Ukip has unveiled its new Aussie-style immigration policy, just a week after the latest bad immigration news for the government. The news was bad only in a sense, as high immigration levels are a symptom of a healthy economy; after all, the Venezuelan government doesn’t break into a sweat every time the immigration figures come in, thanks to the genius of Chavenomics. But it’s all bad news for the Tories because most people would like restrictions on the rate of population growth, and of immigration-led social change, and the government made promises it clearly couldn’t keep.
Yet the British economy is doing well and Ukip realise therefore that there is a danger with ambitious pledges to reduce the number of newcomers; instead the most effective way to deal with it is to focus on quality rather than quantity, which is what the Aussies do. This is the only way they get around the fact that there are two separate, though interlinked, issues involved with immigration – the economic and the social.
Even if the number of British emigrants equals the number of newcomers, there is a social cost to migration.
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