The Today Programme on Radio 4 came to us this morning from Tunis, where the presenter Nick Robinson tried to make sense of the “hordes” of would-be immigrants from all parts of Africa, including Tunisia itself, willing to risk death in the Mediterranean on unseaworthy boats bound for Italy. One of his guests was Sweden’s migration minister Maria Malmer Stenergard, who noted that the population of Africa is forecast to double to 2.6 billion by 2050 and that many of the continent’s young people are determined to make a better life for themselves and their families in Europe. This was unsustainable, she said, which was why the EU has offered the Tunisian government one billion euros to staunch the flow.
I don’t think I was the only one listening to Stenergard who felt that this latest example of Danegeld would achieve precisely nothing beyond enriching the dictatorial Tunisian President, Kais Saied, and his cronies.
But the EU is not, of course, alone in resorting to desperate measures. The difference in the case of the UK is that our bribe – if sanctioned by the Supreme Court – will be paid not to Tunisia, but to Rwanda, led by the authoritarian Paul Kagame, a veteran of armed conflict in both his own country and the Congo.
Does anyone truly believe that sending selected handfuls of illegal migrants to the most densely-populated country in Africa, known for its genocidal tendencies, will have any meaningful impact on the numbers heading for England? Already inured to hardship and risk, those engaged in the traffic will continue until the point arrives when those involved no longer consider Britain a likely place in which to prosper.
The only sure way to deter large numbers of boat people from turning up each morning on the shores of Kent would be to have machine guns lined up on the sea edge. I’m guessing, though, that this approach would find favour with only a tiny handful of voters.
More to the point, four out of five immigrants turning up these days are perfectly legal. In 2016, Britain decided that it didn’t want millions of Eastern Europeans living and working in the UK. The message was clear and over the next three years, most of them packed up and left. No sooner had they gone, however, than it became apparent that someone – not the British, obviously – had to do the jobs the outgoing EU citizens had left vacant.
So, even as ferries from Dover filled with Polish plumbers and others heading home to what for many turned out to be a better life, with shorter hours and higher rates of pay, an invitation was sent out to the countries of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East to send us their best people, leading to an ongoing influx that is expected to nudge the population above 70 million within the next 10 years. Don’t kid yourself. Britain needs these people. They have skills that are in desperately short supply, and for the most part they are ready to put in the hours in a way that is now, let’s face it, “foreign” to the natives.
This morning, I had a long discussion on this thorny subject with my German neighbour Bertie, who retired last year to rural Brittany after 30 years as a frontier officer. The Schengen Agreement establishing freedom of movement across the EU meant that from 1995 on, border posts were nominal at best, and as Bertie was stationed right next door to the Netherlands, his once-pivotal role slowly melted away.
Today, he looks back at his career with a mixture of fondness and regret. Goch, the town he grew up in, with its population of 35,000, was an early beneficiary of the 1950s Wirtschaftwunder – the so-called Miracle on the Rhine – during which the region’s post-war industrial recovery was nothing short of remarkable. As time went on, he recalls, communities of Poles, Portuguese and Italians moved in, keen to work hard and to play their part in society. Goch was a happy town.
More recently, however, new arrivals, unskilled and unable to speak German, have been pouring in from regions outside the EU, notably from Iraq and Syria, but also from Afghanistan and a number of sub-Saharan countries in Africa.
The official view is that there is no crisis. It is regularly asserted that most of the half million asylum-seekers who moved to Germany with Angela Merkel’s blessing in 2015 have gone on to learn the language, find jobs and pay their taxes, a development made easier by the terms of the 2021 Skilled Immigration Act. Bertie is sceptical. He cites the case of a Syrian back home in Goch who learned German and found a succession of skilled jobs, only to end up deeply ashamed of his fellow countrymen, most of whom, he said, made no attempt to integrate and were content to live on benefits.
Though no supporter of Brexit, Bertie sympathises with those in the UK who wanted an end to uncontrolled immigration. He believes that governments should have the power to prevent unwanted immigrants from gaining entry. He also believes that those who fail to find work in a reasonable time should have their benefits cut off so that they are obliged to return home or try someplace else.
My friend, whose peaked cap from his Border Force days occupies pride of place above his desk in Brittany, is a civilised man with considerable experience in frontier regulation. He has done more than anyone I know (and immensely more than any Brit of my acquaintance) to show the local French that he wishes to be part of their society. But when he reflects on the state of both his native Germany and France, his country of adoption, he sees nations that are inexorably becoming part of an amorphous, unregulated territory that takes its lead less from Paris and Berlin than from Beijing and Brussels.
I try to imagine Bertie as part of Britain’s Border Force, operating at dawn in the Channel as the first flush of small boats filled with migrants hoves into sight on the horizon. Would he be tempted to reach for his machine pistol? No. He would not. Instead, he would stretch out his hand and ensure all those at risk made it safely ashore. This is Europe’s dilemma. It needs workers and it is willing, perforce, to give the benefit of the doubt even to those who refuse to follow the rules. But is its new-found liberal ethos destined to suffocate a unique heritage and culture?
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