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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I shall certainly follow your ruling, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Bill is about controlling immigration, and I am trying to find reasons for doing it. If we cannot find them, we cannot have a Bill, so I am sure that you would agree that we need to do so. I was hoping to find in the Bill a fulfilment of the promise that the Government made just before the election: that they would establish an independent commission to advise on how much immigration was necessary and desirable. Sadly, I can find no such reference in the Bill, but such a commission would, I hope, analyse the arguments in favour of more large-scale immigration and see whether they were justified. If they were, we would have that advice; if not, we would obviously have even more need for the controls and restrictions inherent in the Bill. The Prime Minister said that according to the Treasury, our economic growth rate would be 0.5 per cent. lower a year if net migration ceased. Lower growth, he said, means less individual prosperity. But economic growth is the sum of the growth in the number of workers and the growth in output per worker. The Treasury model, about which the Prime Minister was talking, says that immigration will add 0.5 per cent. to the growth in the number of workers, but will not increase output per worker, and it is only if output per head goes up that we get richer. So even on the figures that the Prime Minister quoted, he merely showed that we shall have a bigger economy, not a richer economy, and when he said that growth meant more individual prosperity, he was simply treating the facts with his normal discombobulation. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) asked about the study that showed that the immigrant community makes a net fiscal contribution to this country. The report that she mentioned, which I happen to have, says:"““Migrants in the UK contributed . . . a net fiscal balance of approximately £2.5 billion . . . This is equivalent to around 1p on the basic rate of income tax””" for the rest of us. When we look at the figures, we find that that was a year when the Budget was in surplus. Not just immigrants were paying more in than they were taking out; the whole population was paying more in than it was taking out. When we allow for that fact, half of that £2.5 billion disappears. The other problem was that the study attributed to both immigrants and non-immigrants in proportion to their shares of the population the taxes paid by foreign owners of companies. If we take that out, and if we also allow for something that the authors of the study wholly ignored—the biggest single item, probably: the accruing pension liabilities of members of the immigrant population who are disproportionately below retirement age—all that gain disappears and turns into a net deficit. But I am not particularly arguing that immigrants are a burden, just that it is absurd to say that they are reducing the tax burden on everybody else. Rich people pay more taxes than they receive in benefits from the state, whether they be immigrants or previously resident people. Poor people, on the whole, pay less in to the state than they take out, whether they are immigrants or are born here. It is silly to aggregate them all. If one wants to use immigrants as a fiscal milch cow, one will obviously limit those coming here to high earners, but that is on the whole a rather unattractive policy.