are
now substantially growing areas in many of our major cities which
are in some important respects rather more like foreign countries
than those of the ordinary English domestic scene. Theyre not
parts of the country where most English people will want to go.
MALIK: Immigration has clearly brought about major changes
to this country, creating in some white communities a well of
resentment and a nostalgia for the old pre-immigration Britain. Yet,
even had Britain not been the destination for large scale
immigration, British society today would have been vastly different
from that of half a century ago. And there still would have been
those for whom England had ceased to be England. For whom
increasingly large parts of the country had ceased to be the kind of

country which they had been brought up in and in which they felt at
home. This is really not an argument against open door immigration
specifically, but against all large scale social change. And for Suke
Wolton, theres more than one way to change a society for the
worse.
WOLTON: If we step back and think well what is it that were
trying to hold onto, whats important about being British, well I
can list lots of things that I hold to be important and are worth
hanging onto. I mean I suppose one of the most clear examples
for me you can give today is I would have thought that one of the
things we should uphold in British tradition is the right of habeas
corpus, the right not to be detained without trial. This is exactly
what David Blunkett in the name of upholding immigration
controls has now taken away in Britain. That is a significant
change to our sense of what we mean to be British in terms of
our rights to freedom and I think its very important that if we think
that its important to be British that we uphold what is right
what weve learned about being British i.e. our upholding our
right to be free and weve just lost that.
MALIK: The debate about open door immigration is not about
whether we want to hold onto certain values but which ones?
Control over borders or the protection of civil liberties? Continuity in
the social landscape or a dynamic economy?
Open borders would be a leap into the unknown, and might prove
an open door to disaster. Controlling immigration is the safe option.
But we also know that it doesnt really work. Tens of thousands of
illegal immigrants still enter the country every year.
Controlling immigration is neither as easy nor as sensible as it might
first appear; an open door policy is not as outrageous as it might
seem. Both embody different visions of the kind of Britain in which
we want to live. Both pose a raft of practical problems. The trouble
is, given our current obsession with keeping people out, theres little
chance of a reasoned discussion about which might be better.

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