Was yesterday’s immigration debate a dummy run for the debate on population growth?

Damian Green MP, the Minister of State for Immigration, gave the audience an update on the government’s vision and priorities on immigration, repeating the oft heard mantra of attracting ‘the brightest and the best’, or as we now hear ‘selective immigration’ because the previous government had a system that ‘was not only chaotic but indiscriminate’. This statement could  be interpreted as a government policy that happily promotes discrimination, coating it with the arch-narrative of ‘protecting jobs’ and only attracting the ‘investors’ and ‘entrepreneurs’.

At certain points, the debate became a little confused - perhaps because of the lack of clear focus. Sometimes frustrations with impacts to local services, such as fleeing nurses [because of violent drunks in A and E units] emigrating to Canada, New Zealand and Australia were linked with the challenges the NHS faces in recruiting quality staff from abroad and keeping them.

So why was there a need for a debate on immigration, randomly, at this particular point in time, right after the debate on the Prime Minister’s veto on the new EU treaty? Shadow immigration minister, Chris Bryant MP, asked:

I thought the Government had an announcement to make today. I suspect that they were originally going to announce something, which was why they decided to hold this debate, but suddenly there were other important matters to be discussed, the announcement disappeared, and with it went the Home Secretary.

It wasn't until Nicholas Soames MP, MigrationWatch’s advocate in parliament, explored the wastelands of MigrationWatch’s Number 10 e-petition on population growth in his speech, which at the time of it's launch on the Number 10 website was shamelessly promoted by the Daily Mail, Express and the Sun newspapers, that we realised this was indeed a dummy-run for the debate on population growth, currently being considered by the Backbench Business Committee, and is anticipated to trigger a debate sometime in the New Year. He said:

It has assumed that immigration will continue at a rate of 200,000 a year—about the average of the past 10 years—but if that level is allowed to continue, the UK population will hit 70 million in about 16 years and will continue rising indefinitely beyond that period. Given that neither of the other two components—the birth rate and the death rate—is likely to change very much in that period, this is a mathematical certainty.

This seems to have been an attempt to test the waters and take the temperature in parliament. The Daily Mail’s fears of an empty chamber when this debate is called could be realised if, judging from yesterday’s attendance, MPs refuse to be roped into a potentially vacuous debate on population growth.

However, the APPG on Migration will be exploring the UK’s economic priorities for 2012 and what role migration policy plays at a cross-party roundtable meeting in January. We will touch on the impact of population growth and what sensible policies the government should implement to ensure we harness the opportunities that come with migration and future increases in the UK population.

You can read the full debate here.