The Politics of Immigration: Then and Now

We've heard so much recently about how the economic crisis has changed the rules of the political game. But it is probably more true to say that the crisis has exacerbated existing trends. This is even true of the immigration debate. Since the newly installed UK Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas, said that the crisis means that government has to get tough on immigration, the commonly accepted wisdom has been that until now the government has been naively liberal on immigration. Only new realities have forced it to change course.
Melanie McDonagh takes this line in today's Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/10/20/do2005.xml

However, as Nathalie Rothschild points out on Spiked today, the rhetoric on immigration betrays a striking similarity with the pre-crash era. There is, for example, the environmental argument about 'upper limits' on the population these islands can sustain, the proposition that immigration has to be controlled to preserve community cohesion, and the utilisation of anti-racism to justify this. Rothschild compares Woolas's argument that British workers should be given preferential treatment to the National Front's old slogan 'British jobs for British workers', but Gordon Brown had adopted this slogan long before the economic downturn.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5832/

All this begs the question of how we explain the government's current policy. While there are continuities, it is not wrong to say that this is clearly a U-turn (as McDonagh points out the government is proposing to close its own temporary workers programmes). A key factor is anxiety over community cohesion. There is already a widespread belief that different racial groups cannot be trusted to interact without being monitored, but with the economy in crisis, the government has panicked assuming that if it didn't take action tensions could boil over. But this could be a self fulfilling prophecy.