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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

Everybody in society makes a contribution to everybody else. In a free market society we are all exchanging goods and services and we are all mutually interdependent, and that is a wonderful thing. But if the hon. Lady is referring to the shortages argument—effectively to the Prime Minister’s statement that"““There are half a million vacancies in our job market and our . . . economy needs migration to fill these vacancies””," she is referring to the same misunderstanding of how economies work. Since the Prime Minister first referred to there being half a million vacancies which we need immigrants to fill, half a million immigrants have come to this country, and there are still half a million vacancies to be filled. That is not a coincidence; it is inevitable in a well-working economy, because immigrants not only produce goods and services but consume them, and the value of the goods and services that they produce is equal to the value of the goods and services that they consume. Also, in consuming goods and services they create demand for an equal net further inflow of workers, and that is why, in countries like our own where we have had a net inflow, there is still the same level of vacancies. The same is true of California, and of west Germany.