A new iron law of public policy debate seems to be emerging.
The more politicians proclaim the need for ‘honest conversations’ about immigration policy, the more likely that what follows will be spurious nonsense.
The New Labour Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge, has provided us with a fine example of the operation of this dictum in her advocacy of a ‘points-based’ route to welfare benefit entitlement, which would prolong the period of time before migrants became eligible for social security and tax credits.
According to the Daily Mail, Hodge believes that “only migrants who have made a fair contribution to society [should] get the same rights as local families.”
This, of course, is playing to the coarse, right wing gallery which she believes will be making the running at the forthcoming general election. Rather than taking the anti-immigrant lobby on, Hodge thinks it is a good idea to track rightwards in their direction, all, no doubt, in the interests of promoting an ‘honest conversation’.
Her proposal, as well as almost certainly being incapable of implementation because of the legal obligation to provide equality of treatment under social security rules to European migrants at least under EU directives, is a classic example of the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
The real issue that will need to be addressed by whatever government comes to power after the next election is not unsustainable levels of welfare support for migrants, but rather the increasing entrenchment of newcomers in sectors of the labour market where chronically low levels of pay and poor working conditions prevail.
Evidence of the emergence of a new migrant division of labour has been provided in a recently published book setting out the findings of a research team based at London’s Queen Mary College. Professor Jane Wills and her colleagues found that in notoriously low wages sectors like hospitality, care and contract cleaning the migrant component of the workforce was typically in the order of 60-70%.1 Further, a high proportion of these works had skills and vocational experience which fitted them for better paid employment.
So why weren’t they working in better paid jobs? According to Wills, a large part of the answer is actually bound up with the way the benefit system operates, withholding support from migrants for prolonged periods of time, forcing those lacking savings to accept whatever employment is available on unfavourable terms of remuneration, merely to meet the day-to-day costs of subsistence.
Bad luck for migrants maybe, but the system produces further adverse effects in that it contributes to the locking out of low skilled residents who do have access to benefits from being able to enter labour market at their skill level. To take work at the rates of pay migrants are obliged to accept, because they can’t get social funds to tide them over whilst they get into the better paid jobs, would mean a loss of income for many of these residents, as they subsistence level benefits were withdrawn.
Hard as it might be to get chicken-lily politicians to understand the point, but access to benefits for migrants at a reasonable point soon after their initial entry into the labour market would make a significant contribution to tackling the massive problem of the working poor – those millions of workers whose lives show no significant improvement on entering employment because of the low wages and terrible working conditions they endure.
Welfare benefits for migrants, alongside other low paid workers, would give hundreds of thousands the a degree more security in their working lives which, if combined with trade union membership and living wage campaigns, would provide the best base for challenging a whole sector of the labour market which offers only hardship and insecurity to its workforce.
Will Mrs Hodge ever grasp the fundamental truth of this proposition? Well, it all depends if we can ever get that that dear ‘honest conversation’ under way……
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1 Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Divisions of Labour, Jane Wills, Kavita Datta, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert, Jon May and Cathy McIlwaine, Pluto Press 2010.