Andrew Marr: Jenrick's doom-laden claims about the effects of migration are refuted by the evidence
26 April 2023, 18:56 | Updated: 26 April 2023, 19:09
Andrew Marr has said that Robert Jenrick's controversial speech in which he said “uncontrolled illegal migration” threatens to “cannibalise” the UK's compassion is totally at odds with the evidence.
Speaking on Tonight with Andrew Marr, the presenter said that despite the immigration minister's emotive and doom-laden rhetoric, there is no data to suggest that increased immigration has caused existing workers to lose jobs, or resulted in a rise in crime.
He said: "In politics images are often even more powerful than language.
"The real reason the Commons has spent this afternoon debating a law to stop migrants crossing the Channel is that we've seen so many images of those rubber boats, crammed with people in life-jackets, crunching up the shingle around the southeast coast.
"Images of outsiders arriving by sea dig into something quite deep and sometimes quite dark in the English imagination.
"Older generations were brought up with a popular history that was really all about invasions and stopping them - or failing to stop them.
"Jutes and Vikings, Saxons, Danes, Normans - the Normans were a particular pain in the bottom with their silly foreign language and their pointy metal hats and their boring square castles - then the Spanish and Francis Drake fiddling with his bowls - thats bowls with a w - and sea fortresses against the French, and concrete pillboxes and tank traps and barbed wire against the Germans - and Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson and the rest of them fixing bayonets in Walmington on Sea... it all just means that millions of naturally conservative British people are particularly sensitive to boats, beaches and words like invasion.
Andrew Marr: ‘We shouldn’t forget that in many ways, we are also a country built on migration.’
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"The channel boats is going to be a really big subject between now and the general election, and it already generates far more heat than light; and so this evening I'll do my best to help.
"The immigration minister Robert Jenrick, a mild-mannered lawyer, married to the child of Holocaust survivors who sits for the quiet market town of Newark, yesterday made one of the most hard-edged speeches on immigration any serving minister has ever made.
"Because of climate change, state failure and war there were 100 million people displaced globally, many of whom wanted to come here.
"The English Channel had once been a silver sea but was now a gateway for illegal migration. The number of people willing and able to reach the United Kingdom was now “astronomical” and far beyond what this country could accept.
“'Excessive uncontrolled migration threatens to cannibalise the compassion that marks out the British people'”, he said.
"Migrants had different values; they settled in hyper-diverse areas; and they expected to be looked after by the state.
"So-called asylum seekers were effectively Asylum shoppers who simply thought the UK was a better place to make a claim and build a future than France.
"According to official figures, for every recorded illegal migrant in 2022 about 19 people migrated here legally - net migration half a million in the year ending June 2022.
"For the last year we've got figures for, 2019, asylum seekers made up only around 5 percent of immigrants.
"When the migration advisory committee reviewed the situation in 2018 - admittedly some years ago - they found that immigration had little or no impact on the employment of existing workers.
"So what happens to people coming off the boats if they haven't been put into detention centres, or if they escape from them?
"Some, no doubt, fall into crime, but there's little hard evidence about that. It's anecdotal and it’s emotive. Mr Jenrick talked about migrants kicking open the doors of houses in Dover, entering homes and being found in people’s kitchens.
"Those things happen, I’m sure, very occasionally. But Oxford University’s Migration Observatory found in a report published five years ago there was no evidence to suggest increased immigration to the UK was increasing crime rates either at a local or national level.
"To be fair, there's very little evidence of anything in this area because these are desperate people outside the normal employment world, where statistics get collected.
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"But you will meet them - if you get your car cleaned on a particular garage forecourt, or you regularly have your nails painted pink - I don't - or if you hang around building sites.
"Mr Jenrick argued that recent migrants have different values from the rest of us. Well, they seem to be hard-working and many are religious, so that's true.
"Also, according to the Institute for public policy research, migrants are generally optimistic about Britain - so maybe it's doubly true.
"Now look, I have no doubt that the scale of migration recently across the channel has to be stopped, not least because of the huge involvement criminal gangs and the risk to life and limb.
"Because of things happening around the world far from Britain, I agree that the number of people who want to come here is just going to keep growing.
"We have to decide as a country how many people we can accommodate and who they should be full stop but we shouldn't forget that we are also a country in many ways built on migration.
"Let’s not panic. Let’s not scare ourselves."
