Tom Jones is Councillor for Scotton and Lower Wensleydale and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot substack.
According to the Home Office, a record number have crossed the Channel this year. Over 4,500 have made the journey; that is already twice the total for the entirety of 2019 and half the total for the entirety of 2020. It sets the scene for numbers to far exceed last year’s total of nearly 30,000, with trafficking gangs likely rushing to move as many people as possible in a pre-Rwanda rush.
Criminal gangs are now making a staggering £150 million a year from the small boats trade. Yet, according to the Sentencing Council, sentences for immigration offences have declined across the board in the last ten years; less than 100 adult offenders were sentenced for assisting unlawful immigration last year.
This is less than half the number sentences in 2018, when Channel crossings first grabbed the headlines. Similarly, the number of adult offenders sentenced for possessing false identity documents and similar activities without improper intention stood at less than 200; around half of the number sentenced in 2018, and just a quarter of the number sentenced a decade ago.
These are not encouraging signs that the Government can deliver on its pledge to ‘stop the boats. A promise made, as Robert Jenrick put it, because “The public rightly demands and expects us to stop the boats.”
Even though these crossings only make up a small part of the wider immigration landscape, they act as a lightning rod for the public’s outrage at immigration policy. Their occupation of the centre stage is understandable; the public is rightly concerned that laws are being broken. But this is not only because they therefore have no control over who arrives on our shores, but because they instinctively understand this has downstream effects on the meaning of citizenship.
As I have previously written, societies are made cohesive by a shared understanding that members are expected – and willing – to bear both rights and responsibilities, owed both to citizens and to the national communal project – what postliberals frequently call ‘the common good.’
Our understanding of the obligations owed by and to citizens is made stronger by a common set of values, which act in the office of house rules – they create a framework of acceptable conduct in society within which a society can negotiate rights, responsibilities, and the nature of the common good with minimal friction.
But as immigration in Britain increased in the 1990s, a new belief — multiculturalism — would see those common values and assumptions eroded. The sheer scale of immigration meant that the idea of what it meant to be British, and the common culture and values that helped defined the national identity, was diluted.
Underpinning multiculturalism is the embrace of a multiplicity of cultures, all of equal value. But that necessitated a rejection of the common culture and history of Britain, not only so that it may apply to the maximum number of people possible but because the very notion of multiculturalism could not hold that British culture was the leading culture in its own country.
Our laissez-faire approach to immigration has been built on a foundational principle that makes no demands of new arrivals. As Johanna Möhring writes, “Multiculturalism neither encourages integration, for fear of upsetting cultural sensitivities, nor does much to foster social cohesion, as it leaves the host Society without a clear understanding of what it actually stands for.”
The common culture that serves as the framework of a cohesive society was eroded to assimilate immigrants with minimal friction. The problem is that these common values underpin not only our laws and welfare systems, but the acceptable behaviours governing society.
This is a problem. As David Goodhart argued in his famous essay Too Diverse?, modern liberal states have abandoned an understanding of citizenship based on ethnic lines (“people who look and talk like us”) for one based on values (“people who think and behave like us”).’
But people who get here by breaking the law do not behave like the majority of us. The public are rightly concerned that, if those crossing the channel are willing to disregard the law to get here, they may be equally willing to disregard the law after they arrive.
What makes the public even more uneasy about this situation is that they do not have the facts necessary to conduct a well-informed policy debate. Immigration control is impossible without the right data; this was following decisions by HMRC to stop publishing data on the amount of tax paid by nationality hadn’t been published, and by the Department for Work and Pensions to stop publishing data on welfare claims by nationality.
This ‘data desert’ is not confined to the fiscal and economic impacts of migration, however, but the societal impact too, with crime statistics by nationality and visa or asylum status not currently readily available. But without accurate and up-to-date data, it becomes exceedingly difficult to make well-informed policy decisions.
That is why Robert Jenrick’s amendment to the Justice and Crime Bill, mandating the reporting of statistics on the nationality and visa or asylum status of offenders, is a welcome step to watering this desert.
In other nations that collect and publish data of this kind- including Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France and Norway – it has proven both illuminating and beneficial for rational policy making. Data plays a crucial role in understanding and identifying trends and patterns that inform policy development, as well as public discussion. If we want a more informed debate about migration – and both immigration restrictionists and maximalists should agree that we do – we need more data, not less.
Imelda Marcos once said that ‘perception is real and truth is not.’ But perception is no way to make policy. Only by furnishing ourselves with the arms of certainty can we offer the British public the security of making well-informed and clear-sighted policy based, not on perception, but truth.
The post Tom Jones: If we want a more informed debate about migration, we need more data, not less appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Cllr Tom Jones
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