Because such things are so obvious, it requires a concerted effort to pretend they are untrue. One example of just such an effort is the report that was a foundation document for the wave of mass migration during the Blair government. ‘Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis’ was completed in 2000, a joint production of the Home Office Economics and Resource Analysis Unit and the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit (even their names seeming designed to bore any opponents to inattention). Both entities were staffed with people already known to be in favour of mass immigration and therefore clearly intended to provide ‘intellectual ballast’ to support the existing views of ministers.1

Among the claims of this seminal report was that ‘overall, migrants have little aggregate effect on native wages or employment’. One of the ways it argued this was by painting exceptional migrants as being the norm and simply insisting that ‘There is little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration.’ It went on: ‘Levels of entrepreneurship and self-employment also appear to be high among migrants (and higher among migrants in the UK than those elsewhere in Europe). For example, it has been estimated by Le Figaro that 150,000 French entrepreneurs have moved to the UK since 1995 (attracted in part by better transport links through the Channel Tunnel). These have included internet and other high-tech ventures, one example cited was a computer design firm that had relocated to Ashford, Kent.’

After decades of immigration from the third world, to paint a French high-tech entrepreneur as a typical migrant requires a considerable level of dishonesty. Most people who came to Britain in the period after the Second World War were not highly educated but poorly educated and from poor societies: that was why they wanted to better their lot by coming here. And among those who had qualifications many were, in any case, entering a society where these qualifications were not recognised as having parity and so they had to start down the chain in their profession. But the only way to present migrants as contributing not just equally but actually more than those already working and paying taxes in Britain is if we talk almost exclusively about highly educated, high net-worth individuals from first-world countries. The cliché of the ‘average immigrant’ being an economic boon for the country only works when such exceptions are made to appear as though they are the rule.

All efforts to make an economic case for mass immigration rely on this trick. Among those to have used it are EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström and UN Representative Peter Sutherland. In a 2012 piece they suggested that unless Europe opens its borders to mass migration, ‘Entrepreneurs, migrants with Ph.Ds’ and others will all be ‘flocking to places like Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, China, and India’, thus leaving Europe to be a more impoverished place.2