Thoughtfully Explained.

 It’s a dangerous myth that mass migration is good for the economy.

We need a cap on migrant numbers, to prove to British voters that they will never again be betrayed

ROBERT JENRICK27 April 2024 • 

There is no clearer example of the broken Westminster consensus than the last three decades of immigration policy.

Successive governments have failed to tackle illegal migration. And as I have set out in these pages, the latest attempt – the Safety of Rwanda Act – will shortly join the graveyard of policies that haven’t re-established our southern border.

But as offensive and dangerous as illegal migration is, the bigger scandal is the story of legal migration because the numbers involved are so much greater. Last year, there were about 30,000 illegal small boat arrivals, but this was dwarfed by the 1.2 million people who arrived here perfectly legally.

Adopt my amendments to Rwanda Bill or face an illegal migration catastrophe We owe it to the public to secure our borders. To do anything else would destroy trust in politics

Legal migration policy has a far bigger impact on the public’s day-to-day lives. As just one example, our housing crisis is increasingly an immigration crisis. As housing secretary, I managed to drag up housing starts to almost a quarter of a million (the highest level since 1986), but we would need to build an impossible 515,000 new homes every year in England alone just to cope with current levels of immigration. This unmatched demand will continue to cause rents to spiral and homeownership rates to dwindle.

Sunak refused to meet me for a year to discuss legal migration, says Bra... Former home secretary says PM did not see soaring levels of net migration as ‘an important issue for the British...

For nearly three decades, politicians of all stripes have promised to control and reduce legal migration, only to allow it to balloon to extreme levels. The numbers we have experienced are jaw-dropping. In the 25 years up to Tony Blair’s election, cumulative net migration was 68,000; in the next 25 years to 2022, it was 5.9 million – almost 100 times the previous 25 years.

A frank debate is needed on legal migration The pro-immigration consensus that has governed British politics for decades can continue no longer

Until we left the EU and ended free movement, politicians knew full well that they couldn’t keep their promises. Since we took back control of the levers of migration, these were promises that politicians deliberately broke by liberalising our system even further by lowering salary thresholds and creating new routes with lax rules.

Frankly, those decisions were two fingers up to the public who haven’t forgotten or forgiven. A plurality of almost every voting group agree that immigration has been too high over the last 10 years, including 53 per cent of Londoners, 49 per cent of Lib Dems and 43 per cent of 18-24 year olds. Most in the SW1 bubble are blissfully unaware of the deep well of anger from voters that they have, yet again, had their express wishes betrayed.

Those in power who are aware choose to do nothing as they cling to the last remaining argument the pro mass-migration camp can muster: the orthodoxy that immigration is an unalloyed economic good and that our public services would collapse without it. This myth needs debunking, which is why I have partnered with Neil O’Brien – a first-rate minister and former Treasury special advisor – and the Centre for Policy Studies – the pre-eminent centre-Right economic think tank – to confront it head on.

Immigration is destroying the British economy Businesses’ desire for cheap labour is increasingly setting the country’s migration agenda

It stands to reason that, if all this migration is rocket fuel for our economy, growth would be booming and wages rising. But since 1998, the first year net migration passed 100,000, GDP per capita growth has averaged 1.2 per cent a year, barely half the rate in the four decades before that. There are other factors at play, but it’s undeniable that mass migration has diluted our capital stock and that far too many of the migrants who have come have been net burdens on the Exchequer over the course of their lifetimes.

Policymakers take the economic contribution of the “average” migrant, but the employment rates, earnings and fiscal impact of different migrant groups vary massively. For instance, our report reveals that a migrant from Poland is 50 per cent more likely to be in work than a migrant from Somalia or Bangladesh. This is cause for concern, not least because, since leaving the EU, we’ve seen migration from Europe radically decrease and an enormous increase in non-EU migration.

Non-EU migration to the UK hits its highest since 1975 when records bega... The number of non-EU migrants coming to the UK has surged after the Government lifted the cap on overseas students

Clearly, the post-Brexit liberalisations need to be unwound swiftly. Before I resigned as immigration minister, I managed to secure a reduction in annual arrivals of an estimated 300,000 per year, but I saw that as an important first step, not job done. We need to create a far more restrictive system that establishes the UK as the grammar school of the Western world, focusing on attracting the high skill, high wage migrants who will be net contributors to the economy. If we were to do so, combining the current levels of migration from the EU with our historic, pre-Brexit levels of immigration from outside the EU, this would bring net migration comfortably back into the tens of thousands.

But well-meaning policy isn’t enough. The state has consistently shown itself to be astonishingly bad at forecasting the consequences of its immigration politics. Take the social care route, which the Department for Health and Social Care forecast to have 6,000 main applicants, but ended up with 146,000 and 203,000 dependants last year. Excluding the pandemic, annual net migration has exceeded the forecasts used in OBR projections 93 per cent of the time.

The social care visa is a trojan horse for mass migration Despite having repeatedly promised to reduce immigration, the Conservatives have hugely increased it. Voters are...

The only way politicians can look voters in the eye and guarantee they can meet their promises to reduce net migration is to introduce a cap which would serve as a democratic lock on numbers. We propose that this cap should be voted on by all MPs in Parliament in a Migration Budget Debate, alongside forecasted impacts of immigration on housing, infrastructure and public services.

The road back to having any credibility on immigration will be long and hard. The Conservative Party must repent, and even then voters would perfectly reasonably decide that all is not forgiven. But regardless of the party-political implications of these reforms, they are so clearly in the national interest that they should be delivered without delay.

Loving and Serving Our Persecuted Brothers and Sisters.

 

Loving and serving persecuted Christians

With your support we will ‘raise their voices’, bring them into fellowship with Christians across the UK and, by working with those right in the heart of persecuted communities, bring much-needed prayerful, pastoral and practical support.

Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. Hebrews 13:3. Release Int.

Elisha Honoured.

Birdie.

The ICC.

An arresting story.

Is the International Criminal Court about to destroy what's left of its reputation?

MELANIE PHILLIPS APR 30

 

Karim Khan, International Criminal Court prosecutor

A story has been running for days that the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is poised to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defence Forces chief of staff Herzi Halevi over alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.

If this is correct, the prosecutor would be taking action against Israel for defending itself against genocide while doing more than any other military in the world to minimise civilian death and suffering. It would mean the ICC would be acting on the basis of lies put out by Hamas, such as the number of civilians killed in the Gaza war — figures which have been rubbished by statisticians — and Israel’s alleged blocking of humanitarian aid — a claim that’s contradicted by evidence of aid being provided from the start of the war but which was mostly stolen by Hamas.

Such arrest warrants would be a wickedly perverse move and a breathtaking onslaught against truth, justice and the Jewish people. The move would represent the ultimate in defamation, demonisation and delegitimisation mounted by the apparatus of international law against the Jewish state, a unique and malicious double standard applied to no other country on earth.

But are these reports true?

There’s no doubt that the ICC has been historically hostile to Israel. There’s also no doubt that the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, is being put under enormous pressure by member states and activist groups to act against Israel. This pressure has been confirmed by US sources — who say, however, that they are uncertain if arrest warrants are imminent. 

But a number of things in these reports don’t add up. 

The story seems to have emanated from unknown Israeli sources. In the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, Ben Caspit reports that Israel has picked up “sensitive” information indicating that Khan is seriously considering issuing arrest warrants against the prime minister and other top Israeli officials. 

This is said to have “terrified” Netanyahu who asked US President Joe Biden for help in blocking the ICC’s warrants. In an atmosphere of “managed panic” in the Israeli government, high-intensity international efforts have reportedly been underway to put pressure on those who might be pressurising Khan to act against Israel in this way.  Israeli president Yitzhak Herzog said today:

I unequivocally object to any attempt to abuse international legal institutions — including the ICC — to deny the state of Israel its basic rights. We have an independent and robust judicial system that knows how to investigate as needed.

The US National Security Council has said it opposes the ICC’s investigation into Israel’s alleged war crimes, on the grounds that the court has no jurisdiction to discuss the Gaza war.

This intervention contradicts a key element of the most alarmist reporting, the claim that the Biden administration is in cahoots with the ICC in this deeply hostile move against Israel. The Biden administration has certainly behaved as much like an enemy as a friend of Israel over the past seven terrible months, undermining its war of self-defence at every turn and parroting the defamatory lies designed to demonise and delegitimise it (even while the US has continued to supply it with essential armaments). 

However, the claim that it was giving the nod to the ICC warrants always seemed improbable since the US isn’t a signatory to the ICC and has no standing there at all. The suggestion in early reports that the US was even involved in Khan’s selection as ICC Prosecutor because he was regarded as a suitable patsy therefore seemed fanciful in the extreme. 

In addition, none of this fits with the known attitude of Khan himself. A British lawyer and an extremely cautious individual, he is also an Ahmadi Muslim. Ahmadis are themselves victims of persecution and oppression within the Islamic world where other Muslims consider them to be heretics. He is hardly likely to be a Hamas groupie.

Moreover, as Caspit writes:

Prosecutor Khan is not considered to be hostile towards Israel. Quite to the contrary. He came to Israel after the massacre at the invitation of the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, toured the devastated Gaza periphery communities, met with survivors and with hostages who had been freed, and was deeply moved. Teams on his behalf have met at length with all of the hostages who were freed from Hamas captivity, and have been working to collect evidence.

Khan, who became the ICC Prosecutor in 2021, is undoubtedly keenly aware of the ICC’s deeply damaged reputation as a court owing more to international power politics than to the rule of law, and which was all but wrecked by his two incompetent and deeply partisan predecessors in the post. 

While the current investigation into possible abuses in Gaza and the disputed “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria dates back to 2014 and has been marked by a number of malign moves against Israel, Khan will be acutely concerned to repair the ICC’s reputation as an impartial and fair court of law.

Among other considerations, that means abiding by court’s own fundamental rule of complementarity. As an informal expert paper published by the ICC put it:

The statute recognises that states have the first responsibility and right to prosecute international crimes. The ICC may only exercise jurisdiction where national legal systems fail to do so, including where they purport to act but in reality are unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out proceedings. under which it has to give a state time to investigate itself any claims that have been made against it. 

In practice, this means that before the ICC can make any move against Israel, the Jewish state must be given the chance to investigate any charges laid against it. Since the war in Gaza is still under way, that is clearly not yet possible. 

In addition, Khan has pledged to deliver impartial justice. In a statement he made at the end of October, when he spoke emotionally about his horror and repugnance  at the crimes committed against innocent Israelis on October 7 and also about the suffering of the “innocent Palestinians” in Gaza, he said he would investigate possible crimes committed “on the territory of Palestine by any party”.

So if these reports of imminent arrest warrants against the Israelis are fundamentally untrue, what is the explanation for them? It’s possible that other agendas are in play, aiming to whip up a storm to service self-serving or partisan interests of one kind or another. 

In relation to that, Caspit’s story contains one further intriguing nugget. Having reported that Khan’s teams have been working to collect evidence about the kidnap into Gaza of the Israeli hostages, Caspit writes: 

However, in the meantime, a second ICC team has been operating as well, a separate team that decided that a balance had to be maintained and that the “other side”— in other words, Israel — also had to be dealt with.

Israel reportedly pressed the panic button having obtained “sensitive information” about the ICC’s deliberations. Might this have been obtained  by listening in to the ICC “second team” investigators’ conversations? Might these “second team” investigators themselves have been malignly disposed towards Israel?

But whatever the investigators might be be saying, the person who decides whether or not to act against Israel is no-one but Khan himself. Is it likely that such a man would act in such a way?

On the other hand, is it likely that the Israelis can be so ignorant of the way the ICC actually works?

Maybe these alarmist reports are indeed well-founded. Maybe Karim Khan is about to finally destroy what’s left of the ICC’s reputation. Maybe this really is the apotheosis of the current infernal global drive to destroy Israel through a lethal pincer movement of military entrapment and a legal sucker punch. 

If so, it would mark a new and even more terrifying low in this crisis point for the Jewish people and for civilisation.

Recent posts

My most recent exclusive post for my premium subscribers argues that the anti-Israel student mobs threaten not just the Jews but America and civilisation itself. This is how the piece begins:

The campus crucible of Islamic holy war

4:16 PM

Events at Columbia university and on other American campuses have left many people open-mouthed in shock and horror. Overnight last night, a mob stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Masked men dressed in black used hammers and other tools to break in through the windows, barricading entry to the building with tables, chairs and a human chain. They hung a banner reading “Intifada” and screamed “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is ours alone”. There were reports that one campus worker was taken hostage.

Read full story

Oh, Dear!

Lord Cameron says he is ‘fan’ of BBC licence fee.

Foreign Secretary hints at Cabinet split while warning alternatives have ‘lots of disadvantages’

Amy Gibbons, POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

Amy Gibbons

Malaysia.

28 April 2024 – Malaysia

The majority of those who embrace Christianity, display an overwhelming desire to be baptised. Please pray for them as they make plans to do this discreetly, or secretly. Release Int.

Number of Prayers 14

YES - I WILL PRAY

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The young man swaggered along a side street in the Spanish capital. He was sporting tattoos, a thin moustache and wearing a T-shirt with the logo: 'The White Race. Save European Identity.' He hailed from Valladolid, a provincial city still notorious as a sanctuary for fascists in their fight against the communists during the country's bitter civil war in the 1930s. The 23-year-old had travelled to Madrid a few days ago to demonstrate over uncontrolled immigration to Spain which he says is destroying both the country's identity and its Christian roots. DM.