The Tories are playing a dangerous game on immigration

This week the Conservative Party has been whipping up anti-immigration hysteria. The party has taken a deeply disappointing backwards step in the immigration debate. Labour will, according to the Tories, allow “unfettered, unlimited immigration” that will lead to a rise of 840,000 people a year coming into Britain which Michael Gove said would make the UK “less safe”. It sounded like dog whistle politics, as low as Farage’s “breaking point” fear mongering poster.

The Conservatives are trying to make immigration a central dividing line between them and Labour, as the Labour party is yet to make its policy on immigration clear and is clearly divided on the issue of free movement within the EU. The Conservatives are committed to implementing a new immigration system based on bringing in people with the skills the country needs, this is not in itself unreasonable.

However, the language used and the fear mongering risks demonising immigrants and fuelling discrimination. There is no detail about the Tory immigration policy nor explanation of how they will reduce net migration. All the Conservatives have communicated is a general aversion to immigration and, by extension, immigrants. One of the main purposes of the Tory modernisation process in the mid-2000s was to show that the Tories were comfortable, perhaps even proud, of modern Britain. Now as they pursue the votes of Farage supporters, they’ve lowered the tone.

The numbers the Conservatives have put out this week are obviously nonsense. They got the current levels of migration wrong, completely fabricated something called the “net visa grant” and their claim about Labour introducing free movement with the entire world is utter nonsense that has already been debunked. This reverts the immigration debate back to xenophobic and paranoid warnings about hordes and floods of migrants hitting Britain, entirely designed for the same people who fretted about the population of Turkey invading Britain.

The greatest shame about all this is that behind all the unpleasant rhetoric is the good news that the Conservatives have completely dropped the unachievable, economically illiterate and damaging arbitrary target of reducing immigration to the “tens of thousands”. It’s this profoundly damaging policy that led the Home Office to focus on repelling immigrants or looking for people to kick out leading directly to the shame of the Windrush scandal.

Its replacement with a vaguer aspiration to “cut immigration overall” is a positive step. There is likely to be a natural reduction in immigration from the EU due to the end of free movement, but the UK still needs to welcome immigrants. Indeed, being an open and liberal country that welcomes immigration is the key to our economic, cultural and social dynamism. A more liberal policy towards skilled migration from outside the EU is required to meet the needs of the UK economy, so announcements about the “NHS Visa”, allowing international students to stay on to work after their studies are more than welcome.

The new, vague target of an overall reduction in immigration is achievable, even if the reduction is probably fairly modest. We can be thankful that we’re moving on from Theresa May’s negative, restrictive approach that would inevitably cause economic damage and increase the risks of Brexit.

If what comes out of this is an economically sensible immigration policy that focuses on our needs rather than arbitrary numbers, that’s a positive thing. However, it’s deeply disappointing that the Conservatives have chosen in this election to adopt fearmongering tactics and rhetoric that borders on the xenophobic. It might win over Farage supporters, but it is wrong and it will compound the Tory party’s long term problemattracting the votes of the young and ethnic minorities, something they need to address if their party is going to be fit for the long term future.