Illegal Immigrants and Poisonous Politics

So Iraq is back in the news. On the one hand, US and UK aircraft - weapons paid for by my taxes, supposedly for my defence - are bombing the country again. On the other hand, several hundred Iraqi Kurds are discovered on a wrecked ship off the Mediterranean coast of France, and immediately categorised as "illegal immigrants".

Most politicians are careful to draw a distinction between "genuine refugees" and "illegal/economic migrants". The former, they say, we owe a duty of hospitality and care; the latter are just shamelessly trying to better their lives at our expense. The former are the tired, the dispossessed, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The latter are a bunch of freeloading scroungers out to cheat honest Westerners of their hard-earned wealth. In practice, they say, the former are those with a "well-founded fear of persecution" in their own country.

Now, there seems no doubt that Iraqi Kurds have a well-founded fear of persecution in Iraq - else why are the abovementioned countries still enforcing this "no-fly zone"? So there's a strong prima facie case for treating them as genuine refugees, regardless of how they got to where they are today. But more interestingly, why did they have to pay thousands of dollars to a bunch of crooks and stow away in a ludicrously dangerous and uncomfortable ship to get there? Why do millions of people every year have to risk their lives to get to the West, when there are perfectly good and comfortable ships and trains and planes making the journey daily?

Because our pretentions to hospitality are mealy-mouthed and insincere. No serious politician, in the UK at least, has the moral guts to stand up and say "Send all these refugees home! We've got troubles of our own, we don't owe them anything!" And I still retain enough faith in my country to hope that, if anyone did say that, they'd be finished in politics. But at the same time, they all act as if they wanted to say that.

They all take it as an article of faith that everyone in the Third World would, given half a chance, move here and scrounge off benefits. This is demonstrably false. The huge majority of people, everywhere in the world, would much prefer to stay where they are. Witness Europe - citizens of any European Union country have the legal right to live and work anywhere they like in the Union - but what percentage of them have actually moved to a different country? And of those that have, what percentage have settled down to sponge off the state rather than working?

A few years ago, I had a Russian girlfriend whom I loved very much. She lived in a hovel in Moscow, one of the poorer and more hopeless of countries, and I wanted her to marry me and move to England. But with all Russia's faults - and they are many, believe me - she didn't want to leave it. Because whatever else it is, it's home to her.

Even more bizarrely, these politicians assume that there are only a finite number of jobs to go round, and every job that goes to an immigrant means that a native is unemployed. This goes so flatly counter to the lessons of two centuries of history that it's really hard to see where the idea comes from. It was immigrants that kept British manufacturing industry going through the 1960s, when home-grown kids all wanted to be pop stars or hippies or bankers. It is immigrants who have built the British food industry up from the level of chips-with-everything to one of the finest and most eclectic cuisines in the world. Immigrants to Britain, in the past century, have included Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of radio, and Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis. Immigrants, particularly the much-reviled "economic migrants", create wealth. That's how America got to be so rich.

All an immigrant asks is the right to live free of fear - whether it's fear of floods or famine or pestilence, or of death squads. If they were born in the UK, we'd consider that their birthright. So, on a purely moral level, what sense does it make to deny them that right purely because they happened to be born elsewhere?

Morally, the case is unanswerable: people should be allowed to live and work where they choose. Economically, it's equally clear: immigrants are a burden on the taxpayer solely because our perverse laws forbid most of them from working. Pragmatically, the argument that opening the doors would cause a flood is contrary to experience.

And that only leaves the political argument: that "the people" wouldn't accept such a policy. But it is the duty of politicians to argue for what they believe is right, even if those policies might be unpopular at first. With time and perserverence, attitudes can be changed, people can be educated. I hereby offer my loyalty, vote and service to any party or politician who will champion a policy of completely open immigration.

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