Mass immigration is our choice. Don't blame people for wanting a better life.

We should love it when people set out to better their lives. What isn’t a good thing is the exploitation of poor Africans and displaced Asians in order to sustain economies built on cheap labour

We hear a great deal about how people who think there’s too much immigration are racist because most of the people flocking to our shores in the hope of a better life are not white. And we shouldn’t blame the immigrants for wanting that better life, we should blame the exploiters for dangling the carrot of betterment in front of poor Africans and displaced Arabs. The exploiters we usually hear about are the front line of exploitation: the gangs with a ready supply of inflatables and leaky dinghies charging huge sums to ferry people across the short sea crossing to Lampedusa, across the Straits of Gibraltar or from Mali to the Canary Islands. Plus, seeing I’m in England writing this, across the English Channel.

Every part of those migrant journeys is marked by a stream of men demanding payment - from smugglers to border guards, everyone along that journey is making money from the flotsam of humanity heading to sunlit uplands. Even the kindly humanitarians fishing for migrants in the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico are exploiting those migrants by using their plight to fund nice offices, good salaries and a route to greater power and influence for the NGOcracy. They are joined by politicians, left, right and centre, using those seeking a better life as a cruel political football in the chase for indigenous votes. “Refugees welcome” reads the sign held by a centrist politician in her living room. “Invasion” croaks another politician opportunistically filmed standing on the cliffs at Dover. And on the TV another politician accuses these politicians of being hypocrites or racists depending on the flavour of the show and who that politician thinks is most likely to vote for them.

There is, however, another equally grim form of exploitation. The use of migrants as cannon fodder for a struggling economy. Not just the entitled and guilt-ridden rich moaning that the price of their salad from Pret-a-Manger has gone up or that you can’t get an au pair any more. No it is business people telling us that everything will crumble away if we don’t continue, like a sort of parasitic sponge, to encourage those Arabs, South Asians and Africans to come to Britain:

“Research from employee relocation platform Jobbatical found that international talent is still hugely valued by business leaders, with 58% of organisations with 500 employees or more stating that they rely on migrant workers to solve skills shortages.

“Its survey of more than 200 senior business professionals found that 53% still see hiring international workers as a key part of their long-term strategy, despite the tightening of the immigration rules. This rises to 71% in healthcare, 62% in finance and 58% in IT and telecoms.”

I know those businesses - and the universities - will talk about ‘skilled’ migration but the reality of immigration is that most of these workers are employed in hospitality, transport, health, tourism and agriculture. These are not high skilled workers but rather they are cheap labour used to keep down the cost of your mum’s care home charges, the price of sunday dinner at the nice hotel, and the charge for delivering your takeaway. That this is essentially exploitative (as well as holding back innovation is all these sectors) but this had never struck me until I read a report from the UK Ministry of Defence:

“...Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence reported that Russia has intensified attempts to recruit Africans to fight in Ukraine. In particular these recruitment efforts focused on the central African countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and Uganda. Russia is reportedly offering a sign-up bonus of $2,000, monthly pay of $2,200 and the promise of a Russian passport.”

Here Russia is literally recruiting cannon fodder but, while this is an especially egregious example, there’s not so much difference between this recruitment and UK delivery companies, fast food chains and care homes wanting to keep the flow of immigration so as to prop up their otherwise failing business models.

This, unlike the poor kids suckered into getting shot in a muddy Ukrainian field, does offer betterment to a few fortunate migrants. But it also provides the green light to millions of other poor people across Africa and Asia. It is hard to blame migrants when the governments and businesses of the developed world and, in particular, Europe seem to have economic and social policies predicated on there being a continuing stream of new migrants into the continent.

Harm de Blij, the Dutch geographer, described in his book, “The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalization’s Rough Landscape”, how what he calls “flat-earthers” sit in shining bubbles of prosperity outside of which are millions of other humans desperately fighting to get into those bubbles. de Blij’s “flat-earthers” are those people who bemoan the lack of domestic servants, complain about takeaway charges and refuse to tip a Turkish waiter. Other names have been coined for these people: ‘anywheres’, ‘metropolitan elites’, ‘cosmopolites’. But these people have the wherewithal to set themselves apart from these masses while enjoying the benefits of a Kashmiri cleaning their Dubai apartment, a Sri Lankan building their Singapore offices, or a Malian delivering their evening meal.

Migration is a consequence of this steep difference between international ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. And is driven by the exploitation of poverty in Kashmir, Sri Lanka and Mali to oil the wheels of our economies. Or worse, to provide cannon fodder, in the manner of Gordon Dickson’s ‘Friendlies’, for a war some rich country is losing. We know what makes countries richer (it isn’t having people with get up and go getting up and going) because all of the rich nations were once as poor - poorer even - than those African, Latin American and Asian nations.

Too often people criticise immigrants - violent, the wrong religion, ‘orcs’, ‘invaders’, ‘cultural enrichment’ - when the terrible truth is that they are here because we want cheap care for granny, won’t pay a fair cost to have a pizza delivered and want up-market restaurants at mid-market prices. Then we complain about immigrants rather than about the manner in which the great cities of the west, filled with de Blij’s flat-earthers, act like parasites on the world’s poorest people and the world’s poorest places. It is our fault not the immigrants’ fault. It is the business models of our economy that are at fault, not immigrants. And it is our governments’ enthusiasm for grateful immigrants that should shoulder the blame, not those migrants.

Immigration remains a good thing. We should love it when people set out to better their lives. What isn’t a good thing, however, is the exploitation - legally and illegally - of poor Africans and displaced Asians in order to sustain economies built on cheap labour. And then to blame those Africans and Asians who make that possible for coming here.