Let Them All Come: It's Not a Soft Touch Welfare System That Makes Britain a Magnet for Immigrants; It's Our Need for Cheap Labour. (Features)

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In January last year, Barbara Roche -- now, thankfully, a forgotten politician -- published an extraordinary report. Britian, the Home Office minister said, needed 150,000 immigrants from outside the EU every year for the next 20 years. They had to come to keep the economy moving and provide doctors, nurses, computer programmers, engineers, skivvies and navvies. Roche had advanced her career by pushing political asylum-seekers into penury and using every method she could devise to keep genuine refugees out. Yet in her last months at the Home Office, economic reality had forced her to abandon rabble-rousing and propose mass immigration. No one took much notice.

The projections are more startling in the rest of the European Union. At the same time as Roche's report came out, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, then the French interior minister, said that the EU needed 75 million immigrants by 2050. Admittedly, no one can guarantee that these estimates are accurate. But the nature of an honest debate is easy enough to imagine.

It would begin with a blunt statement that Britain and the rest of the European Union have falling birth-rates and an ageing population. The EU will need millions of immigrants if it is to pay the pensions of today's workers. Honesty would then require a discussion about who should be let in. If the government had total control, it might prefer, for …