Rebutted: Top trendy arguments against balanced migration

  1. Immigration control is racist

    Unless you share your property with others less fortunate than yourself, you’re racist too. Immigration controls ensure we can plan services and look after those already in our country. Besides our country has a limited carrying capacity and with an uncertain global economy it would be unwise to rely too much on imported food and raw materials to sustain our growing population.

    You’re exaggerating, we have plenty of empty houses and green fields

    Only 13% of the world’s land is arable at all. Most is very inhospitable, but we need countryside not only for farming, but for clean water, air and the replenishment of an ecosystem that took 3 billion years to evolve. England is already the most densely populated country in Europe and its population is growing at the fastest rate since 1800. There may be many empty houses, but they tend to be not fit for human habitation (a terraced house bought for £700,000 recently collapsed during renovation), are too upmarket (e.g. luxury flats for property investors) or are simply in the wrong place (e.g. in ghost towns, dangerous high-crime areas, in busy high-traffic zones not suitable for young children etc.). However, it’s true around Europe there are around 11 million empty houses, most of which are naturally in Eastern and Southern Europe in areas of high unemployment and emigration.

  2. Our population is ageing.

    We need more nurses and carers to look after our parents and grandparents. You refer only to our native population. The UK now has one of the highest birth rates in Europe and this is much higher among recent migrants than the autochthonous community. Besides migrants age too, so unless we train our own young people we’ll just end up importing forever more cheap carers and relying on imported goods and resources to sustain our growing population. The idea that net migration boosts the economy is a kind of Ponzi scheme.

  3. Migrants pay lots of tax

    Partly true. However, migrants also consume services and require more infrastructure. Most reports claiming migrants have made large net contributions to the Exchequer fail to take into account services that they use. An oft-quoted figure is that between 2001 and 2011 EU migrants paid £20 billion in tax. However, that works out at 2 billion year for approximately 2 million people leaving just £1000 per head to cover the cost of additional services required. An average worker has to earn over 32K a year to cover services consumed. Yet despite this extra tax revenue, our governments is still running a massive budget deficit.

  4. Our country was too boring before the year 2000

    Actually many urban areas were already culturally diverse in 2000, but migration began to run out of control in the late 1990s. Before then we could manage and assimilate people from many countries into our home-bred communities, now we create parallel societes. Besides what do you have against native Britons?

  5. We have a skills gap

    Mainly because successive governments have failed to invest in key science and engineering education or provide young people with enough apprenticeships. Indeed despite record levels of immigration, the skills gap is growing rather than shrinking as we have a vast oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, but rising demand.