Immigration amnesty - 12 comments

Jon Rogers wants the trade union movement, through the TUC, to commit to supporting an amnesty for migrant workers, and cites the following principles, agreed at UNISON's conference:

1. That no worker should be classed as illegal.
2. All workers have a right to put a roof over their head and food on the table.
3. All workers should enjoy the same rights at work, including the right to organise a union.
4. It is not the workers who should be blamed, prosecuted and deported for working here without papers, it is the employers and gangmasters who make it possible. Only with an amnesty for the workers and a few company directors prosecuted will we see any improvement in this shameful situation.

(1), (2), (3), and the first half of (4) are pretty fundamental. I'm not entirely convinced about the need to convict company directors - without an employer who may profit by employing them, how could the migrant work? - unless that employer is exploiting the migrant's precarious position by making unreasonable demands, or offering conditions that only somebody who was in fear of the authorities could accept.

'Legitimising' workers benefits migrants, the government, and taxpayers too. Does it encourage more economic migration to the UK (you might expect so), or are the possibilities already so tempting that the elasticity of immigration levels with regard to 'leniency of approach' is likely to be particularly low for the UK? I don't have those figures.

To sum up, I would definitely support an amnesty of the sort proposed.

However, I'd much rather it was unnecessary and that we were able to lift all restrictions on migration (if only there wasn't those pesky social problems). After all, the whole point of amnesties is that they're irregular and infrequent, perhaps in reaction to exceptional events a government could not have predicted. Whatever the economic benefits, it would be undemocratic to claim to be following a policy intended to reduce some disfavoured type of immigration but to deliberately not carry the policy out - or only do so half-heartedly - and to use regular amnesties to express the government's real intentions. More honest would be to remove the illegality that cause immigrants to 'disappear' in the first place and apply any new benefits (as a whole, not merely social security) to all existing economic migrants, rather than go down the amnesty route, reasserting existing laws and restrictions, and only lifting them for those fortunate enough to be here now.