Boris’s Amnesty Proposal: you read it first in The Spectator, in 2001

It is good to see Boris furthering his policy of allowing illegal immigrants to stay if they manage to evade the attention of the authorities for 12 years. Older readers may just remember that they read it in the Spec first. The idea, as I remember, came up in conversations for a leader for the magazine back in 2001, when William Hague was jumping up and down about asylum and telling us that if we voted for him he would give us back our country.

The Spectator, honourably, took a very different line. The problem was not with ‘economic migrants’, which was then a popular term of abuse on the right and the left, but with migrants who came to Britain with no intention of working. The threat to the nation was not a liberal immigration policy, but an over-generous benefits system.

There then came up the issue of illegal immigrants who had been here for many years, quietly earning their keep.  Why not, I suggested, instigate a modern-day equivalent of the rule which used rule in feudal England: if a serf could escape from his lord and evade capture for a year and a day he became a free man.

It is a principle used in modern times, too.  If you can build a house and escape the planning authorities for four years it becomes a legal structure, and no-one can force you to remove it. Occupy land for 12 years without anyone challenging you and it can become registered in your name.  An immigrant who has been here for 12 years has shown far more commitment to the country than many legal immigrants. And by evading detection they are showing skills of craftiness from which our economy could benefit.