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Economic Migration (EUC Report)

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, for introducing the two reports with wonderful lucidity. I want to concentrate on the first report, which is on migration. I want both to endorse the report and to expand it a little in certain directions which it intimates but does not fully pursue. But before I do that I want to warn the committee about the likely Daily Mail reaction if it got hold of the report. Page 61 contains a wonderful vignette of the Minister being cross-examined and giving evidence. The Minister talks about GATT and the way in which it is likely to impinge on the movement of people. The chairman with, I thought, a tremendous sense of self-effacing humour corrected the Minister and said:"““This is G-A-T-S. I should say, Minister, I also misunderstood it””." In other words, it is the General Agreement on Trade in Services. The Minister, like many of us, had talked about GATT when it should have been GATS. I thought that if the Daily Mail got hold of that, it would say that the chairman of the EU Committee on migration did not know until recently what GATT meant and nor did the Minister, and would say that those were the kind of people by whom we are governed. I hope that nothing that I say will alert the Daily Mail and company to the intricacies of the report. I want to concentrate on three things. The report rightly talks about immigration in terms of its economic, social and cultural benefits. In much of the discussion the political and cultural aspects of immigration are not fully appreciated. The immigrants are the political and cultural missionaries of this country to theirs. It is not appreciated that the diaspora community or the immigrants play a profoundly transformative role in changing the politics and culture of their own societies—sending back ideas of what they have seen, and taking with them certain ideas and alerting their own governments to how their own policies can be deeply embarrassing. It is a wonderful expression of this very House that I should be here raising questions, that the Minister who will answer them is herself an immigrant and that the proceedings of the House are benignly watched over by another immigrant. What greater tribute can there be to this House and to the contribution of immigrants, which is limited not just to economic and social benefits but affects lots of other areas? Precisely because immigration can easily lead either to racist backlash or to legitimate worries, it is increasingly important that it should be taken out of party politics. I have floated this idea on a number of occasions, and it may be worth thinking about; that every year it should be possible for an independent, non-partisan body to produce statistics on the kind of labour shortage that we have, the fair criteria by which we intend to go about meeting that shortage, and reporting what has happened in the course of the year. That would have a profoundly cleansing effect on the race-related politics of our country. My next point has to do with the policy that we have followed over the years on immigration. The report rightly highlights that there is a contradiction between the points system towards which the Government are increasingly veering, and the labour market shortage. On the points system, you could bring in a lot of people who might not actually be needed by the labour conditions or, conversely, you could bring in people on the basis of labour market requirements who may not necessarily satisfy the points system. Canadians realised this and increasingly moved in one direction, and the experience of the United States has been no different. It might be worth considering that these two criteria—the labour market shortage and the points system—do not necessarily harmonise. There is a profound bias in our immigration system—I also detect it as an undercurrent in this report—in favour of highly skilled migrants, with the result that unskilled migrants generally tend to get a raw deal. While we are right to worry about illegal immigrants, and it is easy to get worked up about them, I suggest that there is also a genuine problem to do with unskilled migrants. When the report talks about £3 billion or £4 billion a year that migrants send back home, I very much urge noble Lords to remember that nearly 75 per cent of that comes not from skilled migrants but from unskilled migrants. They are the people who come from families where money is needed, and they are people who have strong ties of loyalty. That is not only true of what is happening here; it is also true of India as a whole. If you look at the £2 billion or £3 billion that the Government of India receive in foreign remittances, nearly 75 per cent comes from unskilled Indians settled in the Middle East, not from highly skilled people like myself or my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, or many others. Although we do send money from time to time, it is mainly the unskilled people. My next point has to do with the morally uneven transaction that applies in relation to skilled migrants. We keep saying that we do not want skilled people from poor countries or developing countries, yet we keep recruiting them. We have stopped it for doctors, and I will say something about that in a minute, but we keep plundering developing countries for nurses, engineers and IT specialists. The report mentions a moving story of a national hospital in the capital of Botswana, where half the wards have been closed simply because there are no nurses. We do not fully appreciate how much every skilled migrant who comes here subsidises us and how much foreign aid we are getting. I once calculated that there are about 10,000 Indian doctors here and each one, on the statistics produced in this country, saves us £52,000. If you multiply £52,000 by 10,000 doctors, that gives an astronomical figure that runs into hundreds of millions of pounds. I might be told that this is inevitable, and perhaps we compensate for it by giving aid to these countries. The point is that the amount of aid does not even remotely measure up to the amount of aid coming to us in the reverse direction. My basic point is that there is a fundamental moral obligation on our part to do something. The BMA talks about a transfer fee, and other organisations have talked about government-to-government return of money. Whatever measure we adopt, there is a fundamental moral directive that is going to get more acute by the day as with globalisation more and more people migrate to other parts of the world. It is also worth bearing in mind that our treatment of skilled migrants has not been entirely fair. Indian doctors, for example, uprooted themselves from India to come here. They spent enormous amounts of money taking the PLAB exam, and we recently told them that they would not be entitled to apply for jobs and would not receive advanced training unless they had work permits—which they will not obtain as long as there are people from within Britain and the European Union qualified to do those jobs. The result is that, of the hundreds of doctors who came here, two have committed suicide, over a dozen have had mental breakdowns and there is an enormous amount of agony and pain. We should have at least had the courtesy to give them six months’ notice, or even two or three years’ notice, so that they could have started winding up their affairs in a civilised manner. Finally, I strongly endorse the report’s recommendation that we should opt into the long-term residents’ directive and the family reunification directive. That would ensure that migrant workers in this country enjoyed equality of rights with those in the European Union. It is also worth bearing in mind that if a third-country national migrant worker’s employment terminates, say, before the expiry of the period for which that person is let in, they should be given at least six months or more to find alternative employment before it is decided whether or not they go back. The Government concede the principle, but they say they would like to make it a matter of discretion. In line with the committee, I suggest that it should be a matter of right.