Immigration

This afternoon's law and order theme to Tory conference did take a bit of a knock when police were called to an altercation involving one of the party's MPs, resulting in the backbencher, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, being sent home. Not long after this incident, which sent parts of the conference centre into lockdown, Priti Patel walked onto the stage and announced that 'today, here in Manchester, the Conservative party takes its rightful place as the Party of Law and Order in Britain once again'.

Tomorrow the government will say what will happen to free movement in the event of a no-deal Brexit. I understand that free movement will be replaced by a three-year temporary Leave to Remain Scheme for EU nationals who arrive in the UK before 31 December 2020 and register with the EU settlement scheme. Their three years would start from December 2020. So, in other words, if you are an EU citizen who arrives in the UK in March 2020 you would be entitled to stay until at least December 2023. This is a significant change from previous government plans to end free movement on 1 November in the event of no deal. It should provide more certainty to EU nationals considering taking a job in the UK and deal with many of the problems that Fraser Nelson set out in last week’s cover piece.

Priti Patel is the new Home Secretary. This is likely to attract a fair bit of opprobrium from Boris Johnson's critics, given she is a supporter of the death penalty. Whether or not she has been given any remit to examine that particular policy issue, she has a big job on her hands. The Home Office is one of the hardest departments to run. Theresa May managed to survive it, largely by micromanaging everyone else into the dust. Her successor Amber Rudd did not, finding that obeying her boss too well led to her being implicated in the Windrush scandal. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, May's aides in the Home Office and then in Number 10, would constantly tell friends that they were always trying to avert disaster in the department or one of its agencies.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is often taught to schoolchildren, who read it as a warning about the fragility of human power. Conservatives should study it now and ensure they take an opportunity to learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration. If there was one issue that helped May become, for a short time, a figure of “cold command” over her party, it was immigration. As home secretary and then Prime Minister, she was the senior figure at the top of the Conservative party who consistently took the hardest line on the issue.

Republicans claim they want to put Americans first when it comes to immigration. So why are they backing another giveaway to Big Tech and foreign workers at the expense of American citizens? Several Republican senators, including Mike Lee, Tom Cotton, and Kevin Cramer, have sponsored the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act. The bill is being for a vote in the Senate by Unanimous Consent, which means skipping all debates. The bill is anything but fair. It would be another special privilege for Silicon Valley — allowing giant corporations to hire more foreign nationals instead of STEM graduates. The bill would eliminate country caps on legal immigration, which prevent one nationality from monopolizing the allocation of Green Cards.

In August 2007, three months after coming to power at Holyrood, the SNP launched its National Conversation on Scotland’s constitutional future. We have been talking about little else since. Among the many national conversations postponed is one on immigration. The CBI has tried to kick-start such a discussion by warning that, within 20 years, just one third of Scotland’s population will be of working age. Given that figure is currently 64 per cent, it is an arresting claim. It is also entirely plausible. The Office for National Statistics predicts the number of working-age Scots to grow by just one per cent between now and 2041, while the pensioner population is expected to surge by 25 per cent.

I was working in Johannesburg when I first got wind of the fact that Ireland has become an illegal back door to the UK. If you’re from a country such as South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Fiji or Guyana, you need, not just a passport, but a prearranged visa, obtained from the local embassy for a fee, before you can even board a plane to Britain. It takes time, your details are checked, and you need to show a reason why you’ll go home at the end of your stay. In the 1980s most African nationals could come to Britain visa-free. But worries about terrorism and crimes committed once in the UK meant that, one by one, African countries had to join the visa scheme.

If the modern left has an original sin, it’s redefining language. Much of the craziness of the culture wars and the idiocy of identity politics can be boiled down to one critical problem: we have lost the ability to talk to one another because we have lost our shared language. When one group of people uses critical words like ‘violence,’ and ‘safety,’ in ways that do not represent the historic meaning of these words, conversation breaks down. This time, it’s not the left, but the right, that is guilty of redefining language and using that new fangled definition to shut down and destroy the fabric of our national debate.

In his late essay ‘Perpetual Peace,’ Immanuel Kant lauded the ideal of ‘universal hospitality.’ In his first Oval Office speech Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took issue with Kant (though not by name), noting that the porous Southern border of the United States represented a serious humanitarian and security crisis. Everyone who can spell ‘Google’ knows that the Democrats, until November 7, 2016, supported robust border security and, indeed, a physical barrier — otherwise known as a wall — to retard the flow of illegal immigrants into this country.

Donald Trump is trashing America. Garbage is piling up from California national parks to the Washington mall as Trump insists on keeping the federal government shutdown over his request for a totemic border wall. The longer he’s cooped up in the White House, the crazier his pronouncements seem to become. Once upon a time a defiant Trump declared, ‘I am proud to shutdown the government.’ He figured this would be enough to scare Chuck and Nancy into compliance. It didn’t. Instead, they were emboldened. Schumer, who previously offered Trump a cool $25 billion in wall money in exchange for liberating the Dreamers, isn’t budging. And Pelosi is openly scoffing at him.

The British government’s new white paper on immigration has been shaped by a social norm which argues that the white British ethnic majority's interest in limiting the pace of cultural change and facilitating assimilation is racist. The emphasis on skills rather than numbers, on economic over cultural considerations, and on rebalancing immigration away from Europe speaks to this. The document reflects the thinking of both Brexit and Remain politicians. Yet it does not align with the motives of many who voted Leave, or a considerable chunk of those who voted Remain. These voters seek lower levels of immigration, and research shows that this is driven more by identity threat than by economic considerations.