THE GUARDIAN

COMMENT

New Labour's failure to make the case for migration is a dangerous one

When it comes to making accurate predictions, America's intelligence establishment has something to prove these days. So it may provoke some reader resistance to suggest that a useful place to start when looking at Britain's latest immigration debate might be the US government's newly published assessment of the world we face in 2020.

Nevertheless, the US National Intelligence Council's new document, Mapping the Global Future, has compelling things to say about the planet we will inhabit - and our corner of it - in a generation's time. The document's primary focus is on the implications for the US of continuing globalisation, Asian economic dynamism and the rise of political Islam. But the parallel implications for Europe - and, as seen from Washington, Britain is very much part of Europe - shine through its pages almost as clearly.

Over the next generation, says the report, Europeans will continue to enjoy many advantages: a large market, a single currency in many parts of the region, a highly skilled workforce, a big GDP - and democratic stability. Through our diverse populations and histories we have strong connections with the Muslim world and Africa, as well as Russia, and we offer many other parts of the world an attractive "western" alternative to the US.

What we do not have, though, is a large enough workforce to maintain our economic growth and affluence. If those are to be achieved, the report says, Europe must do two things in particular: first, encourage mothers of young families and the "young elderly" (50 to 65-year-olds) to return to the labour market; and, second, encourage further legal immigration and improve the integration of migrant populations.

We can choose not to make these changes, but we would pay a price for that. We would face economic slowdown. Our clout in the world, both as individual nations and as a European Union, would decline. And we would run the risk of encouraging ethnically or religiously based internal conflict.

If the American report is correct, therefore, Europe has to get real about the strategic importance of migration. Many Europeans may not like this truth, but increased legal migration and increased cultural diversity are fundamental to our prosperity and power. Without embracing them, we shall face decline. With them, we have the option of progress. We have to accentuate the positive, to make the best of the challenge we have created for ourselves. There is no third way.

This is the unflinching context in which any debate about migration - including that triggered by Michael Howard this week - ought to take place, but rarely does. Every modern migration policy implicitly accepts that migration is economically necessary and that it will continue to be so. If this were not the case, there would be many more examples of European nations forcing out their migrants. But the implicit is rarely made explicit. Both the need for migration and the essential direction of the policy are givens, yet far too many politicians are far too coy about saying so.

This is not to say that there are no practical problems about current migration management policies. Britain has barely begun, for instance, to come to grips with the seriousness of the role that organised crime plays in people trafficking to and across Europe. And the failure to expel rejected asylum applicants makes a mockery of the system. Nor is it to imply that politicians can afford to be insouciant about the scale of the cultural changes, especially for Europe's poor, from migration.

Even so, the current debate represents progress of a kind. When Enoch Powell made his "rivers of blood" speech in 1968, it was a mere 20 years since the docking of the Empire Windrush with its first boatload of Caribbean migrants. Though relatively few called for repatriation even then, that remote possibility was the continuing poisonous subtext of many arguments on race and migration in those years, especially within the Conservative party.

But those days have gone. The Empire Windrush was more than half a century ago. British and European realities have been multicultural for at least a generation. If Britain has indeed reached a turning point in migration policy, it is not the one that Howard posed this week, but one that asserts that there is now no turning back. The question that matters in migration policy is no longer whether there should be migration. It is how migration should operate. The issues that matter are issues about numbers, timing, and how to make the policy as successful as possible for all.

In that general sense, all the main political parties, even the Tories, are broadly in the same place, not in the more adversarial positions that Howard is trying to contrive for them in the run-up to the election. All the parties are in favour of migration. All are in favour of managing and controlling it. All are aware that the public is extremely anxious about what is happening - partly, though not exclusively, because of the way the subject is covered in parts of the press. All know that they cannot be, or appear to be, dismissive of such concerns.

The problem is that none of them, not even the Liberal Democrats, have found the confidence or the means to make a virtue of a necessary policy. Partly this is because of the perceived hostility of the press, which is genuine in some cases (notably the Express) but capable of being exaggerated in others (the Sun, most conspicuously). But it would be dishonest to blame the media for a problem with which few other sections of British society have successfully engaged either.

Part of the responsibility, nevertheless, lies with a lack of political leadership. New Labour's reluctance to make the case for migration is one of the most serious of its failures to seize the opportunities it created for itself in the 90s - part of its broader European failure, perhaps. Tony Blair may now lack the credibility to take the necessary risk, but he did not take it when that was not the case. Gordon Brown has rarely ventured either on to a subject which might seem well suited to his perceived strengths. At least David Blunkett tried to craft a debate that had a place for the benefits of migration alongside the controls. But in the end he drowned out his own efforts.

The depressing truth about British politicians of the modern era is that none has yet found - and few have thought it sufficiently worthwhile to seek - a way of putting optimism and opportunity at the centre of the debate on managed migration. It is not as though they will ever have a much better opportunity to do so. These are prosperous times. There are jobs for almost all. But this will not last for ever. Ordinarily, this would seem an ideal moment to craft the case for properly managed migration. The fact that we are so far away from even attempting to do that makes one shudder for what will happen when times are harder.

m.kettle@guardian.co.uk

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