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Managed Migration

The answer to the question is simply put in the living, breathing elements of the points-based system. What is required by the country and the economy is the appropriate level of migration. It is facile and fatuous in the extreme to talk of upper limits, as happened during the general election. The hon. Gentleman would have it that the country needs a certain number of migrants for the next decade—x migrants—and that is it. Regardless of whether parts of the economy are starved of skills that particular migrants might have, the view of the Conservative party and the hon. Gentleman is that the future of the economy and the vibrancy of the country can go hang if we reach x + 1: one above the facile and fatuous quota that he would set for migration. The hon. Gentleman’s facile argument—it is not a conspiratorial one involving Back Benchers—is that the liberal elite want more and more migration. I repeat: the premise for any managed migration system must be the prevailing economic needs of the United Kingdom in the next five to 10 years that will not be met by the EU-wide labour market. That must be the only driver. However, the hon. Gentleman has some other intention and, once again, he deliberately conflates—he needs to stop doing so if he wants to remain on the Opposition Front Bench—race, community cohesion, asylum, immigration and a whole range of other matters. This is all that a quota is about, and he should be ashamed of himself.