Read the full text of David Cameron's speech on immigration
The prime minister’s stance on immigration, as outlined in a speech in London this afternoon, can be summed up as ‘some is good, but not too much’. According to Cameron, we want the “the brightest and best to come here”, but we don’t want the people who will end up as “a significant burden on the welfare system and the taxpayer”.
The difficulty is, and always has been, how you work out who falls into which group. People don’t turn up with handy labels round their necks that say ‘future tech millionaire’ or ‘soon-to-be benefit cheat’. Cameron is very damning about the previous government’s attempt to address this with a ‘points-based system’, which he denounces as a “complete failure” that left us with “weak minimum thresholds”.
Instead, he’s proposing “tough limits” and a system reconfigured for “real fairness”. There aren’t many details forthcoming about how he’s going to bring this about, though. He mentions that potential immigrants will face “real tests of skill and potential, not thousands of people box-ticking their way into the UK,” but doesn’t set out how these tests will be set, completed, marked or judged.
Cameron cites the cap on economic migrants from outside the European Economic Area the coalition introduced in April as a major success, but makes no indication of what will be introduced to accompany it to bring about the change he says the UK so desperately needs.
We get vague promises – “that’s why we’re addressing the shortcomings in the education system”, “looking at new ways to encourage employers to do even more”, “consulting on how to ensure those who come to the UK as family migrants are supported without becoming a burden on the taxpayer” – but very little that’s concrete.
Even the focus on sham and forced marriages, which Cameron says he will be pushing to be criminalised, isn’t really a new announcement – Theresa May already mentioned it in her cat-haunted party conference speech last week, and Cameron doesn't seem to have anything to add. And as the Migration Observatory and Dan Knowles have already pointed out, family migration only applies to a relatively small proportion of the overall figures anyway.
This speech contains all the key words that will get those naturally inclined to be hard on immigration roaring their support – “tough limits”, “get a grip”, “something for nothing”, “national interest” and the like. These are also all the words that get those who are anti immigration controls all riled up. But the problem with this speech is that it doesn't contain anything apart from these words. There's nothing really substantive that either supporters or opponents can get hold of. All heat, no light.
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