The Numbers Game

Is there no more room in Britain?

BBC Radio 4's Analysis: The Numbers Game was broadcast on Thursday, 24 July, 2003 at 20:30 BST.

Refugees and other migrants are accused of "swamping" European culture.

But refugees are not just nameless statistics or a flood. They are individual human beings with mothers and fathers, children, husbands and wives.

So is it just thin-lipped meanness to believe that Britain is full? Is there really no case to be made in defence of maintaining the boundaries of a given national entity and attempting to control the rate of ethnic change?

By the same token, raising the walls higher and higher seems to have little effect on the number of people coming in.

The argument goes that no solution is possible without a harmonised European asylum policy. This was agreed at the EU summit in Finland in 1999 but since then, progress has been painfully slow. But if "Fortress UK" doesn't work, why should "Fortress Europe"?

And there's the moral argument: Isn't it incumbent on one of the richest countries of the world to accept our international responsibilities and to organise a credible, fair and humane asylum system?

Economic migrants

You cannot have a credible asylum system without a credible immigration policy as a whole. Some critics argue that, even now, far more people enter the country with work permits than do as asylum seekers.

Perhaps we do need both skilled and unskilled economic migrants- particularly as the ratio of the working to non-working population declines.

Yet if the UK has a treaty - if not a moral obligation - to take all-comers, then their skills are irrelevant.

Shouldn't the causes of migration get more attention so that those who oppose migration are prepared, for example, to pay a higher proportion of GDP in aid to migrant-supplying countries, and perhaps even approve of interventions - including military ones - which might prevent or stop conflicts that give rise to displacement?

And aren't those who welcome migration implicit individualists, insofar as they place the welfare of individuals and their dependents above the welfare of the society to which they might have made a contribution if they had stayed put?

While asylum and migration continue to be loudly and hotly debated, the argument seems to have been mealy-mouthed, as ministers and their critics on left and right decline to be precise about either principles or numbers.

David Walker asks why both the public and policy-makers have allowed fundamental questions of rights, identity and collective choice to be obfuscated.

Presenter: David Walker
Producer: Ingrid Hassler
Editor: Nicola Meyrick