Immigrants help to make London the great place it is

Does this sound familiar? A political backlash against the wave of immigration; East Europeans competing with native Londoners for unskilled jobs, pushing up rents, and swamping the schools.

As one Conservative London MP put it: “English families are turned out to make room for foreign invaders. The rates are burdened with the education of thousands of foreign children.”

Actually the MP — Sir William Eden Evans-Gordon — was speaking in 1900, and he meant Jews. They, and London, did fine. It grew, and it boomed. We even hosted a successful Olympics in 1908.

When my parents moved to London in the early Seventies, immigration was at a low ebb. The result: the inner-city population shrank by 20%. It’s easy for today’s Londoners, living in one of the world’s great global cities, to forget that only 30-odd years ago London (like New York) faced falling population, rising crime, and no obvious replacement for vanishing manufacturing jobs; it seemed doomed to permanent decline.

Globalisation and, central to that, immigration, saved the city. People born abroad now make up half of Londoners between 20 and 40. Immigrants form an essential part of the workforce at all skill levels — from supermarkets and sandwich shops to law firms, tech start-ups and research institutes like my own. London’s recent economic growth has been driven by immigration; without immigration it would come to a screeching halt. Immigration makes London, by far, the most productive part of the UK.

What about the downsides? Congestion and pressure on housing, definitely. But let’s not exaggerate. I live in Islington, now the most densely populated borough in the country. But Islington’s population has only just regained its 1971 level. A century ago, twice as many people lived here.

Schools? London schools make a virtue out of the necessity of coping with high turnover and many pupils for whom English isn’t a first language. They have improved so rapidly over the past decade that kids in our poorest neighbourhoods do better than the average pupil living outside the capital.

David Goodhart, who is speaking in the Evening Standard debate, claims London’s diversity conceals “sundown segregation; people mixing during the day but going home to quite separate neighbourhoods”. Really? One in eight London babies is of mixed heritage. Not only do most Londoners not go home to ethnically separate neighbourhoods, many don’t go home to separate beds.

To say that immigration is essential to London — economically, socially, and culturally — is simply stating the obvious. The question is how we manage immigration in London’s interests. Here’s where recent policy has gone in entirely the wrong direction.

We attract hundreds of thousands of foreign students to this country every year. Some want to stay — get a job, start a company, maybe make a life. By definition, these are people who not only have higher education but also good English and, in most cases, the desire and ability to integrate into this country.