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Thank you for joining us this evening for the spectators panel debate.

We are going to be asking, is it time to offer amnesty to Britain's illegal immigrants?

Now, while I remember, there is a hashtag,

if you want to get involved in the social conversation on social media. It is hashtag spec immigration. And we also have the Spectator Events Twitter account. Now, when it comes to the

theme of this debate, we had a leading article in a recent issue

of The Spectator, which argued, there is an unspoken truth about British life. We have two

classes of citizen. The first of those born or formerly settled here, who have all the rights

and protections of the law. Then there are perhaps a million others who may have lived here

with their families

for years, but without the proper documents. They can be our neighbours, work on our shops,

contribute to our economy. Yet they do not have the same basic protections and are far more vulnerable

to exploitation. These are the so-called illegal immigrants and it's past time to offer them amnesty.

When it comes to addressing how many of these immigrants there are, the Pew Research Centre

estimates that there are between 800,000 to 1.2 million illegal immigrants in the UK. Around

250,000 of that number are thought to have been here for 10 years or longer.

And when we are talking about this amnesty for illegal immigrants, I think the number

vaguely everyone had in mind was a 10-year amnesty.

Boris Johnson was once quite keen on the idea.

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