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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I listened to the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) with great interest. He and I entered the House at the same time and in our early days here worked together in the Home Affairs Committee. We looked at some of these matters then, and few of us can match his experience, given the ethnic make-up of his constituency and the many cases with which he has to deal. I am sure that what he said will have been of great value to the House. I want to deal with some of the issues that are under consideration in the Council of Europe’s Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population, to which I was appointed earlier this year. They go right to the heart of the difficult question of the employment of irregular migrants. I concluded that what the Government propose in clauses 14 to 21—which the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) address—namely, stronger criminal sanctions against employers who give work to irregular or illegal migrants, seems significantly out of step with the work of the Migration Committee and the advice it has received on future migration and employment trends. As colleagues who follow economic trends will be aware, Alan Greenspan estimated recently that there may be between 10 million and 11 million irregular migrants in work in the USA, without whom, he said, the performance of the US economy would be adversely affected, particularly in relation to the rate of inflation. I understand that it is two years since any prosecutions were pressed against employers in the USA. We know that irregular migrants are in work in the UK—the hon. Member for Leicester, East gave us one example. The clandestine nature of their employment can and does on occasion call into question the morality and ethical behaviour of their employers. On the other hand, some employers may unwittingly employ irregular migrants, especially through subcontractors in the agricultural sector or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Woking said, migrants who used false papers.