Immigration may decide this election, so why are politicians still not really engaging with it?

My friend Emma had an argument with her girlfriend recently. Dzina grew up in Poland and came to the UK to study two years ago. Emma grew up in Bradford, so she’s familiar with the racial tension that the area is infamous for. She also spent a large portion of her working life doing the kind of manual work which is often taken by immigrants. Emma, like many people in this country, believes that it is unfair that foreign workers are widely employed in these jobs, pushing out English people. Her argument is that migrant workers, particularly those from EU member states such as Poland and Lithuania, enter the country for a few years, during which they work punishingly long hours for minimum wage (or less) before returning to their home nations with their savings. British people taking a similar job have no such escape plan. Emma wanted Dzina to admit that this was profoundly unfair.

I must confess that I always find these arguments uncomfortable. I’m very much in favour of the European Union and I have a familiar strain of middle class guilt from the fact that I’m English and relatively privileged. I’m far too much of a bleeding heart liberal to begrudge migrant workers from poorer countries for taking jobs I myself would never dream of doing. But this is clearly a hot-button issue. It’s a major reason why the BNP and UKIP are making electoral gains and racial tension continues to simmer across the nation. Writing people like Emma off as ignorant racists (she isn’t) is foolhardy, and the failure of left-wing, pro-European politicians to address the issue in plain-speaking terms has only served to fuel the resentment.

The infamous ‘Nick Griffin’ episode of Question Time was a prime example of this. Griffin has made capital out of exploiting the fears of English workers who perceive that their jobs and way of life are threatened by immigration. His party’s policies are simplistic easy-answers based on prejudice and misinformation. They bear no scrutiny whatsoever. Major party elites Jack Straw, Sayeeda Warsi and Chris Huhne were momentarily united in disparaging his dubious past-assertions and his racist beliefs. Quite right too, we may think. But I couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t something of a missed opportunity. Everybody knows Nick Griffin is a nationalist and a racist. Due to the tabloid-fuelled controversy neither he nor the show would ever have such a significant public platform in the foreseeable future (ratings were almost triple what the show usually attracts). Here was an opportunity for the mainstream parties to engage in a really accessible discussion about immigration in front of a massive audience. Unfortunately Jack Straw’s waffle did little to illuminate the matter, giving a distinct impression of preaching to the converted.

The problem is that for many potential BNP voters, and perhaps even more so with the comparatively mild UKIP, outright racism isn’t the issue. Racist thinking is a symptom, not a disease. Encouraging people to feel guilty for having a problem with migrant workers without tackling the major problems in employment law (not a race issue in itself) or bringing proper attention to the many benefits immigrantion brings to our country does nothing but breed further resentment.

The fact is that many employers are more likely to employ immigrant workers than British, because they are generally more willing to work harder for longer hours and for less pay than their British counterparts. We saw evidence of this in the recent BBC documentary ‘The Day The Immigrants Went Home’, in which unemployed white Britons were given the jobs of Polish field and factory workers for three days, with predictably disappointing results.

Adult workers cannot be forced to work more than a 48-hour week on average, but there is an option to opt out of this limit. This is technically voluntary and you should never be discriminated against for refusing to waive your rights, but in reality employers abuse this on a regular basis, as Emma is all too aware. Apply for a factory job, refuse the opt out, don’t get the job. This is the primary reason for the dominance of migrant workers in these jobs. They’re not superhuman, they simply have fewer perceived options. Even the most unqualified British national can probably hope for something better than a 70+ hour working week of incredible tedium and often considerable manual labour. I have faith that for most people the dole really isn’t an aspiration, but if the choice came between jobseekers and that kind of working week, I know what I’d choose…

The minimum wage has done so much to improve the lot of all workers. But it doesn’t go far enough. It needs to be much more strictly monitored so that all employers are sticking to it. More importantly still, the opt-out clause needs to be given a serious and thorough review so that no worker, whatever their background, is expected to work extreme hours just to obtain a job at all. If companies need to be operational for longer days to keep production up then shift work needs to be allocated accordingly. This seems incredibly simple, yet I’ve never heard a politician discussing it. Perhaps if they did there would be more understanding of the job market, more equality of employment opportunity at every level and the racially motivated fear-mongering of the far right would fall on deaf ears.