What I told the big immigration debate

We're heading in the wrong direction

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The Big Immigration Debate, Westminster 2024. Sophia Rumpus/Touchpoint Strategy

On Monday evening, more than 600 people joined the big immigration debate —a major event I helped organise in the heart of Westminster, London.

Why did I help organise it?

Because I think our national debate about this crucial issue —an issue millions of ordinary people care deeply about— is sorely lacking.

Too many questions are kept off the table.

Too much evidence that does not support the pro-immigration beliefs of the Luxury Belief Class is downplayed, if not ignored outright.

And too many people who hold a different view, who want to change the direction of travel by lowering immigration and strengthening our borders are excluded from the conversation altogether, derided as racists, xenophobes, and far right extremists.

This is why I think it’s crucial we all do whatever possible to build and cultivate an alternative ecosystem —events, podcasts, YouTube shows, Substacks, and more— where a more honest, genuine, and productive conversation can take place.

This is, after all, the main reason why I created this Substack —to have a place that is free and independent of the legacy institutions and the broken elite consensus.

And this is why I not only helped organise the event but spoke, alongside Konstantin Kisin, about why our current model of mass immigration is deeply problematic, with Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee and Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani making the opposing case.

In the end, based on a poll of the audience before and after the debate, Konstantin and I won comfortably. So for those who were not there here’s what I said in my opening six minute speech about what is already one of the most important issues of our time and which, for reasons I outline, will only become even more important in the years and decades ahead …

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You are being lied to. You are being lied to by all of the big parties, by the ruling elite, by big business, and by much of the expert class.

For much of the last decade, you’ve been told —we’ve been told— that we would get lower, controlled, high-skill, high-wage, and highly-selective immigration which puts more into the economy than it takes out, and strengthens our society.

But in reality you’ve been given the very opposite of these things.

Under both Labour and the Conservatives, which are now indistinguishable on this issue, you’ve been given a completely broken model of mass, uncontrolled, low-skill, low-wage, and non-selective immigration which is taking more out of the economy than it is putting in, and which is weakening, not strengthening, our society.

The evidence for this is crystal clear, even if it is ignored by the other side who routinely use taboos and ad hominem attacks to try and shut down this debate.

For a start, Britain is now relying on the very kind of immigration —low skill, low wage immigration from outside Europe— which studies have shown is a net fiscal cost, not benefit, to Western economies like ours.

Put simply, we’re not getting the best of the best —far from it.

Our economy, our country, is being flooded by hundreds of thousands of people each year who either earn well below the median wage or who do not work at all.

This is one big reason why, after twenty years of mass immigration, after twenty years of being told over and over again that this would drive the economy, we are still stuck with very sluggish rates of economic growth, low productivity, and the worst decline in GDP-per-head since the 1950s.

Here’s just one statistic to think about.

If you look at the two million or so people who migrated into Britain over the last few years what percentage do you think came to work in high-skill jobs?

The answer is 15%. Just 15%.

The rest are international students, the relatives of students, the relatives of workers, refugees and asylum-seekers, and a rising number of illegal migrants.

While some of them do go into work they often go into low-skill and low-wage jobs which pay less than than the average wage, compress the wages of British workers and remove any incentive for big business to innovative and promote workers rights.

Mass immigration, in short, is used to serve the interests of big business over the interests of the British people —to keep labour costs low, consumption and profits high, and to keep this incredibly weak Deliveroo economy ticking over.

The key point is that what is good for big business and what is good for the British people are not always the same thing. Had we listened only to the big business lobby then we’d never have got things like the Equal Pay Act or the minimum wage.

Mass immigration is also used by much of our liberal political class to put off and avoid dealing with the longer-term problems in our economy and society —from a collapsing system of social care, where it’s simply easier for governments to import cheap workers than improve pay and working conditions, to the National Health Service, where, once again, it’s easier to import cheaper and often less qualified workers than expand the number of medical school places for British kids.

From one sector to the next, an alliance of political and business elites have simply become addicted to importing cheap labour to avoid making tough decisions.

And you can see how this unfolds where I work —the universities. Contrary to what Polly Toynbee has tried to argue, that international students are always a net benefit, the reality is quite different.

I work in the universities so let me tell you what is really going on. Under our broken model of mass immigration, international students, typically from India and Nigeria, are used to plug the broken financial model of second and third-tier universities which, to be blunt, should not be universities at all.

A not insignificant number of these students drop-out before they finish their one-year MA programmes while university academics like me are routinely asked or incentivised to lower standards so we do not lose their higher tuition fees.

It is, in short, a ponzi scheme, another example of how mass immigration is used to avoid dealing with the longer-term and much deeper problems facing our country.

We’ve also just heard how mass immigration is essential in our ageing society, that with a fertility rate of just 1.5 and a rapidly ageing population Britain simply cannot survive without even more and more of this migration in the years ahead.

But this too is nonsense.

All we are doing is pushing Britain, like other Western states, into a looming ‘population trap’ —whereby the rapidly expanding population of a state starts to clash with the limits of what that state can actually provide when it comes to absorbing the sheer scale of this population explosion.

From schools and hospitals to roads and GPs, we are now increasingly subjecting ourselves to what I call ‘immigration austerity’ —a situation where our general standard of living plateaus because the population is growing so fast that all available savings are needed to maintain the existing capital-labour ratio.

Or, as labour economist Alan Manning recently pointed out: