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Economic Migration (EUC Report)

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Wright and his colleagues have highlighted two major areas of policy, and migrants everywhere, as well as the rest of us, must be grateful to them for helping to make these important facts more generally known. I congratulate the committee, not just on the timing of the last-minute publication on illegal migrants, but on its contents, because some of its conclusions chime with much that has been said in debates on previous Bills. In particular, I commend paragraphs 100 to 116 on judicial oversight and legal assistance. Can the Minister give us just a little more comfort on this matter than we received from her colleague during consideration of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill? For years, the legal agencies who really know about detention have argued for greater judicial oversight and the right to automatic bail hearings. The committee mentions that the Government changed their mind when they repealed Part 3 of the 1999 Act and that they now feel under no obligation even to inform detainees of the possibility of judicial review. Only weeks ago, a few of us were still arguing for that in the latest Bill, but to no avail. I wish that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, was with us today. Now, with the new draft EU directive, I hope that the Home Office will reflect further on this possible breach of the ECHR. Remembering the recent media interest in the criminal casework unit and its missing prisoners, and as a patron of the Haslar Visitors Group, I would like to say a word against indefinite detention. My point is illustrated by the case of Mr F, a Ghanaian detainee currently in Harmondsworth, who was sentenced to prison with deportation in August last year; but the Home Office has failed to deport him after three attempts, despite the fact that he is desperate to leave this country. When his sentence ended on 27 February, he was not deported but sent into immigration detention. The travel documents supplied by the Ghana High Commission became out of date; so in March it sent another set, so that he could fly out in early April. A removal date was set, but he was not flown out and those documents also became out of date. Mr F was delighted to be given another removal date of 4 May—last week. He was taken from Haslar Removal Centre to Harmondsworth on 2 May. All seemed to be going well—however, on 4 May, he was not collected. That inefficiency is causing a lot of concern to other immigration staff, as well as the detainees concerned. Mr F has now spent a considerable time in immigration detention beyond his criminal sentence. This is at least one prisoner who is not missing. The National Audit Office stated last July that detention costs £200 a day, which means that the unnecessary detention of this one prisoner has cost some £14,000. Haslar visitors have come across four such cases in the past eight months. It must be time to review this policy of indefinite detention. Moving on to the first report, the number of migrant workers has dramatically increased according to the IOM. Between 1985 and 2000, the total number of people living outside their country of origin increased from 105 million to 175 million—that is, in only 15 years. This figure includes refugees but not irregular migrants. It represents a 67 per cent increase, compared with a total world population increase of only 26 per cent As the right reverend Prelate and others have said, in the UK the contribution of migrants to our economy has been fully recognised by government but not by the population at large. In the EU 25, deaths will outnumber births in only four years’ time, and in 20 years even the present rate of migration will not be enough to make up the difference. As we have heard, migrants not only compensate for population decline but they provide labour in many areas of our public services where there is a shortfall, and they are a net contributor to the economy. The IPPR figure on page 11 of the report of £41 billion in 2003–04 is staggering, representing a 22 per cent increase. Such facts should help to dispel the widespread racism and prejudice that exist against migrants of every kind. Inevitably, the most vulnerable categories of migrant are those who fall in with gangs of criminals and get on to Charles Clarke’s ““disappeared”” list, and they will be the ones who feed the prejudice. But the vast majority are stories of success and enterprise, whether in the factory and small business or in schools and laboratories. The figure for Turkey provided by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants was repeated by the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan. By contrast, I found the evidence from Migration Watch UK in the report unconvincing as an argument against migration, although it strives for a more reasoned academic position somewhere above the tabloids. But I am not so sure. In the field of international development, where I have some experience, migration has long been recognised as a key component of poverty reduction, with migrant remittances often substituting for low agricultural wages or falling income in the poorest regions. As the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, said, it can even become a safety valve for nations in crisis or failed states. I was in Nepal recently, where I learnt that the loss of income from the civil war there and political uncertainty over the past four years would have crippled the country but for remittances from Nepalese workers in the Middle East. The issue of the brain drain of doctors and other skilled migrants has been tackled in the report. The illustration from Romania in Question 373 is poignant but it leaves me wondering why so little is being done to promote EU ideas on ““circular migration””, whereby migrants are eventually encouraged to return home. Compensation schemes in poor countries, such as DfID’s projects in Malawi, will always be limited to localised poverty reduction. What is needed is a package from member states that addresses the problem right at the beginning of a contract. More could also be done to encourage the flow of remittances. Such projects could give the EU, alongside the OECD, a much more important role in shaping future migration. But of course it begs the question, fairly raised by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and others, whether the EU has any genuine common migration policy. It is the UK’s particular problem that it cannot participate in Schengen and therefore neither fully in external borders management nor in the use of biometric travel documents, although it is trying hard to do so. However, I hope that the report encourages the Government to make more progress on other subjects, such as illegal migration, where common ground could be found, and eventually on signing the UN and Council of Europe conventions. Finally, I hope that the Government have not forgotten that under an earlier Bill on managed migration they undertook to receive a reasonable number of refugees through the UNHCR, although many fewer than other OECD countries, which take hundreds and thousands. Will the noble Baroness kindly let me know in due course how many have been assisted in this sensible way and also whether the Government have filled the disabled quota, which would assist a small number of mainly skilled migrants who have been refugees?