Immigration: Why Did it Rise?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Immigration to the United Kingdom remains at a near-record high - but what are the political decisions and global trends which led to its rise in the first place?
Unprecedented levels of immigration motivated many Leave voters in the EU referendum and in this week's programme David Aaronovitch charts a short history of immigration over the past two decades.
Joined by a panel of experts bringing unique insight into the issue, they explore claims that the Labour party wanted to increase immigration to build support, through to the causes of the asylum spike in the early 2000s, and the impact of an expanding European Union.
CONTRIBUTORS
Ed Owen, Former Special Advisor to Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw
Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford
David Goodhart, Journalist and commentator, former director of the thinktank Demos
Tony Smith, former Director General of the UK Border Force
Producer: Richard Fenton-Smith Researcher: Kirsteen Knight.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before during and after the European referendum, |
| 0:03.0 | the issue of who can come to the UK to live and to work |
| 0:06.0 | has been central to public concerns. |
| 0:09.0 | What is the recent history of immigration? |
| 0:13.0 | Why is it running at record levels and who are the immigrants? |
| 0:18.0 | Step inside the briefing room and we'll find out. |
| 0:23.8 | Inside, round the table, under the charts, |
| 0:26.0 | I have three experts on the recent history of immigration and its effects. |
| 0:30.5 | If you'd like to introduce yourselves and then we'll get stuck in. |
| 0:34.4 | My name is David Goodhart. |
| 0:35.9 | I'm a journalist and think tanker currently at |
| 0:39.4 | Policy Exchange, the think tank where I run a unit called the Demography Immigration and |
| 0:44.8 | Integration Unit. I've been interested in immigration issues for 10 years or so and |
| 0:49.0 | wrote a book called The British Dream, successes and failures of post-war immigration |
| 0:53.2 | that came out in 2013. |
| 0:55.1 | My name is Madeline Sumpion. I'm the director of the Migration Observatory at the University |
| 0:59.2 | of Oxford, and our mission is to provide completely non-political analysis of migration policy |
| 1:04.7 | and data in the UK. I'm Ed Owen. I was advisor to Jack Straw's Home Secretary and then |
| 1:10.1 | Foreign Secretary between 1997 and 2005. |
| 1:13.9 | That's my panel, for that many people worried about rising immigration. Much of the responsibility, |
| 1:19.2 | they think, lies with the Labour government which came to power in 1997. It's even been said |
| 1:24.5 | that it was a Labour strategy to increase immigration as a way of shoring up its support on the premise that immigrants were more likely to vote for them. |
... |
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