Articles
No to illegal amnesty
24 June 2009
It’s hard not to like Boris Johnson. He is a colourful, vigourous and unpredictable maverick, the sort of freethinking politician who stands out from the grey suits at Westminster.
Read his columns in the Daily Telegraph and you hear the voice of someone profoundly in love with liberty; a hardened campaigner against the bureaucracy and political correctness disfiguring our nation. But his recent proposal to offer an amnesty to London’s illegal immigrants is both misguided and naïve.
It is wrong in principle because it directly contravenes the rule of law, the bedrock of any civilized society. This principle is just too important to be discarded for the sake of convenience. It is one of the things that make us different from Zimbabwe and other despotic regimes that repress their people for fun. The law is the law, as they say.
The mayor claims that an amnesty makes financial sense as we would gain £1 billion in extra taxes. But what he fails to point out is that the British taxpayer would be coughing up a vast sum in extra welfare payments, including working tax credits, child benefit and council tax subsidies for many of the new low skilled workers and their families. Good financial sense? More like Alice in Wonderland economics.
But an amnesty is also unworkable because it would encourage more illegal workers to enter the UK where they would then be vulnerable to exploitation. Here the Mayor should learn from the experience of other European countries.
Spain offered an amnesty to illegal workers in 1991 but has since had to offer 4 further amnesties to more than a million illegal workers. Amnesties also failed to depress illegal migration in France, Italy, Holland and a host of other countries. If implemented, Boris’ proposal would offer a field day to people traffickers everywhere.
So how do we deal with this problem? One answer is deportation but as this is both time consuming and expensive, it can only be done selectively. A more effective remedy would be to prosecute any firm that was willing to employ illegal workers.
With jobs cut, the incentive to remain would vanish and people would start to leave. More to the point, it would surely discourage other foreign nationals from entering the UK illegally.
The immigration of skilled people, when sensibly managed, can be an immense boon to this country. To that end, the Mayor should discard his amnesty proposal with immediate effect.
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