Sean Clerkin: Cap on immigration wouldn't be racist, just common sense

Published on Friday 23 April 2010 23:27

THE open-door approach to immigration, which was launched by Tony Blair and Jack Straw in 2001 for economic and social reasons to drive down wages to the minimum wage level, has to be abandoned.

With the worst recession in living memory, we cannot afford to continue with it. We have hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and more than half a million EU eastern Europeans in the UK that we cannot sustain in terms of housing, education and health services.

Glasgow, one of the poorest cities in Britain, has had to absorb many thousands of economic immigrants in recent years, resulting in the growth of ghettos in Govanhill, Pollokshaws and Red Road. How can a socially deprived area such as Govanhill cope with the influx of over 3,000 Slovakians in the space of 12 months? It cannot.

Glasgow City Council education department has to provide resources to educate 14,000 children whose first language is not English. Indigenous children are held back and are denied the educational resources that they need.

Many indigenous people in Glasgow and elsewhere are naturally resentful that the massive influx of immigrants increasingly takes away from them shrinking public resources in areas such as housing, education and health. Until now, they have been afraid to speak out in case they were labelled racist by the chattering classes and those with vested interests to protect.

The rise of the British National Party has forced the issue of immigration to the fore, with the issue being one of the five most important concerns for the British people during this election campaign, and yet the main political parties continue, at their peril, to sidestep the issue, only paying brief lip service.

Indigenous people also feel strongly that their culture is being undermined by the likes of Islam, from the closure of public houses in the north of England to the threatened imposition of Sharia law, where there are increasingly high concentrations of Muslim populations.

Multiculturalism has gone far too far, and there is a clear need for more integration of ethnic minorities in our western democratic values, like the French do in that, as a great nation, it ensures that its secular democratic values, such as the freedom of expression, are never undermined.

The mainstream political parties continue to worship at the altar of multiculturalism and tiptoe around the subject of immigration and its implications for our economy and social structure. This is shown very clearly when First Minister Alex Salmond championed an illegal immigrant who faced drug charges and it can be seen how out of touch our mainstream politicians are on this issue.

A cap must be put on immigration in line with the numbers of people leaving the UK each year. This means, in effect, that there has to be zero net migration, and this would include those coming in from eastern Europe. This has been agreed by well-informed academics, and politicians such as Frank Field, MP, hardly raving racists. Such a policy is only common sense.

France and Germany have rightly tightened up on immigration and it is about time the UK did the same, as we cannot financially sustain large numbers of immigrants and would-be asylum seekers when severe financial cutbacks will take place in public services after the General Election.

&#149 Sean Clerkin is the former chairman of the Glasgow Campaign against housing stock transfer and current chairman of the Glasgow Homeowners' Campaign. He is a non-aligned socialist.