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Managed Migration

On the whole, my opening remarks about welcoming such a debate were well made, because it has been, on the whole, an interesting debate. Many extremely reflective and thoughtful contributions have been made on the substance, details and practicalities of the new system, without demurring from the overall shape and framework of the system. For that, I am enormously grateful. I shall not spend undue time on each and every point that has been made, but I shall deal with the broad thrust of what Members have said. One theme was how lower-skilled workers fitted into the overall system. That was a moot point, particularly for my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith). We need to consider wider issues, such as the need not to build in too much reliance on what may appear, at least at this stage, to be an unending stream of people from eastern Europe and the A8 countries making very positive contributions. The key point must be that the system rises and falls with the needs of the economy. In an intervention on the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) described himself as a crass economist. Without, I think, being unduly offensive, I will give the right hon. Gentleman ““crass””, because I did not agree with his comments at all. I thought that his attempts to analyse a labour market were quite fourth-form. We have heard such views before. We have heard them put less eloquently by Sir Andrew Green and other characters, and we heard them put far less eruditely by the Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). I am afraid that the position of Conservative Front Benchers is still deeply confused. I will give them this: if we deem May and June 2005 to be the immediate election and post-election period, while it appears that the leadership has reached October or November of that year in its Pauline conversion to things more civilised, I fear that the hon. Gentleman is stuck somewhere around the day before the election. Neither of those speeches was terribly good. My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East—he has left, but he told me that he would have to—is entirely right. If our managed migration system is indeed driven by the questions ““What are the needs of the economy?”” and ““What are the needs of the country?””, it is obtuse to talk of limits, numbers and quotas to the extent that the hon. Member for Ashford did—or, worse, to talk in a ““second gunman on the grassy knoll”” conspiratorial way about the liberal elite simply wanting to get more and more migrants here, for what purpose I do not entirely understand. I really thought—and most contributions acknowledged this—that in welcoming the points-based system we had reached a stage at which there could and should be mature reflection on the needs of the UK economy. I agree with the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright) that the sum of what migrants have contributed to this country goes far beyond the economic dimension, entering social, cultural and other dimensions. However, the thrust of any managed and controlled migration system must be principally economic.