Immigration Controls

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, I stand corrected. It is absolutely right that almost every contributor to this timely and important debate has mentioned the extraordinarily beneficial impact of immigration on this country. These islands are, in fact, a nation of immigrants. I sometimes think that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) is probably the only purely English Member of this House. If we think about what makes up our nation, it is clear that we have been refreshed by constant waves of immigration. However, despite—or, maybe, because—of this, we have never been able, at least during my brief time here, to discuss this subject objectively and sensibly; we seem to have squeezed ourselves into, as it were, a lobster pot of liberalism, whereby we are so anxious to avoid giving offence that we cannot realistically discuss it. One of the easiest things for Members to do in this House is to make a speech in defence of unlimited immigration to this country, and to talk about the great advantages of that, and always to play the race card in a way that is not normally thought of, as it is actually playing the racist card. We can easily make a speech that is something of a Southwark squirm, going on and on about the great advantages and simply refusing to accept that there are also profound differences and disagreements. The hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green)—who appears to have been temporarily deported from his place in the Chamber—made an extraordinarily interesting contribution, but he was wearing the fixed smile tinged with anxiety of the charity mugger as he was trying to make his case, because the point he was making sits ill with the reality of his party's actions when it was in power. I cannot be the only hon. Member who remembers that in 1997 people would come to advice surgeries who had done 14 years on student visas—14 years doing degree after degree, and constantly coming back and retraining. After 14 years, many of them were married and had children, and it would have been a vicious cruelty to have then forcibly removed them from this country. We have heard about legacy cases. There were people coming to my surgery in the late '90s and the beginning of this century who had been here for so long that they had almost forgotten where they came from, and these people were in many instances supported and subsidised by crooked solicitors and lawyers. If there is one thing we should do above all it is to continue in our examination of, and clamping down on, those blood-sucking leeches who take cash from the weakest and most vulnerable people by holding in front of them the false promise of British citizenship in exchange for a lump sum in cash. That was the reality then.