Are we talking enough about immigration?

We can't let the right exploit these riots for their rhetorical gain.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. The events of this last week have been shocking – deplorable, even. And, they have come with a refrain: We need to finally, at long last, to have an open and honest conversation about immigration.

This line has been the leader column in centre-right newspapers; it’s come from former academics who’ve had a funny turn. It’s come even from people who would once have defined as on the left. What baffles me about it, though, is the embedded assumption that we were not talking about immigration already. It often feels like we’ve spent the century so far speaking of little else.

Pretending otherwise is a tactic that’s been around so long that it’s now old enough to vote. In 2005, Michael Howard’s Conservative party campaigned using a series of apparently handwritten posters accompanied by the slogan, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” Two of those messages were “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration,” and the punchier “It’s time to put a limit on immigration.” The Tories lost that election – the voters were not, it turned out, thinking what they were thinking. Nonetheless, we absolutely were talking about immigration.

In fact, we were talking about it already. Tabloid coverage of the EU’s 2004 eastward expansion focused largely on its immigration implications, because Britain was one of the few countries to impose no transitional controls. In 2002, home secretary David Blunkett got himself in hot water for inflammatory language, after promising that the children of asylum seekers would be educated separately and thus would not be “swamping the local school”. (Tony Blair’s official spokesman later said that his home secretary was “not talking about immigration as a whole”, which was very reassuring of him.)

We can go back even further – Tebbit’s “cricket test”, and so forth – but the point is that even at what at the height of New Labour’s relatively liberal approach to Britain’s borders, the British government still felt the need to be theatrically cruel to asylum seekers, and the British media was still noisily warning about foreigners. We were talking about immigration.

And so we have continued. In opposition, Ed Miliband’s Labour party not only made “Controls on immigration” one of its cornerstone policies, but plastered the slogan over a comically ridiculous mug (I bought one for the office, as a joke; my then partner, quite reasonably, would not allow it in the house). The Tories, meanwhile, made such controls a cornerstone of every manifesto, with David Cameron and Theresa May repeatedly making airy promises to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands”.

A week before the Brexit referendum, UKIP released its infamous “breaking point” poster, showing a column of suspiciously swarthy men heading this way. Other leavers promoted the claim that Turkey was about to join the EU, giving the union a border with Iraq and Syria. You can argue that these are not the main reasons Britain voted leave. You cannot argue we weren’t talking about immigration.

And for as long as anyone can remember, some of Britain’s best-selling newspapers have ensured we have kept talking about it. On Thursday, Sheffield Hallam’s Dr Pete Olusoga posted a lengthy Twitter thread collating front pages which should bring shame upon those who produced them. The Express: “Every 4 minutes a migrant is arrested in Britain.” The Mail: “There are too many migrants”. The Express again: “Fury at ‘soft checks’ on child migrants.” Repeat, over and over again, for decades.

It’s true that people frequently tell pollsters they want less net migration. But it’s equally true that they’re less keen to reduce any of the biggest groups (those from Ukraine or Hong Kong; those working in the NHS or care sectors; international students) which contribute to those figures. It’s true, too, that the same voters often don’t want to do any of the things that might make our economy or public services less dependent on immigration (paying higher taxes to fund higher social care wages, say) than they are about reducing it in the abstract.

Suffice it to say, though, that the problem is not that we have not been having a conversation about immigration – but perhaps we’ve been having the wrong conversation. Perhaps we should instead have an open and honest conversation about the economic, social and cultural benefits a more diverse population has brought to this country. Perhaps more newspaper front pages should explain that, without immigration, vital and much loved parts of the British state would collapse; or how the reasons we are a popular destination for migrants include the fact that they’re more likely to speak English and have existing links to this country, and that it is at least possible that the centuries Britain spent showing up in other people’s countries could be a factor here. Perhaps a senior politician could even try explaining that it’s much better to live in a country people want to come to than one that they do not.

So yes, perhaps we do need to have a conversation about immigration. But it’s not the one the Faragists of the world want us to have.

[See also: Understanding England’s anarchy]