IMMIGRATION and immigrants have long been a proxy for race and racism in the terms of political debate in this country.

Whenever there is an upsurge of hostility to migrants this always leads to a rise in racist attacks, as we have seen recently.

These are officially sponsored by leading politicians as a distraction, whenever there is an economic crisis.

Of course, to fuel the anti-migrant campaign and rhetoric a series of bald-faced lies are repeated. The latest is the vile slur that migrants (and, by extension all black and Asian men) are likely sexual predators or paedophiles, or both.

The far right, many of whom are found to be perpetrators of domestic violence, claim they are protecting our women and children. The evidence suggests the opposite, that migrant men are somewhat less likely to be convicted of sexual offences than the British-born population.

Yet the campaign against migrants is not confined to the far right. Leaders of all three leading parties in the opinion polls have offered their support to the protesters outside asylum-seeker accommodation, have repeated many of their false claims and argued that their grievances, expressed violently against migrants, are legitimate.

The leader of the Labour Party Keir Starmer may now regret his remarks on becoming “an island of strangers,” because of the pushback he experienced, and the fact that Labour lost even more ground in the polls. But there has been no apology for also suggesting, in the same speech, that immigration is an “uncontrolled experiment” that must now end. In a similar vein the would-be leader of the Tory Party Robert Jenrick now says he wants to see a period of net emigration.

In both cases, there is a clear implication that immigration is the key problem for society and that they will fix it. You would never know from these statements that it is their parties which have been in office while all of this maniacal experimenting took place. Jenrick was even the immigration minister under Rishi Sunak.

This begins to reveal the startling level of hypocrisy that underpins this entirely fake set of policies.

Starmer himself even alluded to it in the same speech: “Between 2019 and 2023, even as they were going around our country telling people, with a straight face, they would get immigration down, net migration quadrupled.”

This is quite true. But this means that it is the government most recently in power, with some of the same characters in place, who caused the surge in immigration. And, this hypocrisy stretches back far longer than 2019.

This policy was never criticised by the Prime Minister when he was leader of the opposition. Both the main traditional parties adopted policies which led to the rise in immigration numbers which they now complain about.

Unsurprisingly, they cannot make any inroads against Farage when he spouts his anti-immigration rubbish.

So, now we have the farcical situation where it is claimed that migrants are taking jobs, housing, NHS space and even, God forbid, taking our women. Yet the main sectors that are getting clobbered are international students and care workers, though no-one can bring themselves to claim they are responsible for all these ills.

On the contrary, it is widely understood that students bring in enormous amounts of revenue, about £42 billion last year according to Universities UK, which pays for an awful lot of welfare and other benefits.

At the same time, care workers are playing a vital role in looking after our sick, vulnerable and elderly, usually at wages that most British people will not. The politicians who have targeted them have no intention of doubling care workers’ wages or training the workers here to replace them.

The main architects of Brexit always implicitly argued that ending freedom of movement within the EU would be a key benefit. Sometimes the claim was made explicitly.  

Yet prior to Brexit the annual average level of net migration varied between 200,000 and 300,000 people a year. In 2023 net migration was over 900,000.

This is not an act of God, or some unforeseen consequence. It is government policy. As some of us argued at the time freedom of movement was being replaced with a points-based system of immigration.

These are always permissive systems, which essentially allows everyone who meets the given criteria to come. As predicted, the number of migrants soared.

What changed was the status of those workers. Under freedom of movement they had full rights as EU citizens. Under a points-based system a worker’s right to remain in the country is tied to their job. They have no rights as citizens. As such, they are prey to all unscrupulous employers.

They have little resistance to any increased exploitation. The aim is to create a US-style, under-unionised and docile workforce.

That was a political choice. But there is a looming demographic trend which will have seismic consequences for all Western economies, including Britain. In effect, we are living longer and choosing to have far fewer children.

Naturally, with varying assumptions about the birth rate in particular, there are varying official projections about the scale of this issue. But all are agreed that the resident population is set to decline because the death rate exceeds the birth rate and, simultaneously, this population will age rapidly as people on average live longer.

Without moderately high levels of net immigration, this would soon lead to a significantly smaller workforce, and a much larger dependency rate, as people age. Without some other dramatic change in the economy this is a recipe for much lower living standards.

Some on the right internationally have already registered these trends and there is a new virulence in their opposition to a woman’s right to choose, alongside their visceral opposition to immigration.

Forcing women to have children is never going to work, no matter how much the anti-choice lobby tries to forcibly prevent a woman’s right to choose. The choice will be reduced to poverty and low immigration, or higher immigration and prosperity.

Jenrick reveals himself as the worst type of politician; an intelligent man pursuing utterly stupid ideas. His aim on net emigration would see the brightest and best leave.  

But all the politicians who now agreed on the “failed experiment” of migration are deluding themselves or the public, or both.

They fooled the public once with the false promise to bring down or eliminate immigration and are now attempting to do it again. All of it is based on the big lie that immigration reduces prosperity, when the opposite is the case.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Follow her on X @HackneyAbbott.