immigration is not the problem
on Labour, Britain's borders, and the politics of blame
The Overton window for pro-immigration rhetoric in Britain has never been wide. The acceptable range of opinions has always leaned more restrictive than expansive, shaped by decades of quiet scepticism and louder hostility. But something more dangerous is happening now. What was once marginal is being mainstreamed. Language previously confined to far-right message boards and National Front flyers has crept into public debate. The word “remigration” has returned. A concept that implies not just stopping migration, but reversing it. A fantasy rooted in racial exclusion. A threat dressed up as policy.
This is not new, exactly. In the 1970s and 1980s, British neo-Nazi groups made their demands clear. They marched through Lewisham and Southall and Brick Lane, shouting for Britain to be “white again.” They didn’t win elections, but they shaped fear. And the centre bent towards that fear. Today’s version is slicker, more plausibly deniable. But the logic holds. The same old song, just sung in different tones.
Labour won the 2024 general election with a large majority. It ran on a promise of competence, on stability, on rebuilding. But since the election, the party has become visibly nervous about Reform UK. In parts of the country Labour used to call home, Reform has gained real ground. They speak directly to disaffection. They offer an answer, however crude, to people who feel ignored. And they’ve made immigration the proxy for every other kind of loss. Loss of control, loss of identity, loss of security.
Faced with that rise, Labour has responded by trying to triangulate. It has launched campaigns that feel like they belong to a different party. It has aired ads about foreign offenders and made pledges about “cracking down” on asylum. It has moved to prove it is “not soft.” Not naive. In doing so, it has absorbed some of the terms of the debate without questioning the frame.
I am pro-immigration. Not uncritically. Not dogmatically. But simply because the evidence is there, and so is the moral principle. Migrants do pay more in tax than they receive in benefits. Most immigrants, frequently demonised as drains on the state, have 'No Recourse to Public Funds' attached to their immigration status, meaning they are excluded from most benefits and social housing. On top of that, they pay an NHS surcharge every year they live here— £1,035 a year upfront for the privilege of using the health service they already help to staff and fund.
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that higher net migration in recent years has directly improved the UK’s fiscal outlook, helping to reduce debt as a share of GDP. A 2022 Home Office study showed that migrants make net positive contributions across income groups, with EEA migrants contributing an average of £4,400 more per year than they receive in services.
They also fill jobs where vacancies are high and recruitment is low. According to the ONS, sectors with persistent labour shortages include health, hospitality, agriculture, and social care, all of which rely heavily on migrant workers. These are not jobs being taken from others. They are jobs unfilled, by an increasingly stagnant domestic labour market.
They support essential services. They are not the reason hospitals are full or housing is scarce. That’s the product of British policy decisions, not migration. This is especially clear when it comes to the so-called hotel crisis. Thousands of asylum seekers are currently being housed in hotels at significant cost, in conditions few would choose to live in. It’s treated as a failure of immigration control. But it’s not. It’s a failure of government planning.
In 2012, the provision of asylum accommodation was privatised under the COMPASS contracts (short for Commercial and Operating Managers Procuring Asylum Support) transferring responsibilities to private companies such as Serco, G4S, and Clearsprings. This move was intended to reduce costs but, instead, as is the case for many of the services we have farmed out to these and similar providers, it has led to substandard housing conditions and a lack of accountability.
Since asylum accommodation was privatised, the system has prioritised profit, over care and over communities. The first study on it's impacts, from researchers at the University of Manchester in 2016, called it fragmented, neglectful, and built without plans for integration and accountability. With profit a priority, the cheapest homes were used because the brought in the greatest margin. And those homes were often in the most deprived areas of the country.
Despite this, in 2019 the government doubled down, awarding £4 billion worth of ten-year contracts to Serco, Mears and Clearsprings. There was talk of reform, but the reality on the ground changed very little. As the housing crisis worsened, those firms turned to hotels; unsuitable for long term stays, damaging for mental health, contentious for communities. And while people wait in those hotels, cut off from work, from family, from any sense of normal life; the firms running the show continue to post healthy profits. Serco reported £180 million in profit in 2019. Mears cleared £4.8 million in just half of 2020. Clearsprings’ operating profit rose from just under £800,000 to £4.4 million in a single year.
The conditions are inhumane. The model is extractive. And while the contractors carry out the day-to-day work, it’s the government that set the rules. It’s the state that allowed suffering to be monetised. And it’s the state that has the power to stop it.
The backlog in asylum processing has exploded. There aren’t enough caseworkers, enough legal pathways, or enough accommodation. The system is deliberately slow and under-resourced. Then the government uses that crisis, one of its own making, as a reason to tighten borders further. It’s policy as provocation.
There are real pressures. On housing. On schools. On healthcare. But those pressures predate current migration levels and won’t be solved by cutting numbers. Blaming immigrants for long-term disinvestment is not just inaccurate. It’s convenient. It moves responsibility away from those who made the cuts and onto people who had no power over them.
The moral case still matters. People fleeing war or persecution have a right to be treated with dignity. But that case alone won’t shift the debate. The community case has to be made, too. Most of us live immigration every day, whether we name it or not. Our neighbourhoods reflect it. Our workplaces rely on it. It isn’t always easy. No process of change is. But the idea that immigration only brings strain is as lazy as it is false. It also brings renewal, resilience, connection. Migration replenishes communities that might otherwise shrink. It keeps local schools open. It revives high streets with new businesses and new energy. It brings workers into care homes and hospitals, where staffing gaps would otherwise mean closures. It builds social bonds across difference, between neighbours, classmates, colleagues.
It’s not just about economic value, but about human presence: people investing in places, raising children, starting lives. Migration has always done this. Britain has always been changed by the people who arrive and stay. It always has.
Labour cannot win this argument by conceding it. It cannot out-Reform Reform. It cannot drift into a managed decline of principle. If it wants to lead, it has to reframe the terms. That means refusing to play the numbers game. It means investing in the things that make migration work for everyone: housing, services, integration. And it means rejecting the reflex to demonise migrants for problems they did not cause, while continuing to pursue immigration policy grounded in need and fairness.
You don’t beat cynicism with mimicry. You beat it with clarity. And if Labour wants to be more than a caretaker government, it has to believe in something. Immigration is not a threat to be contained. It is a feature of modern Britain. It can be managed well or poorly. But the people arriving are not the problem. The problem is pretending they are.
Labour MPs like Jonathan Hinder are wrong when they imply that the answer to Reforms dominance on the public question of immigration is for the Labour Party to move to occupy their position alongside them. The problem isn’t, as some on the Left would suggest, that people don’t like change. The problem is that Reform has successfully pointed to change that has negatively impacted peoples lives (the decline of towns, jobs, training programmes, systemic underinvestment in housing and infrastructure), and convinced people that this has happened as a result of another parallel change (immigration).
Adopting Reforms position on immigration will do nothing for Labour, because it won’t solve the problems that created the environment that allowed Reform to credibly occupy that position to begin with. If every deportation flight and denied visa Reform had ever proposed was enacted, we would still be left with a crumbling state, a shortage of affordable housing, and an austerity ridden infrastructure that will never serve people or communities across this country without suitable investment.
Immigration, in this context, is not just a policy debate. It’s a distraction technique. A ball lobbed into the air by politicians who hope you'll chase it, barking all the way, while they remain standing comfortably in front of the real issue: decades of underinvestment. In public services, in housing, in infrastructure, in the state itself. They shout about numbers and borders and boats while making no real plan to fix the waiting lists or rebuild the schools or staff the care homes. It’s not about control. It’s about misdirection. And you are not a dog. So don’t follow the ball.