 Hello everybody, welcome to the Cambridge Festival of Ideas and to a dividing issue, the immigration debate in context. It's brilliant to see so many people here and I think this is testament to the importance of the topic of immigration as a political and a social issue in Britain today. I also think that the interest in events like this are perhaps reflective of the way in which people feel the topic isn't treated with as one of the most important issues. Cyngor i ei modio'r llymau sydd tynedaeth, oedd yma ymddiannau hynny'r llymau ond iawn. Mae'n edrych am gyflawni yn sicr mewn holl gŷnoddd ar gyfer o gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio a'r pethau yn bawaith, gydag o'r holl whiskr. Byddlawnau hynn defnyddio cyflym y panel yr ysgolol a fwyliadau i gydag, eu ffyrwyr mwyliadau, mae'n ffyrwyr ar gweithio, Maen nhw'r y tro yn y dal i ddechrau. Rwy'n symud o symud o fyrl amser. Felly wrth fe, dyfodd o'n mynd i fynd, maen nhw'n gofynu hwnna. Mae'r reddloch i'r meddwl o'r ddafod, os i ddweud hynny o godiwg. Rwy'n ei wneud gweithio'r panellad â'r ddweud o'r ddisgwysbyn gyda'r ffordd a'r ddechrau'r CEO Lorraine Gellethawr o chi gweithio'r ffrindio'r cesiad. dweud y panell yn y moment, ond dwi'n dechrau'n gweithio'n cyffredinol i'r prifesor cyfnodol yn gyfliadau cyfnodol yn y Cymru. Rwy'r cyfnodol y dyfodol ar y Cyfnodol, gyfnodol yn gyfliadau cyfnodol, ac rwy'n cyfrwyno'n gyfliadau'n cyfaith y Cymru, a'r cyfnodol yn y cynwylliant cyfnodol rydyn ni'n gweithio'n cyfnodol i'r cyfrwyno cyfnodol yn cyfliadau cyfnodol. Finally, she's also a member of the University General Board on Education, Equality and Diversity. So, without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Professor Gellthorpe who will introduce the panellists. Thank you very much. Well, thank you so much to Ed Anderson for organising this event and thank you for coming to this Festival of Ideas seminar. Mae'r cyfrifio ymddiwedd yn bwysig i gael y llunio'r llunio'n gwaith. David Goodhart, Michael Kitson, Habib Raman a Sarah Fein, ddweud hyn yn ddweud ychydig yn gwneud. Yn oed, Edd Anderson yn dweud, mae'n gwneud ymddiwedd yma o'r hyn o'r cyfrifio'r ysgolwyddau yn ymddir iawn. Ac mae'r cyfnod o'r gweithio sy'n cyd-oedd y bydd o'r byd yn ymgyrch. Mae'n gwybod mewn tendensiol ydych yn dod i gyd ar y cyfnod ffordd yng nghymru ar y gwbl yn gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio'r cyfrifiadau i gyd yn y gwaith ei fod yn gweithio ar y gweithio ar y gwaith. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Ond we also need to think about the feminisation of patterns of migrants. Significance of women in current migration flows. We also need to think about politicisation, in its impact on domestic politics and prominence in bilateral and international agreements. ac we also need to think about transition, where countries of emigration become countries of immigration. So societies now look very different from those with which older generations grew up. There are many questions in relation to policy implications of changes, state capacity, regulation, rights, the right or not to regulate, the impact of the rules on those people who migrate to the UK, their involvement in the labour market, impact on public services and relationships with existing residents. Well, as Ed has mentioned, we're delighted to tell you that with a grant from the Vice Chancellor's Endowment Fund, the University of Cambridge will be launching a network, a Cambridge Migration Research Network in the new year, bringing together wide-ranging research interests and activities from across the university. Education, criminology, politics, economics, land economy, sociology and indeed history and archaeology, thinking about the historical roots of patterns of migration too. But let me move on. The plan is that each of our speakers will speak for between 10 and 15 minutes, one after the other. There will then be a short time for them to ask each other questions and then we'll open things up for more general discussion for a short question and answer session. Short questions, short answers, that's what I mean by a short question and answer session. Finally, I think our speakers hopefully will each give us one point, one takeaway point, an observation or a question for us to take away and chew on. So, I should just say also that there are so many people who wanted to come to this event but were unable to do so with the kind permission of the speakers. We are video recording the event and I mention it now just in case you forget when it comes to the question and answer session. So, let me introduce the speakers and the order of the speakers will be David, Michael, Habib and then Sarah. David Goodheart, a British journalist, commentator, author and director of the influential think tank, Demos, founder and former editor of Prospect magazine. Very importantly, David recently published The British Dream, successes and failures of post-war immigration. Michael Kitson, at the other end, is an economist at the Judge Business School in Cambridge, senior lecturer in international macroeconomics, director of the Management Tripos, hub director of the UK Innovation Research Centre and assistant director of the Centers for Business Research as well. Habib Rahman, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants causes an important national charity which exists to campaign for justice in immigration, nationality and refugee law and policy. Then Sarah Fine, who is a lecturer in moral and political philosophy at King's College London. Sarah is no stranger to Cambridge. Dr Fine did her undergraduate degree at Cambridge before going to the other place, shall we say, for further graduate study but then came back to Cambridge as a research fellow at Corpus Christi College. Again, importantly, she has a new book coming out, not quite out, but it will be out in the mid 2014, so it's not too early to put your pre-orders in and the book is called Immigration and the Right to Exclude. But without further ado, let us welcome David Goodheart as our first speaker. Well, thanks very much everybody. Can you hear me alright? I'm not quite sure which microphone is operative but you can hear me at the back, can you? Good. Thanks very much for that introduction. I don't want to disappoint everybody who's come here for this debate today, but I have to inform you that the debate about immigration in Britain is effectively over. It's been over now probably for five years or so. It's over in the sense that there is an overwhelming majority, 75, 80% of British voters who think that immigration in the last 10 or 15 years has been either too high or very much too high. There is not a single political party who it is imaginable would return to the sorts of policies that led to the very large increase in immigration after 1997. As you know, the coalition government or rather the conservative part of the coalition government has a policy of trying to reduce net immigration back down to the high tens of thousands and the Labour Party has quietly maneuvered itself into a position that is not really that different from the Tories. Having said that, I think it's also fair to say that only troglodytes are really against immigration per se, although I did say this at a recent debate and Peter Hitchens who was on the panel said I'm a troglodyte actually. No one is against immigration completely any longer if they ever were and no one's really debating any longer whether it's a good or a bad thing. The debate is about levels, it's about who comes and it's about the effect on the existing population, who benefits from it, who is advantaged, who is disadvantaged. In the course of writing the book The British Dream I spent quite a lot of time working my way through all of the economics of contemporary immigration and oddly enough you work through all the papers and all the books and at the end the conclusion is it doesn't actually make very much difference. It's perhaps marginally beneficial overall, certainly somewhat more beneficial for the more affluent, for employers, for obvious reasons, and somewhat disadvantageous to people at the bottom in terms of downward pressure on wages, competition for scarce public resources, particularly when immigration increases very rapidly and the system doesn't have time to respond. In terms of extra schools, hospitals and so on. I think that probably somewhat underestimates the disadvantage for the resident population at the bottom. It's partly because a lot of people are not captured through self-employment, a lot of East Europeans who came were self-employed and were not captured in the figures. But if you consider the fact that 20% of people doing low-skilled jobs in Britain were born outside the UK, I think it sort of gives you some sense of just how much downward pressure there is. Particularly as most of the people coming are people with much lower wage expectations, even if they're coming from Eastern Europe. The A8 countries when they joined in 2004 had average per capita income about a quarter of the rest of the EU average. I think it also very large-scale inflows tends to perpetuate, tends to exacerbate many of the economic problems of Britain, which as you all well know, short-termism, lack of training. The creation that we've particularly seen in the last generation of a very long tale of low-skill, low-productivity service sector jobs. We have in effect a kind of hourglass labour market in Britain, about 40% very productive, mainly highly skilled and reasonably well-paid jobs at the top. A few jobs in the middle and about eight or nine million very poorly paid, usually not much above minimum wage service sector jobs. So, as I say, economically I think it's been a pretty mixed picture with disadvantage at the bottom, some advantage perhaps overall. Culturally and socially it's again a very mixed story I think. The inflows of people from other countries and other cultures obviously brings variety and dynamism in all sorts of ways, not just economically. But as we also know, there's been polarisation, parallel lives in many parts of the country, particularly the northern Midlands. We have imported multi-generational poverty into some of our cities and there are significant gaps in value and lifestyle that are sometimes hard to bridge, particularly with people who come from very traditional South Asian cultures. I mean if you look at speed and scale is really what matters, it's what turns something that can be very advantageous to society into something that is much less advantageous. I think certainly if immigration continues on the same sort of scale and speed that we had in the 10 or 15 years up to 2010. I mean just a couple of snippets, there are 10 borers in London where half of the population changes every five years. Now that won't only be because of immigration but immigration will be a significant factor in that. Now that degree of churn I think is not something that most people feel comfortable with, at least not at certain periods in their lives. Perhaps periods when you're in your 20s and single when living in a place with high churn doesn't matter to you. But if you're either very young or bringing up a family or very old people value stability and continuity. And the picture overall I think has probably changed too fast for most people's comfort in Britain. The ethnic minority population of Britain in the mid 90s was about 7%. The figure for England and Wales anyway in 2009-10 was 20%. That is a very, very big change over a short period of time. So I think as I say, I think it's a pretty mixed picture. I think most people, both politicians and voters think that it was too many people too quickly. And they are now struggling to adjust to return to the sort of more moderate levels of net immigration we had in the early mid 90s. Which is true, maybe harder in a world where there is more movement. Although I think that is often exaggerated. I think there are about 200 million people, about 3% of the world's population live outside the countries they were born in. And that figure has remained more or less the same. Or rather the figure has gone up but the percentages remained the same because the world's population has risen. There has been a significant increase in inflows into richer countries in recent years. But there is, as I say, this political consensus now that will probably slow that process down. I do think the debate has become more reasonable and more mature actually in recent years. I speak from some personal experience. I got into this whole debate rather by accident in 2004 when I wrote an essay in the magazine. I then edited Prospect called Two Diverse Question Mark, which is about what I call the progressive dilemma. The tension between the two of the left's great values of solidarity on the one hand and diversity on the other. And the extent to which the two were to some extent in tension. The essay was reprinted in the Guardian, caused a mighty outcry. I was accused of being a nice racist, a liberal racist, various other things like that. One of those phrases actually came from Trevor Phillips who has subsequently become a friend and endorsed my book on the front cover, which is very nice of him. But I do think that we can now, perhaps in a way that we couldn't even ten years ago, we can separate arguments about racial justice, which continue and are important from arguments about the economic and social effects of large scale immigration. One reason we're able to do that is that much of the recent immigration has been white people from Eastern Europe. But I do also think it has something to do with the fact that levels of racism have fallen dramatically in the last 20, 25 years, the last generation really. I think it's also easier now to talk about the relative success and relative failure of different minority groups other than simply in terms of the racism of British society. Again, Trevor has been quite significant in this at the Equalities Commission, the research he's produced on the very thorough research on the employment, educational and employment outcomes for Britain's minority population. If you look at that data, it's quite hard not to see Britain as a pretty open society these days. Probably most established minorities in Britain, the average outcome is now better than the white average, certainly for Hindu Indians, Sikh Indians, many black Africans, Chinese, it goes without saying. There are some groups that still hang behind the white average, but many of them even are catching up Bangladeshis for example. So, as I say, I think the debate has become more mature. I think if I was asked sort of what are the two things that we should do, given the current situation, my proposals would be in order to get the most out of immigration from the point of view of the existing population, which is really the only reasonable measure, which is not to say we don't have obligations to people when they become refugees and so on, although those numbers these days are very small. But what I think we need to think about is how we can create a real Rolls-Royce immigration bureaucracy which can create the balance that we want, which is actually to bear down on the very high levels of permanent immigration we've had in recent years, bear down on permanent residents, bring it back down to around 100,000 or a bit below as the government wants, while allowing the kind of short-term movements that this university and other places benefit from the students, the short-term skilled workers and so on. Now, it shouldn't be that hard to do that, but our immigration at the moment does struggle. One of the reasons it struggles is that so little money is spent on it, the border's element of the home office has a revenue of £1.7 billion a year. That's less than 0.3% of total public spending, which is ludicrous given how important this issue is, so that would be my one proposal. My other proposal is that we do have to, and we're doing some work on this at my think tank demos, we do have to think more carefully and realistically about the issues of integration and segregation. I think people are far more, people are completely tolerant, I think, of immigration, so long as they don't think it's damaging their economic interests, and so long as the people that come mix in with the society and become part of modern Britain. Many people of course do do that, and there is many examples of very successful mixing. We have a very large mixed race population now, more than 1.2 million people, evidence of the most fundamental mixing of all. But we do have those parallel lives in many places, including in London, which likes to think of itself as a very successful multi-ethnic city, and is to some extent, but it has some boroughs where the parallel lives are almost as extreme as in the mill towns. Just to leave you with one, I think, slightly worrying stat, a guy called Eric Kaufman who's doing some work for us at Demars, he's a Birkbeck academic who's done a ward analysis of the 2011 census, and he has discovered that 45% of minority Britons now live in wards where the white British population is less than half of the population, in some cases much less than half of the population in those wards. Now that in itself may be a slightly meaningly stat, but as recently as the previous census in 2001, the figure was only 25%. So that does not suggest that we are becoming a happily integrated society, so I think we should think about that and worry about that, worry about white exit wise, at what point do white people in out of London boroughs think that this place no longer sort of reflects me and move out? We need a sort of unsqueamish and honest debate about these things. Anyway, I will stop there. I think I've just gone over my 10 minutes. Thank you very much. The debate is not over. Let me start with a very simple question. It's actually a very simple question, but it has a very difficult answer to it. I mean, how British are you? It's very difficult, I think, to define what Britishness is and whether we are British. But thanks to the UK government, we have a citizenship test which tells us how British we are. I'll just give you three questions from this test, and you can see and evaluate how British you really are. This is just three of the questions and remember your answers. In which year did married women get the right to divorce their husband? Was it 1837, 1857 or 1875? Remember your answer. Question number two, the number of children and young people in the UK up to the age of 19 is 13 million, 14 million, 15 million. Again, remember your answer. Very important. Question three, the percentage of people in the UK in 2001 who said they were Muslim. 1.6%, 2.7%, 3.4%. Again, remember your answer. We'll come back to that. Apparently, we have maturity in our debate. I think we have mass immigration mania. We have mass immigration malice in many aspects of the debate in the UK today. Just take a look at some of what the popular press are telling us. The true toll of mass immigration in UK life, official, it's not official, about how everything is under strain into the schools, police, NHS and housing. They've stolen all our jobs. They've come over here, they've taken all our benefits and stolen our jobs, which is very difficult to do at the same time. Quite amazing. So what's the response? We must stop this immigrant invasion. Britain must ban migrants. This is not a mature debate. Much of the debate doesn't seem to be polluted by evidence. The propaganda is there, but the evidence is very rarely discussed. It may be discussed in prospect, but many more people read the Daily Express and the Daily Mail than read Prospect magazine, which perhaps is unfortunate. Let's have a look at some of the evidence. It's bear in mind that mass immigration mania has been for the past 15 or 20 years. But let's look at some of the recent evidence. This is recent evidence from the Office of National Statistics. This is UK international migration from 2002 to 2012. So the pink line is immigration and the blue line is immigration. So there is a difference. We have more immigrants than immigrants. So this green line here gives you the so-called net immigration into the UK. It's substantial. It's around about 200,000. This is annual rolling data. So it's telling us around about 200,000 people are coming into the country more than going out. But an important question to ask is who are they? Not where they come from, but particularly what do they do when they get here? This is the evidence of the reasons for immigration from 2012. The red line, people are coming in here to work. The other one, the blue line, people are coming in here for education. And actually the blue line has been more substantial in the red line for the past few years. Many of the people coming into the UK are coming in as students. The vast majority are going to universities like this one. Look at the orders of magnitude here. Around about 200,000 to 250,000 are coming in as students. Remember our net migration is around about 200,000. Many are coming in as students. They're coming in because we had world-class universities. They're coming in not actually because we're educating the world, we're educating the world's rich because you've got to pay a lot of money to be educated now in the UK. If you take a university such as a London School of Economics, 75% almost of the students are from overseas. What does this mean in economic terms? In economic terms it's a massive boost to UK exports. That's what people are coming in for our education. It's one of the few things we can export now. So when we actually look at the ivory towers of the UK, we need to bear in mind that they are a massive export industry. The estimate is £17.5 billion is coming into the UK through our universities in terms of overseas students. Really this is a massive export boost which is usually missed, I may add, on the economics of immigration data. If we look at the economics of immigration, it does increase our trade performance. We don't sell very much to the rest of the world. We are very good at importing, not very good at exporting. One of our great exports is our education sector. It also stimulates innovation. The most innovative places around the world are places which embrace and capture diversity, be it Silicon Valley in the United States, Route 128 round Boston, if you go to places like Toronto in North America, if you go to places like Randstadt in the Netherlands, if you come to places like Cambridge. Diversity stimulates innovation and innovation stimulates growth. Overall immigration stimulates GDP, GDP per person. It stimulates productivity, it stimulates economic growth. Not only through the standard metrics of labour supply, they are more educated workers and more skilled workers, but also through innovation and its impact on trade performance. Of course now our public focus is when we are blaming everybody for our current predicaments. How do we deal with austerity? How do we deal with public debt? Of course immigration actually improves the public finances. We hear all this thing about benefit tourism and so on, but actually immigrants are more likely to pay taxes than draw revenues in terms of benefits. Because of the structure, they come here, they work, they pay their taxes in most cases, and they generate very few in terms of revenues. Just to look at this, and I apologise this will be the last graph, this is public sector debt, net debt and migration. It's from the Office of Budget Responsibility, not some left-wing think tank. This is the organisation established by the government to look at its fiscal position. What you have on this side over here is the percentage debt of GDP, which you're very concerned about, it's 80% in terms of GDP. What happens if we have no migration? Nobody going in and nobody coming out. Then it comes up to here in about 50 years times about 180% of GDP, because migrants are actually contributing to the public finances because of paying taxes. What would a high immigration strategy do? It would actually reduce slightly public debt. Chrisley, what immigration is important for our economic performance? If it's important for our economic performance, why do we seem to have this blame culture? Really, I think there are two aspects of the blame culture. One, this so-called mature debate is a massive perception gap. It's a perception gap about who the migrants are. The second point is, although immigrants contribute to economic growth, when times are getting hard, when we have economic problems, we blame immigrants. It's the paradox. They contribute to economic growth, but when we have unemployment and recession, which has nothing to do with immigration, then we target them for blame. That previous graph wasn't the last graph. This is the last graph. I'm sorry I'm an applied economist. I'd rely on numbers, Rodden, anecdotes. This is imagined immigration. This is from Scott Blinder. It's not my work. Scott Blinder published in political studies in 2013. Basically, the line on the left, the darker line, is what people perceive the immigrants are. The reality is the light grayer one. The basic story is many people perceive all these immigrants are asylum seekers. There are very few asylum seekers. What most of them are coming here is to study, as I said before, but that's one of the lowest group that's perceived. There's a perception gap. They are here for education and work, not for asylum. The other aspect is that when times are going tough, we blame immigrants for our economic ills. We saw this in the 1930s, we saw it in the 1970s, and we saw it now. When we have the problems of recession, when we have the problems of high unemployment, we blame others. We blame immigrants, we blame the poor, we blame now welfare seekers and so on. Let's take three episodes. The 1930s. A period of mass unemployment. We saw a great recession from the 1929. It persisted through the 30s. We saw massive unemployment. What did we see? We saw a rise, a fascism in the UK. We saw a rise of antisemitism. We blamed others. This was Oswald Molesley in the black shirts during the 1930s. Again, an antisemitic fascist organisation. That it was taking the opportunity of unemployment and recession to peddle its evil ways. What was a daily mail saying about that in the 1930s? Hurrah for the black shirts was Vaikat Rothermere's headline. That's a daily mail from the 1930s. You cannot read the opening paragraph, but I find it ironic if not painful. The opening paragraph. Because fascism comes from Italy, short-sighted people in this country think they show a sturdy national spirit by deriding it. So we weren't open-minded to ideas from abroad according to the daily mail then, because we weren't embracing fascism. Again, in the 1970s, we had the period of stagflation. Rising unemployment, rising inflation. Again, the three-day week economic problems. What did we do? Again, a lot of it was to blame others. We saw the rise of the national front. We had arguments with power for PM. We saw the focus being on Afro-Caribbeans and to some extent the Irish because of the troubles. Again, the blame others culture. What do we have now? Again, now we have a recession. We have austerity. We have the worst economic recovery in over 100 years. And now, this so-called debate, this recent maturity and finish, we're blaming others. We're blaming others for the problem. They didn't cause the problem, but we're blaming others. We have this focus on illegal immigrants. We have the rise of UKIP. We have the rise of hatred throughout. Again, the focus now on Muslims as our focus of attention. Again, increasing hatred in response to an economic crisis. Again, fuelled by this mass media. Particularly the Express, the Mail and others are focusing on immigration as a cause of all our problems. And when we move away from the economics, we sometimes say, well, there may be some economic benefits. There may be only modest, but of course they are damaging our society. They are damaging culture. In fact, what we see is that immigration has contributed an awful lot throughout the world to other cultures and also including to the UK. If we look at the UK, what's now the national dish of the United Kingdom? It's chicken tikka masala. Who is one of our favourite athletes, Mo Farrah from Somalia? Okay, look at our businesses. Marks and Spencer's, Michael Marks came in from Belarus to establish one of those establishments that is very well known in terms of Britain. And if you look at the popular press now, who's going to save the British football team? Well, this man, Adnanam Janazar, you might not know him. Okay, he's Belgian. His parents are from Kosovo and Albania. And he plays in Manchester for a team owned by Americans. And he's going to save us from the state of our British football team in the future. And even when you look at the institutions throughout the United Kingdom that often underpin our society, they often come in from abroad. We look even at our royal family. We have to remember that the Windsors, of course, are the Sax Cobra Gothas that went through a rebranding from Germany, that went through a rebranding in the First World War. What we see is that the openness of British society, my final point, British society has been successful by being open to cultures, ideas and people. The debate isn't finished and if we actually shut down that openness will severely affect British society in the future. Thank you very much. Sorry, I forgot you want to know how British you are. 1857 is when you could divorce your husband. There's 15 million people who are under age, young people under 19 and there's 2.7% of Muslims. So who got them all right? Right, you can stay in the country, the rest of you got to leave. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, chair. When I come to this kind of meetings, I came several times here in this great university. I feel younger again. Professor Kittson, you have said you made my life easy. Quite a lot what I wanted to say you said. And David, debate is not over. As you say, a mature debate has just begun. And this debate will go on. And perceptions, public perception I hope will change. Let me say today, human migration is not new. It is an age old phenomenon. People move from a place to place, a country to another either fleeing from strife or to better their life. If we look back in our own family history, we'll find that we all are either migrants or descendants of migrants. Some economically very successful countries in the modern world, namely USA, Australia, Canada, have been populated from migration. In the present globalized world, with the technological development, migration has become increasingly more common. The history also informs us that human migration has its fair share of problems in various eras. For example, colonization of foreign land to rule and exploit resources, or for that matter unmanaged population movement in the modern world order sometimes results in serious social discord. However, in the British context, I will argue that post-second world war inward migration has by and large been good for Britain. The economics argument for encouraging inward migration is overwhelming. Migrants make up around 10% of the population now is about 13% or 14%, yet they are focused to contribute up to 15% to 17% of predicted economic growth. Take our national health service, which would be in chaos without the help of migrants health professionals as the migration observatory of Oxford calculated in 2010 10% about 30% to 32% of the health professionals in national health service are foreign born. It is also universally recognized that annually around 250,000 as Professor Kitson said, overseas students come to be educated at our great academic institution like Cambridge, financially benefit huge indirect benefits in terms of international relationship. It is estimated that overseas students' fees alone contribute 8 to 9 billion pound to the British coffers and British education and benefits universities and educational institutes. Moreover, their ambassadorship between their country of origin and Britain is invaluable. An overwhelming majority of modern migrant workers are relatively young, 20 to 40 years of age who are highly mobile. Their migration from developing to developed economies to work help replenish the demographic decline. As you know, according to you commission, Europe will face a 20 million worker shortage by 2030 and therefore its ratio between pensioners and working age population will be dangerously imbalanced. Migrants not only generate economic benefit, their contribution to the cultural and social enrichment of society in the long term has been enormous. For example, London was promoted by the 2012 Olympic bid campaign as one of the most ethnically diverse and vibrant capital cities in the world. Migrants and refugees contribution to academic research and enriching knowledge has been invaluable as 18 Nobel Prize winning British scientists in the last 70 years have been the migrant or refugee origin. There are two main reasons people move across national borders. Presently, firstly, economic reason to find work, study or establish business to better their and their family's life. The second, human rights to seek asylum fleeing from tyranny and persecution or strife or from economic environmental disaster or both. The contention that world population is footloose and given the opportunity there will be flood of migration from developing countries to the developed countries is debatable. The World Bank reports in 2013 that globally around 200, only 214 million people worldwide, less than 3% of the world population live outside borders of their national boundaries. Migration not only helps rejuvenate domestic economy, it also benefits migrant producing countries. For instance, the World Bank reports again in 2012 migrant remittances through recognized banks and financial companies total more than 530 billion dollars, about 240 billion pounds, which is around three and a half times of the total global international aid. And these remittances, because it goes directly to the migrant's families, it is one of the best way to resolve poverty in developing countries. As Professor Nigel Harris of UCL estimated that in 2000, year 2000, the migrant workers from United States sending money to Mexico with economic multiplier, the 6 billion pound became 16 to 17 billion pounds. These are only some examples of economic and social benefits of migration, but we forget migrants are also human being. They also have rights and their needs and their human being and they should be treated as a human being for them to be integrated in the new society they come in. Their integration in society really hampers if they are denigrated or not valued. In this respect, we are witnessing with alarm that despite all these unquestionable benefits to Britain for far too long, immigration has wrongly been depicted in the negative light and the debate on the subject has been underpinned by xenophobia. Immigrants and the concept of immigration have been demonised to such a low level that public negative perception about immigration has recently sunk to a new law. This is mainly due to unabated, as Professor Kittson says, irresponsible and unfounded negative media portrayal of immigration, particularly by the tabloid media as the immigration has continued to provide headlines and column inches at an incredible rate, immigrant bashing continues to scapegoat migrants for all ills of the society. Sadly, both the government and the opposition with the exception of a handful of parliamentarians either remain silent or pender to this public discourse for cheap political gains. The coalition government's commitment to bring down annual net migrants to tens of thousands is a spin-off of this debate. In their pursuit to control non-EU migration, the government in July 2012 introduced draconian family union rules in which, among other harsh and restrictive provisions, a far higher income threshold to sponsor non-EU spouses, civil partners and family members. Under these rules, a British citizen or a settled person in the UK is required to show an annual income of £18,600 to sponsor his or her spouse or civil partner, and families with children will need to show much higher income or savings. Third party contributors such as paternal support to meet this income threshold cannot be taken into consideration in this respect. These kinds of prohibitive and rigid laws are dividing and destined to ruin family life in numerous ordinary British families. Apart from restrictive legislative framework to control non-EU nationals, as the British immigration control is administered through visa controls, one has to question as to why the current list of visa countries are mainly developing countries outside OECD. Predominantly from African, Asian and Latin American continents. More recently, Prime Minister David Cameron has been advocating for even more harsh in-country measures such as depriving both undocumented and legitimate new migrants of free healthcare under national health service and compelling landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants. These ideas form substantial part of the new bill going through the parliament now. These measures are bound to lead to racial profiling of tenants and health service users in 21st century Britain. These also bring back memories of days of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the racist slogans in Britain not long ago. No blacks, no dogs, no Irish allowed. These restrictive immigration laws combined with drastic cuts of legal aid in immigration denying access to justice to impoverished and vulnerable sections of the migrant communities. At the same time, the government has also developed a vicious public relation exercise to promote their multi-pronged attack on migrant rights. We are bombarded daily with the deluge of messages boasting about surveillance, rates, arrest, removal, deportations of migrants. Even more alarmingly, the government recently callously imitated a loutish slogan of fringe racist group like National Front vans proclaiming go home alongside pictures of handcuffs were sent to drive around multi-ethnic areas. Happy to say on the face of avalanche of complaints they have stopped this now. As I mentioned earlier, a group of people entered the UK for their human rights protection fleeing from tyranny, persecution and strife. I should say a few words on this important aspect of migration. Despite giving lip service to obligation to the international conventions and treaties, including the Geneva Convention, successive governments have introduced legal and practical barriers to stop refugees and asylum seekers from reaching shores of Britain. We know the main burden of refugees in the world now is born by the bordering countries of the strife, and these countries are mainly poorer countries of the world. European government's policy towards asylum seekers turned Europe into a fortress where the only way open to them to reach here either in guise of a visitor or as a victim of smuggler or trafficker. Because of this, we are sadly witnessing tragedies such as deaths of hundreds of refugees in sea and the deserts like the ones we have recently witnessed near Lampedusa Island and the tragic event only yesterday reported around 100 women and children died in thirst in Sahara Desert. Finally, for decades, the immigration debate underpinned by xenophobia has generated a climate of fear and mistrust against migrants and foreigners. The public perception has been poisoned by responsible media reporting, anti-migrate, negative rhetoric used by politicians. The debate on immigration is devoid of facts and based on myths. The negative public perception of immigration stems mainly from a hyped up negative media propaganda about so-called uncontrolled inward migration. As the recent polls suggest that large proportion of British population wrongly believe that the foreign-born population of Britain is about 30 to 35%, whereas the true figure is around 13 to 15%. People also wrongly believe that immigrant depressed wages and take jobs from locals. However, all reputable researchers point to the contrary. The government own advisory body, migration advisory committee, headed by distinguished academics, recently reported that migration under the government's point-based system contributed positively to the GDP level and this contribution will be more significant over the time. The committee also found that there is no evidence at the aggregate level of adverse public market impacts due to migration of foreign workers. There is also general misconceptions. The migrants and refugee seekers do not want to integrate in society and therefore destabilizing Britain for this reason. Britain cannot absorb more and they say Britain cannot absorb more migrants without destroying its national identity. Just look at Britain to London how harmoniously diverse cultures create a positively vibrant city. The kind of negative propaganda is not allowing us to have a balanced debate on immigration. To counter all this negativity, we argue for a new, modern and progressive vision in migration. In our view, immigration policy of Britain should be determined by three main fundamentals. Number one, migrants and refugees in Britain must be treated equally under robust system of fundamental human, economic and civil rights within the agreed international human and social rights framework. Number two, Britain must provide human rights protection to those seeking refuge in the UK by preserving and respecting our obligation to the international treaties and convention. The British government in collaboration with international community must make concerted efforts to resolve issues behind world refugee problems and also take a fair share of international refugees. Number three, Britain must recognize that economic migration brings increased prosperity across society both in Britain and migrant producing regions and indirectly promotes global economic development and peace. Therefore, Britain must allow equal access to migration schemes for everyone irrespective of their background, race or nationality. I end today's debate by saying that due to migration we live in a rich multicultural society which should be celebrated and not fear. Thank you. The immigration related stories and issues provoke a great deal of moral and political debate, even ire and outrage as we've heard today. People question, for example, whether their state should let in more or fewer immigrants or immigrants with particular skills, for example, whether it should be easier or more difficult to deport foreign nationals, whether rules about family migration or asylum appeals should be reformed, whether it's acceptable to hold asylum applicants in detention centres, for example, which benefits immigrants might be entitled to claim on arrival, how best to integrate new arrivals and what should be demanded of them. And I could go on and on. But behind all this lively and impassioned debate, there tends to lie a significant unspoken assumption. And the assumption is that states are morally entitled to set their own admissions policies on their own terms, that they have what we might call a moral right to exclude prospective immigrants to refuse entry to non-citizens or to deport those who are in the state without authorization. Now, of course, many people think that states aren't morally entitled to complete discretion on all matters relating to the entry of non-citizens. They might think that states have some duties towards refugees and to other people in desperate need. They might think that states should treat all applicants in a transparent and fair fashion. They might think that states should not be permitted to discriminate between applicants on grounds of race, ethnicity, maybe also sex, sexuality and religion, for example. And they might also think that there are limits to what states may do to and with unwanted and or undocumented newcomers. For instance, whatever your stance on undocumented migrants, I'm going to assume that you don't think border guards are entitled to hunt them down and beat them to death. Nonetheless, by and large, most people still believe that states have a right to admit or refuse to admit would be immigrants on their own terms, in accordance with their own interests, to cap the number of new arrivals, to specify which kinds of skills are in demand, to deport people who overstay their visas and so on. That right just seems to be obvious, to be an uncontroversial right of sovereign states, and it's rarely questioned or subjected to scrutiny in popular debates. Indeed, the right of states to control and restrict immigration is widely considered to be an absolutely central aspect of sovereignty. That's the way that states operate now, states routinely try to keep out all sorts of prospective immigrants for all sorts of reasons. They expend a huge amount of time and resources trying to restrict immigration. In the process, they might exclude the needy, the poor, the vulnerable, the frail, those seeking work and other opportunities, those seeking an education, those wanting to be with loved ones. They may attempt to detain and deport people who are in the country without permission. The stakes, as we've already heard, are extremely high. Many people who are desperate to enter a state are turned away at the borders, or refuse the requisite visas and never make it to the borders. People risk their lives in order to immigrate when permission isn't granted, or when they don't expect to be admitted via authorized channels. Some people die in the process of being sent back, and many people die in the process of trying to cross borders. People who are in the country without authorization are vulnerable to all sorts of ill treatment from employers, landlords and so on, and often live in a state of perpetual fear of being discovered and deported. That's the reality. As I want to suggest today, though, when we take a step back from the highly charged political debate over immigration, it's not obvious that states do enjoy a moral right to exclude would-be immigrants. I'm a political philosopher, and one of my specialisms is the ethics of migration, and the ethics of migration is a broad and expanding academic topic. In fact, the debate over immigration in political philosophy is only just beginning. The subject includes questions related to forced migration, for example, the nature and extent of duties to refugees, the very definition of a refugee, what states, though, to immigrants that they admit, and what they might owe to those whom they refuse to admit, or those who are present without authorization, whether states have special responsibilities to particular immigrants such as those from their former colonies or to family members of citizens or residents and so on. There are also questions about immigration, including the so-called problem of brain drain. All of these are important questions which are addressed to various degrees in this blossoming literature on migration in moral and political philosophy. I'm going to focus today on this fundamental, moral and political and philosophical issue of the state's supposed rights to exclude would-be immigrants, that is, a right to a wide range of discretion on questions of admission. So, what moral justifications might be offered for the existence of the state's right to exclude? What might be the moral foundations of this right? Let's focus on liberal democratic states like ours, or that self-identify as liberal democratic nation states. Why might we think that these kinds of states have a right to exclude? Well, one obvious potential set of answers lies in the name. Maybe something about being a state supports the right to exclude, or maybe it's something about the nation, or maybe it's something about democracy, for example. And then what follows? Briefly, I'm going to introduce three sorts of argument in support of the state's moral right to exclude that work in that vein. So, first, that sovereign states just have a right to exclude because that's part of the definition of a sovereign state. Second, that democracies have a right to make these kinds of decisions for themselves. And third, that people have a right to protect their national cultures. These are all familiar arguments. What I'm going to try to do is illustrate how each of these arguments actually runs into significant obstacles, and that the task of defending the state's moral right to exclude is much more difficult than it might at first appear. I don't know if in this short talk I'm going to manage to persuade you that the state's right to exclude currently lacks moral justification. For that, maybe you could read my book. This is just a taster, and my arguments aren't exhaustive. But what I want to try to do is sow some seeds of doubts in your minds, or if you're already doubtful, give you ammunition, and indicate that we can't just take it for granted that states enjoy a moral right to exclude would be immigrants. It's not obvious, and it's not uncontroversial. Before continuing, I just want to point out briefly that even if the state's right to exclude does lack moral justification, it wouldn't necessarily follow from this that any and all barriers to admission are completely unjustifiable, or that all individuals should enjoy something like a human right to immigrate to the state of their choice, or that borders and indeed states should cease to exist to pre-empt possibly an objection over here. But it certainly would mean that there's a fundamental and urgent need to revise some of the most entrenched assumptions we have about the legitimate role and activities of our states. First, let's think about this argument that sovereign states just have a right to exclude because that's part of what it is to be a sovereign state. Well, yes, it's true that we do now tend to think of sovereign states as having a right to exclude, and we tend to think that the right to exclude just is part of what it is to be a sovereign state. As I said at the beginning, that's how states operate now. But we can't assume that states actually have a particular moral right just because they behave as though they have it, even where they're widely accepted as having it. Consider this. In other times and places, states have claimed the right to trade in slaves, or to colonise other countries, or to imprison their subjects without trial, or to exclude women from the franchise. But, of course, that alone tells us nothing about whether states do indeed have the moral right to engage in those practices, even where those practices are widely accepted and even endorsed. Or consider other migration-related issues and practices. In the not-too-distant past, states like ours had the authority to control the movement of their own citizens and subjects within the state's territory and to restrict their freedom to leave and to re-enter the state. Those practices were commonplace. If you're a citizen of a democratic state today, though, you probably take it for granted that you ought to enjoy the freedom to move around and settle in the place of your choosing within your own country, freedom to leave a state and to return to your own state. No doubt you'd be outraged if your government decided to apply permanent internal migration restrictions or tried to stop you leaving to take up a job in another country or refused to let you return if you did. Freedom of movement within one's country and the freedom to leave any state and the freedom to return to one's own state are now considered fundamental human rights and are recognised as such by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So, as I say, then, the mere fact that states claim a right to do something doesn't mean that they have that moral right. States change and evolve over time as do commonly accepted norms about the extent of their legitimate authority. Maybe you think the right to exclude would-be immigrants is just a fundamental feature of states and we can't imagine states without that power. Well, you might be surprised to hear, then, that they haven't always been that way. At various points in modern history, many states actually paid little attention to the movement and entry of non-citizens into their territories. Sometimes they weren't able to monitor immigration effectively. Sometimes they didn't care to. Sometimes they agreed with other states to allow freedom of movement between their countries for their own subjects. Often they were much more concerned about keeping their own subjects in. Moreover, as Princeton political philosopher Melissa Lane has emphasised, the most eminent theorists of state sovereignty in the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Grotius, Hobbes, Russo, they didn't consider immigration to be pivotal to their analyses of sovereignty in the state at all. So, actually, the right to exclude would-be immigrants may not be such a fundamental feature of states after all. What about democracy, then? Maybe it just seems obvious that decisions about emitting immigrants are the kinds of decisions that democracies are entitled to make for themselves. These newcomers are potential future citizens who will get a say in the running of the state. And don't we have a right to control membership in the destiny of our own state? Who, if not we members, should be entitled to decide the shape and composition of the citizen body? Isn't democracy ruled by the people? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that people should wish to control? You might already recognise clear moral limits on the rights of democratic communities to set their membership rules in accordance with their own terms and to exclude unwanted insiders or outsiders. Suppose that the majority of citizens in the United Kingdom decided they no longer wanted to grant entry to Jews. Or even that they wanted to remove citizenship rights from current Jewish Britons. Would that be acceptable? After all, it's a decision about membership and shouldn't a democratic community be entitled to make such decisions for itself? Well, if you think there's a clear argument against allowing a democratic community to make that kind of decision, then you already recognise that there are limits to a democratic community's legitimate control over its membership rules. Furthermore, we tend to assume that the people, the democratic people, is an unproblematic category. It's just all the citizens. But is it unproblematic? Note that in recent centuries the boundaries of the people have been challenged, redefined and redrawn as a result of various democratic struggles for inclusion. Excluded groups such as disenfranchised men, women, religious and ethnic minorities and their supporters highlighted the problematic fact that existing boundaries, which subjected some people to political power to the authority of the law without granting them any opportunity to participate in that exercise of power and in that making of law, lacked democratic legitimacy for those who had no political voice. So then consider this. If you don't think people should be subject to the authority of the state without having any opportunity to participate in the political process, if you think that goes against the principles of democracy, then does it not go against the principles of democracy to subject would-be immigrants to our immigration laws without granting them any say, any political voice? In other words, far from there being a democratic argument in support of the right to exclude, maybe there's actually a good democratic argument for greater inclusion. I'll let that marinate. What about the national idea that people have a right, for example, to protect their national cultures? Many nationalists would argue that people have an important interest in protecting their national culture. And even though that national culture is going to evolve over time anyway, they would argue that to maintain any sort of control over the character of that national culture, then we need to maintain some sort of control over immigration, at least over the pace of immigration. And obviously this is a very popular argument. But let's just grant for the sake of argument that immigration does have an impact on the national culture. And let's also agree that members of national communities may have a significant interest in maintaining some control over the character and pace of change of their national culture. But we're still entitled to wonder whether this interest should be considered more weighty than the interests of would-be immigrants in being allowed to settle within state borders. Don't we just have competing interests here? It's not enough just to say there are interests on one side. There are obviously interests on the other side too, and we need to know why one set of interests should take priority. Well, maybe you'd want to say one's national culture is a fundamental importance to individual identity, to a sense of belonging in the world, to individual autonomy, to the ability to make meaningful choices. But again, the opponent might just reply that following one's own life plans, even if that requires migrating across borders, is a fundamental importance to individual lives. Again, why should the importance of the role of national culture take precedence? It's not enough just to state an interest. We need to know why it's weighty enough to trump the interests of migrants in entering. So, to conclude, that's just a taster of the kinds of arguments that one might offer in defence of the state's right to exclude and the kinds of challenges that those sorts of arguments might face. And what I hope to have shown is that we can't just take it for granted that the states enjoy a right to exclude. Even something as obvious and familiar to our political landscape as the state's right to exclude would-be immigrants is when subjected to philosophical treatment, not actually that obvious at all. Thank you. Thank you very much. In order for us to have a question and answer session, I think we're going to proceed right away. What I'm going to do is collect questions of three, and if you remember, short questions and please panel members, short answers. So, any questions, please? Okay. Hi. Isn't it the case that the current state of the immigration debate, that is to say the near consensus among the people and the political elite, is indicative of the failure of class politics in the hegemony of nationalist political discourse? Thanks. Thank you. I have a question here. Okay. One, two, and three. I'd just like to ask the panel, if they could say something about progress and significance and solutions, which the modern slavery bill to protect immigrants, migrants from exploitation will have. I suspect that a piece of legislation, which like all other legislations will fail to protect migrants from exploitation by employers and landlords and everybody else who exploits migrants. Thank you. Third question here, and I think there's a microphone coming in your direction now. One of the speakers touched on the disastrous migration across the Mediterranean from Africa, disastrous in the terms of loss of life. And that's swelling, I think, all the time. Africa, taking, sorry, coming outside the European Union and migration from the east to the west. Africa, I suspect, is the biggest driver of migration into Europe and perhaps into this country. What can be done? Okay. Thank you very much. So first question about the stage of debate and how far it reflects class interests. Second question relating to modern slavery. Third question to do with modern routes of immigration and disasters on route and what can be done. Panel members, please. Who would like to? I'm happy to go first. In response to the first question, I think it's one of the very few bits of British politics, which is actually class politics. It's the interests of working class people that are represented in more restrictive immigration policies. Most of the economic elite and to some extent of the political elite have an interest in quite large-scale immigration. So it's class politics in action, although I think not of the kind that you're talking about. I would also say, and this is partly a response to Habib, there is a very high pressure to cross from poor countries into rich ones. I think in Paul Collier's recent book, Exodus, in which he challenged this academic consensus that it's somehow a good thing for poor countries to lose all their brightest and the best, which is oddly enough is believed by people in the World Bank and lots of academics probably like Michael. Paul Collier, the author of The Bottom Billion, who spent his life looking at these things, now believes that actually certainly the poorest countries suffer from losing too many people to the West, which I think must be right. He also has a very interesting triad argument explaining why there is this constant and increasing pressure now from poor countries to rich ones, which consists of three things. One, continuing very large gap despite the growth of China and India, the very large gap between rich country and poor country incomes, combined with two other things. One is the growth of diasporas in rich countries, which radically reduces both the economic and the psychological cost of being in imminent these days. It's a really important new factor in the debate. The third point is that actually a lot of poorer countries, particularly the sort of richer poor countries, there is an increasing body of people in those countries who actually do now have the wherewithal to make the initial, often quite large investment in movement. That is why, I think it's completely, that is why most rich countries now have stricter restrictions than they did 10 years ago because there is that underlying pressure to move. Much better that we help people stay in their own countries and develop those countries. It is not a good thing to allow the brightest and best to leave. Thank you. Would you like to pick up on that or a different question? The questions, first of all, the politician, the discord point, as I said, it is the media vested interest politicians class some businesses. They are creating the discord and the debate itself is now quite mudded because of the interests are different because some sections of the business they want to exploit labour and wants to bring in the more people to fill skill gaps here. And it's very easy to get skill gaps. And there are some points about that are very important and it is a bigger debate about it. So that's the quick answer to that. But it's only can be done through the rights and responsibility, the rights-based kind of immigration policies. It comes to the second point is that I've already said in my submission that if we create a society where everyone, the slavery point, that equally treated and they are bestowed with rights, then those kind of exploitation doesn't take place. We are going in the wrong directions all the time. We are bringing in, for example, bringing in policies that the migrants are openly can be exploited because they have got lesser rights than citizens here. So that's the other point. And the pressure from poorer countries I just give an example just for the thinking purpose that the pressure has been for very, very long time that this is just not the new countries and things like that. Of course the strife and the reason for strife and wars and other things in different parts of the world the rich countries are mainly responsible creating those kind of strife like Iraq war is one of the example and what's going on in Syria and things like that. But it is much more complex than that. I'm not telling about, it's not simplistic. It is much more complex than that. But it's not a new thing and previously we had, for example, Indian subcontinent was not visa nationals. It is only 1986, 1986, as recently as 1986. Visa was introduced to those countries. All Indian subcontinent, they were poverty stricken people there. They didn't want to come here. Visa was not mandatory. They didn't want to come here. So the restrictions and rigidness on immigration policy directly links to the people's movements also. Because fortress, when there is a fortress there people want to bridge the fortress and other side of the fortress is gas is green out, the roads are paved with gold and all these things. So this is directly linked. That's why I was saying vision should be much more progressive. We have already ruined the vision but we want to now go back from that and think progressively what creates this kind of pressure. Thank you. Michael. Briefly, chair. First of all, on class politics, you can call it class politics. I think it's as broadly correct. It's about the problem of unemployment and slow growth and you're blaming others for those problems. You're blaming immigrants, you're blaming people who are single parents, you're blaming people on welfare recipients. They didn't cause the problem. They're not the cause of the problem at all but they're the easy solution to blame somebody else and blame the people who actually caused the problem. That's point one. Second point about the issue about exploitation. All I'll say is that I think David wants a Rolls-Royce immigration service. I mentioned before I have a Rolls-Royce service that prevented the exploitation of immigrants in the country. And thirdly this thing about where people come from and do they advantage their countries? Well actually what we know really is about the best way, one of the best ways about economic development is the movement of ideas and the movement of people and movement of people is crucial to the movement of ideas. If we're educating people from around the world that will help economic development and it will also help the development of new industries in many developing countries. If you look at India it's got a prospering ICT information technology industry. Why? Because many people worked in Silicon Valley then went back to India to establish new firms in economic growth. Thank you very much. The first question about nationalist, political, difficult. I think it's very interesting that what seems to have happened is as David said at the beginning it looks as though the debate has finished because clearly a lot of people are worried about immigration and they don't like it and they want it to happen at far slower rate and politicians have picked up on this and the Labour Party for example are saying oh yes we were wrong to let in migrants from Poland as quickly as we did and so on and so forth. So the response seems to be well it's unpopular so we're just going to take that on the chin and move forward rather than thinking about how to challenge the terms of the debate how to present things in a different way how to lead on the question of immigration. So I think actually the debate we shouldn't think of the debate as finished we shouldn't think of it just as being won by the fact that people have certain likes or views about what should happen with migration but there should really be a discussion on this one. The second point which links the two questions one about the slavery Berlin one about the loss of life both of them point to the fact that our immigration system a world in which we think that states are entitled to exclude people according to their own interests is one which creates a huge amount of misery and suffering and the misery and suffering isn't just people who are kept out from countries that they wish to go to or people that feel that they have to go via unauthorised channels because they know that they're not going to be let in via authorised channels but also people who actually arrive and who live in countries as undocumented migrants they are subject to a huge they're vulnerable they're in a vulnerable position and we categorise them as a scourge on our society but actually they're some of the most vulnerable people in this society they're people who are treated they can be treated in a terrible way so we need to shift the debate I think in that way Okay and the third question I think is enormously important the human costs of people being smuggled, trafficked and that's a question for all of us I think to take away and consider how best to we can participate in doing something about that alas we are rapidly running out of time so I don't think there is going to be time for another round um um well I think are people going on to other events can I just take a check or whether we could take five more minutes have people got other events to go on to show your hand if you have and then in which case perhaps I, instead perhaps I can ask our panel members to give us a thought or a question to take away to chew on so David would you like to start um okay my thought is um if the global villagers who seem to be dominating the table up here had their way and removed most immigration restrictions would Britain be a society worth living in in 30 years time would we have a welfare state worthy of the name I think you know what my answer is my thought I already said in my submission that um the migrants are the part of the society migrants I mean migrants and refugees they should not be demonised they are human being they should be treated equally as told on them that equal rights like citizens okay thank you well I just want to to challenge David's point about whether we'd have a welfare state worthy of the name if we relaxed our if we relaxed our immigration restriction we might not have a welfare state worthy of the name if we continue with a government like this one but that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with immigration but moreover I mean think about our own country there's a huge amount of diversity in this country even though there's free movement within it we have really extreme regional accents even though we're such a small country you go to Edinburgh you go to Liverpool you go to London complete variations in our cities in the people who live in them and the idea that freedom of movement would just wipe out our sense of solidarity and lead to an absence of a welfare state really needs to be challenged thank you question or thought I think we're fine question or thought if you ask us a question we can at least answer your question so the answer is yes we would have a welfare state worth living in in 50 years and well we will do fortunately you won't be you won't be making immigration policy so we may still have a welfare state well actually if we don't have immigration carrying on we won't have anybody working in the welfare state in 50 years time okay I'm sure you will agree that we've had four excellent presentations to an ongoing debate I think very thoughtful and thought provoking so thank you very much to our panel members thank you very much to you thank you very much to you for coming and very much thanks to Ed Anderson who has organised this event