The past two years have seen the crushing failures of Joe Biden and Sir Keir Starmer’s governments exposed the woolly thinking that had pervaded a left desperate to both escape the Third Way orthodoxies of the 1990s and defeat today’s increasingly racist right. This post-liberal turn is perhaps best reflected in Biden keeping a tight reign on legal immigration through his administration whilst Starmer fired Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary to get someone in Shabana Mahmood who would more aggressively curtail the rights of migrants. And yet Donald Trump is in the White House and Nigel Farage is seemingly on his way to 10 Downing Street. This failure shows that the likes of me who argued for immigration restrictionism on policy or political grounds were badly mistaken. In this article I look at the reasons why I no longer think immigration restrictionism is a sensible policy for left-wing governments to pursue.

The Economy and Public Services

The economic case for restrictionism is far weaker than I once thought. I’ve personally seen how the argument that migration hurts the countries people were emigrating from doesn’t make sense due to the remittances people send back “home”. As I wrote way back in 2016 this debunks the old crunchy progressive saw that Western countries shouldn’t be stealing poorer countries’ best and brightest. Indeed, many nations deliberately overproduce easily exportable professionals such as nurses so that they have enough to meet domestic needs whilst others move abroad.

But the impact on the country people come to is more positive than I realised. This is partially because I massively underestimated the importance of inflation. Like all forms of protectionism, immigration restrictionism reduces supply whilst leaving demand relatively untouched. In this case the hope is that it leads to higher wages.

But as I wrote about earlier this year, such a hope is forlorn due to the “my spending is your income, and your income is my spending” interdependency. Provoking worker shortages to increase wages only makes us all poorer because it either drives up the cost of goods we need or crowds out luxuries we enjoy. This has particularly hit the British night out by compounding the impact of the energy shock of rising wholesale gas prices following Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The increased cost of not just heating venues but stunning animals before their slaughtered and served as food or carbonating pop was already laying waste British leisure and hospitality before it became harder to secure staff. Likewise, the long squeeze on the value of the tuition fees paid by British students has made the higher fees paid by foreign students increasingly important for British universities. But this overseas income rests not just on easy access to student visas, but successful graduates gaining preferential access to the British labour market. Without them either the British government will have to increase domestic fees and the implicit public subsidy of institutions that anchor many local economies.

Then there’s the structural issue facing us and all other Western countries of an ever-growing proportion of the population being not just retired but in need of some form of elder care. Not only are they not working but one way or the other the need to care for them takes people out of the sectors that generate additional economic activity.

Do not confuse the previous paragraph as some kumbya for the transformational power of workers from overseas looking after our sick and old people. It is brutal work, and we are far too complacent about placing recently arrived migrants in fraught situations they often lack the cultural capital to successfully navigate. And that’s before you consider the increased likelihood that they will encounter racist abuse or discrimination. But currently the only way to escape using migrants in social care is to not just accept being poorer as a nation but embrace becoming poorer with each passing year.

Real Man’s Work

There is a trend to sneer at lower-level jobs in the services as merely letting people evade chores that they should do for themselves. But in the same way it didn’t make economic sense for Tom and Barbara Good to grow their own food in the seventies, it really does make sense for a busy professional to outsource everyday tasks to somebody else. But the cultural stigma against such work means few British men want to work in jobs that they see as essentially being someone else’s skivvy. This fuels a wider argument for economic protectionism that by onshoring manufacturing we can restore purpose and meaning to working class men’s lives.

This runs into three problems. Firstly, as Labour discovered in the seventies, technological developments mean that heavy industry becomes an ever less effective job creation program as efficiency improves. That’s especially true if you’re looking for heavy industry to boost the economy as it must be as efficient as possible if it’s to win business overseas. However, neither issue applies to construction and refurbishment. Not only are the building trades still pretty labour intensive but we have a long backlog between the building new homes, overhauling public services, and having a viable military. If only a Government would commit to a comprehensive and sustained public works program, then they’d be more than enough work to go round for those who are happiest or best suited to working by hand rather than mouth or brain.

And that brings the third problem. Such an ambitious program of building, refurbishment and manufacturing needs more labourers than Britain has to spare, especially those with the skills to perform skilled tasks or lead on complex projects. In actuality, properly managed, immigration today would crowd in domestic workers rather than crowding them out by giving key projects the leadership, technical knowhow, or sheer mass of bodies they need to be viable.

National Security

I personally never felt there was a compelling national security rationale for immigration restrictionism. Indeed, attempts to construct one tend to rely on Islamophobic tropes of the most baseless kind. All the evidence is that newly arrived immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the rest of the population, especially when accounting for immigrants being younger and more likely to be male than everyone else. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of terrorists or wannabe terrorists in the UK were born here or in Ireland, and the security services really are highly effective in stopping most attacks.

However, what is becoming increasingly clear is that immigration actually enhances national security. The simplest way is that as the likes of Neville Chamberlain repeatedly argued in the 1930s the foundation of a strong defence is a sound economy. As discussed above, by helping to address manpower shortages, boost output and combat inflation, immigration helps maintain the economic base that allows us to defend ourselves and support our allies in a sustainable way.

And of course in geopolitics, quantity has its own quality. As both Ukraine and Russia are discovering, the number of people in arms you can bring to the battle is far more important than many modern theorists of war had assumed. Not only does immigration help us staff the armed forces during peace time, but a larger population also means a bigger pool of conscripts should we ever find ourselves in another total war. It also means more people available to build the ammunition that modern armies burn through more quickly than those aforementioned modern theorists had realised.

Global Influence

If I could trace the first cracks in my immigration restrictionism I would cite a book and a country. The book is Matthew Yglesias’s One Billion Americans. Now overshadowed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Yglesias’s book is the far superior pro-growth text because it has a clear rationale for going for growth (maintain American geopolitical leadership), a singular tool for achieving that (exponential population growth) and then a genuine exploration about how you would achieve that, including addressing the challenges such population growth would cause.

The key argument that really resonated with me, is that whereas previously the wealth of America meant it could easily assert itself against more populous countries because they couldn’t match it materially, this is no longer the case. China and India may be far poorer per capita than America, but they have so many more people that their economies will ultimately become meaningfully larger. It would be morally wrong for America to frustrate this improvement in Chinese and Indian living standards, which would be a significant advance for humanity in terms of taking people out of poverty. So instead, America should take steps to meaningfully increase its population so that it ultimately matches their size, thereby ensuring it continues to be the world’s largest economy.

You see a real-life example of the consequences of failing to do this in Japan. If any country had been held up as an example of the immigration restrictionism it is a nation renowned for its peculiar form of proactive isolationism where it maintained a generally hostile attitude to overseas influences but proactively managed the absorption of foreign ideas it thought could help the country achieve greatness. This extended to Japan being unusually hostile to overseas immigration, with even an attempt to recruit migrants from the ethnic Japanese communities in Brazil, attracting a backlash due to the new arrivals being seen as unduly loud and boisterous. So stringent was the Japanese taboo against immigration that Rikidōzan, the father of Japanese pro-wrestling who set records for television audiences in the 1950s and 1960s, hid his Korean ancestry.

And yet by the time I read One Billion Americans, Japan was starting to openly court immigration because it had started to realise that under the shadow of China’s rise, it could no longer indulge in population decline. Japan could choose between hostile foreign governments having ever greater ability to boss it around or it could let friendly foreigners into its nation, integrate them into its society, and fight back its slow decline from the top tier of nations.

How this relates to Britain is sometimes obscured by people assuming the loss of Empire solely explains our slide down the international ladder. But this is incorrect. Look at our population compared to America.

We’ve gone from having half America’s population to a fifth. Imagine how different global politics would be if we still had half America’s population? Today’s world with 166 million Britons would be very different not just in terms of geo-politics but our contribution to global discourse be it trade, education or culture. That would obviously be particularly beneficial in a world where America is increasingly going off the rails.

An additional 100million people living in our nation may seem like science fiction given it would involve a population density double that of Japan. But the similarly flat and wet Netherlands has population density that if applied to Britain would have us at a population of 132million people. And while pro-natal policies may help somewhat, most of the heavy lifting would have to come from immigration.

And immigration should act as a multiplier of the positive impact that a larger population has on soft power. Hosting diasporas of other nations, if properly monitored and nurtured gives us greater influence over their country of origin, building both formal and informal links that helps us better understand and influence the wider world.

But a growing population has benefits closer to home.

The Problems of Big London and Small Towns

That “Take Back Control” has haunted British politics long before Vote Leave won the EU Referendum proves that ghosts are not trapped by temporal time. The sense that people in Deep Britain have lost control has caused people in small towns, suburbs, and rural areas to increasingly lash out at political class they increasingly see as hostile to them and their interests.

But what does losing control mean? It can’t be due to immigration, because whilst immigration has ebbed and flowed, it’s been at elevated levels throughout the post-war period. Nor have periods of relative retrenchment such as the 1980s and the past couple of years coincided with people feeling like they have regained control.

There are three reasons for this. Firstly, reduced immigration tracks economic recession, and obviously people feel less in control when they have lost their job, fear losing their job, or know people who have lost or fear losing their job. Secondly, as population declines at a national level that amplifies the pull factor exerted by its most productive areas, as high-wage vacancies open-up due to lack of local people to fill them. This of course exacerbates the population decline of struggling areas which compounds their loss of influence within the country. You see this in Japan where Tokyo has kept growing despite Japan’s overall declining, with ultimately whole villages being abandoned. Thirdly, as a nation’s population shrinks its ability to produce products and services declines more than its ability to consume them due to the efficiencies of scale being significantly greater in the former than the latter. This results in it having to consume more products and services from overseas, due to an inability to produce them itself. This is particularly true of a country like Britain that doesn’t control its own language.

These three dynamics are all reasons why people feel like they are losing control. They can no longer buy things produced in a local factory or have to go to the big city for shops that were once in their town centre. The ambitious young people they know are moving to London or Manchester whilst even they have to travel further for work because the good jobs are no longer in small towns. Whilst they remember the whole world loving music and television produced from across Britain, today almost everything children listen to and watch is produced overseas because British output is infrequent and cheap looking. Because they’re angry at diverse cities and overseas countries having greater influence on their lives, they then take against immigration.

But this is counterproductive. All the problems they and their community face, is caused by having too few people, not too many. If people are mad about a shrinking economy, then we need more workers not fewer. If people are mad about London hoovering up all the talent from the provinces, then we need to make it easier for foreigners to move to London. Likewise, we need to make it easier for them to move to elsewhere in Britain if we want other cities to challenge London’s supremacy or stop small towns and villages literally dying away. And if we want Britain to not have to accept the slop that other countries serve it, we need an economy big enough to produce what we want or bend multinationals to our will.

It should be that obvious immigration can help solve all these issues. So why does the government think its salvation is through getting net immigration down to the tens of thousands?

Other People’s Pain for No Gain

I’d long been a reluctant immigration restrictionist The best neighbourhood I’ve lived in was Leicester’s Narborough Road, which packed such an amazing range of communities in its shops, restaurants and bars. Whether it was getting an Indian head massage after a hair cut, drinking Polish vodka, or eating Zimbabwean sadza, Punjabi vegetarian dishes or Chinese noodles, the diversity around me enriched my life. And it didn’t crowd out so-called “English” culture, as almost all bars and restaurants came together to follow Leicester City’s unlikely march to the title in 2016. Indeed, I would say that if you’ve never watched a high-stakes Premier League match in your local African Bar, you’re doing football fandom wrong.

But like I suspect many in the current Government, my very enjoyment of cultural diversity led me to distrust and discount the arguments for it. I took pride in putting what I thought were arguments of the head above arguments of the heart, couching my advocacy of immigration restrictions on what was politically possible. But this was to confuse cruelty with strength, resignation with vision, freeriding with practicality. In the face of angry voters and powerful newspapers it’s tempting to believe that just giving them what they want is the right thing to do.

But we have seen over the past five years have shown that this isn’t the case. Britain has tightened and tightened its border with France to the point that the only way to evade the numerous checks is to now travel across in small boats. It has tried to export the processing of asylum claims to Rwanda and there is now a consensus between the leadership of the two major parliamentary parties that the European Convention of Human Rights in its current form is preventing them taking the measures necessary to tackle unauthorised entries into Britain. Meanwhile Theresa May’s hostile environment to legal immigration seems positively welcoming compared to the policies and rhetoric of the current Home Secretary. After a short-term spike caused by China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s civil society, the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan, the renewed invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the need to replace European migrants that left Britain during lockdown we are racing towards the lowest net immigration since the 1980s.

And yet the reward for all this has been Reforming surging to a clear first place with Labour struggling to stay ahead of the Tories. Indeed, in the recent general election, Labour’s embrace of immigration restrictionism made little impression with the party once again failing to win over socially authoritarian voters.

That’s partly for all the reasons listed in this article. Immigration restrictionism is not just a false solution to real problems but the opposite to what the country needs. Properly managed, mass immigration would make Britain both cheaper to live and more fun to party in. A better place for the young to learn and the old to rest. More powerful on the world stage, be that geo-politics or global pop culture. With enough people to keep London one of the world’s leading megacities without hollowing out provincial cities and towns.

But of course, that proper management involves real investment in public services. That costs money and would involve state direction of society and increased taxes. Few on the right want that. It also involves accepting Black and Asian people as fellow and equal citizens and slapping down any racist who disagrees. Many on the right are increasingly unwilling to do that. Labour can never outbid the right on immigration restrictionism, because the right needs it to either hide their toxically unpopular desire for a smaller state or whiter population. The more aggressively Labour apes their policy positions, the more unhinged they become in response because they have nothing else to offer the angry and the desperate.

The reality is that sometimes in politics you must fight for what you think is right. As I wrote earlier this year the Tories did not respond to their failure to beat the miners in 1974 by embracing them. They instead did the hard work to better understand what they needed to do to beat the trade unions, and then methodically implemented that plan over their first two terms in office. Likewise, New Labour did not abandon their party’s determination to support the low-paid but found a better way to do that than squeezing wage differentials.

The reality is that the best times to be a British government in recent years were the mid-1950s to mid-1960s and late-1990s to mid-2000s. What they both have in common is that immigration into Britain was high with new arrivals not stopping the Tories nor Tony Blair being repeatedly re-elected. We as a country have got stuck at a level of immigration that is high enough to be controversial but too low to address the problems caused by the manpower shortages we face.

Politicians need to remember, that sometimes, they must compromise with reality.