Immigration minister, Mark Harper, has given the British public the strongest hint yet that he plans to revive the ‘go home or face arrest’ mobile billboards he controversially trialled earlier this year.
Speaking on BBC TV’s Question Time, Mr Harper said he failed to “see any problem with saying to people who have no right to be in the United Kingdom that they can’t be here anymore”.
Question Time host, David Dimbleby, who chairs the weekly debate, asked Mr Harper about the UK Home Office’s decision to send mobile poster boards through six London boroughs where large numbers of immigrants, both legal and illegal, are thought to live. The adverts, carried through the streets on vans, carried pictures of a pair of handcuffs and a warning that illegal immigrants should ‘go home or face arrest’.
The campaign caused a considerable furore, leading to over 400 complaints about them to the Advertising Standards Authority. It was dubbed “stupid and offensive” by Lib Dem business secretary Vince Cable, and questioned by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Many commentators claimed the posters were ‘racist’ and ‘nasty’ and likely to cause suspicion towards and unease amongst genuine immigrants. The ASA ruled that the billboards may have been ‘distasteful’ but were not ‘offensive’, while admonishing the Home Office about the misleading nature of displayed statistics, referring to a supposed tally of ‘arrests this week’.
After Mr Harper defended the campaign, Dimbleby asked him whether he would sanction an extension of the advertising campaign in other locations outside London. Mr Harper said that the government was evaluating what effect the initiative had had. If analysis of the data proved that the pilot scheme had been cost-effective, he said, the government would “keep rolling it out”. He added that the government’s policies were about “welcoming people to the country who contribute and deterring those that don’t”.
The debate was held in the run up to January 1, 2014, on the expiry of seven years of ‘transitional controls’ that currently prevent a predicted large influx of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, who joined the EU in 2007, from arriving in Britain. A questioner asked whether the UK would be able to absorb more immigrants that will be free to come and live and work here. Romanians and Bulgarians can already, unlike nationals of other Countries, also apply for UK Highly Skilled Migrant Program visas if they have the required skills and qualifications.
The purpose of the transitional controls is to give time for the economies of new member states to benefit from EU membership, in the hope that these economies will experience economic growth, and provide more, and better paid jobs so that, by the time the transition controls are lifted, the number of people wanting to leave will be reduced. That embargo will end at midnight on 31st December 2013, while six and a half years remain of transitional controls on Croatians, who joined the EU on July 1 this year.
Commentators who fear an unmanageable deluge of eastern Europeans point to the fact that since Poland joined the EU in 2004, it is believed that over one million Poles have settled in the UK. They also say that the economies of Romania and Bulgaria have not converged with the rest of the EU and therefore many people from both countries will take the opportunity to move to the UK.
Diane James of the UK Independence Party, an anti-immigration and anti-European Union party, said that no one had any idea how many people would come from Bulgaria and Romania to the UK when the current transitional controls expire. She accused Mr Harper of a failure to deal with uncontrolled immigration into the UK.
Mr Harper said that under half of immigration into the UK is from within the EU. He said that the UK’s Coalition government has reduced immigration from outside the EU by a third since 2010 and that a higher proportion of those coming are now skilled workers and students. He said that the government was taking steps to cut immigration from outside the EU because it recognised the pressures that uncontrolled immigration placed on local housing and services.
