James Windsor-Clive: Immigration should not be about what our country can do for you, but what you can do for our country

James Windsor-Clive was the Conservative candidate for the Ealing Central and Acton at the 2024 general election.

Last year, my view on immigration hardened. Whilst campaigning in North Ealing during the general election, I came face-to-face with the pace of demographic change that is challenging communities.

The first door I knocked on, I was met by a smiling resident who could only communicate with hand gestures.

I assumed this was a one-off. It wasn’t. Nearly every person I met couldn’t communicate with me.

I was shocked. Being able to speak our language is the cornerstone of integrating into our culture and communities. How could these individuals have a job? Visit their GP? Contribute to our society?

Finally, I knocked on the door of a gentleman who had grown up in the area. He told me: “No one on my street speaks English anymore. I don’t recognise it.” I could only nod in agreement. The evidence was undeniable – although many would be quick to label him a racist, unable to see the benefits immigration brings (a temptation to which I might once lazily have succumbed).

It hammered home to me that immigration is impacting real communities, real people – something lost in a debate dominated by statistics. A gentle anaesthetisation from years of eye-watering net migration figures; nnother million migrants on top of millions of others.

The penny finally seems to have dropped amongst the public and the politicians. Immigration levels are wildly unsustainable. As Conservatives, we must hold our hands up and admit that many of the egregious decisions were made on our watch – something that Kemi Badenoch has been right to do.

We can’t get stuck in the weeds of the immigration debate. While our recent proposals on immigration were certainly a step in the right direction, we still have time in opposition to take the debate back to first principles. What do we seek to achieve with our immigration system? Who should we be letting in?

We need to debate these questions as a party and come to a consensus. Pitching the debate on principles will resonate better with the public, rather than on policy specifics like salary thresholds and spousal visas.

It can be tempting to try to condense this debate into just a number. David Cameron targeted immigration levels in the tens of thousands. Nigel Farage speaks about having a net figure of zero. This all seems arbitrary. I don’t think we should be fixated on a number, but on a system that works for British citizens and can be justified culturally and economically.

The easy part of the immigration equation is those who come illegally. Rishi Sunak was right: we need to stop the boats. Ideally, we would go back to the returns agreement we had with France, an option no longer on the table post-Brexit. We must make do with the Rwanda policy. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best option available – one Labour were wrong to reject.

Detractors got wrongly worked up about the policy. The point of it was not to send immigrants to Rwanda but to deter people from endangering themselves by crossing the Channel. Hysterical analysis of the policy on a ‘per immigrant sent to Rwanda’ basis missed the point.

What we were paying for was the deterrent effect. We don’t measure the effectiveness of Trident on a ‘per missile fired’ basis!

Without the policy, Labour is going to fail to curb illegal boat crossings. Last year, 36,816 migrants crossed the Channel – a 25 per cent increase on the previous year. At pre-Covid immigration levels, the number of people arriving this way would be staggeringly high. We must continue to hammer Labour if they fail to deal with this.

The debate becomes thornier when you move into the realms of legal migration. For many years, immigration was marketed as a positive trend: filling skill shortages, bolstering an ageing population, and bringing some cultural zest. While this may have been true when we had the finances to invest in public services, it has not been the case since the Financial Crisis in 2008.

Instead, immigration has become a zero-sum game as new arrivals compete for housing, school places, and hospital appointments = a situation that fosters resentment amongst our citizens, who have paid their dues and waited patiently. We can’t afford to offer public support without a contribution in return.

It is our dependence on low-skilled immigrant workers where hard decisions need to be made.

For too long, we have let organisations snack on the junk food of cheap immigrant labour rather than investing in healthier, more productive ways of working. It will be a painful structural shift, but it will also be the first step in closing the productivity gap we have with France and Germany.

We need to see a shift in mentality across the public and private sector. Businesses and organisations will not like it. There will be disruption, requiring them to innovate and adopt new technologies – or, whisper it quietly, perhaps even offer better working conditions.

Nowhere is this needed more urgently than the NHS or the social care sector. We have pilfered medical care professionals from countries with far fewer doctors and nurses per person for too long, rather than investing in our own workforce.

We cannot be cowed by the industries impacted. It was recently reported that the UK will need 25,000 more bricklayers if the Government is going to meet its target of building 1.5 million homes in this Parliament. This should be an opportunity to invest in skills and training, rather than an excuse to hand out more visas to migrant workers.

Our fellow citizens will need to play their part; 5.2 million people are claiming out-of-work benefits, a higher proportion than any of our European neighbours. We must be tougher and require these individuals to look for work. We need to offer them opportunities to remove themselves from the cycle of dependence.

I strongly believe our doors should be wide open for the best and brightest, whatever their country of origin. We want highly educated people to build the sectors of the future in artificial intelligence, biotech, and quantum computing; to entrepreneurs who contribute more than they take.

Our ideal migrant is a single person of working age, who is highly skilled and economically productive. If that individual is a refugee rather than an economic migrant, then even better. We can’t help everyone, so we must prioritise people who can contribute effectively to our society – a harsh truth, but no less true for that.

We cannot ignore social factors either. Migrants must speak English, share our values, and want to integrate. We have seen this working effectively with the Ukrainians and Hong Kongers who sought refuge here in recent years.

We have many reasons to be proud of our culture. Seeking a multiethnic country rather than a multicultural country is not unreasonable.

To achieve this, we must double down on the points-based system, set higher standards for admission, and introduce stricter language tests. The immigration policies that Badenoch announced in February are a great starting point, but we will need to go even further.

Each migrant should be evaluated on merit rather than ties to those here already. If migrants want to bring in a dependent, they must be in a position to support them without having to rely on state support.

The public sentiment is there for a sensible reformulation of our immigration policy. As Conservatives, we should lead the reframing. At the heart of it, to borrow JFK’s phrasing, should be this principle: it should not be about what our country can do for you, but what you can do for our country.

We should not be competing with Reform on a number, but on the underlying principles: an immigration system that focuses on quality, not quantity, and drives investment in our own workforce to boost productivity and economic growth.