Heh, saw that just now and was planning on writing a rebuttal but you beat me to it. Your point about it concentrating on heavily on the static effects rather than the dynamic impact is a keen observation, I didn’t notice it before.
Immigration is, and ever will be, a tender topic for discussion. The House of Lords and the Conservative Party have made no attempt to dispel their negative stigma today in demanding for a cap on immigration. In the television interview with Sir Andrew Green (Migrant Watch), he actually underestimated the number of emigrants by 300% (he said 100k when the actual figure is 400k - perhaps he just “misspoke") and asked for a roughly equal number of immigrants as emigrants, so that the country can have a “stable” population, i.e. a net immigration of zero. Danny Sriskandarajah (Institute of Public Policy) also picked him up on the point that if you want to build more houses to prevent house price inflation, the best way of doing that is to allow immigrants to come in and build them for you - they’re the net contributors in terms of housing.
Even though the £6billion does not account for much after being made per capita, Liam Byrne does still insist that we have a triple of: rising employment, higher average wages and greater productivity, which he attributes to our liberal immigration policy. The strain on public services does exist, but immigrant workers pay tax too and contribute to the system just as much. Here’s a great interview with Philippe Legrain: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/the-case-for-open-immigration-a-qa-with-philippe-legrain/
Finally, on the points system: sure it’s better than a cap (which I believe to be morally repugnant) but I am still deeply sceptical about its effectiveness. How is a bureaucratic, centralised system supposed to respond efficiently to consumer demand? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7242095.stm This amusing report last month has graver implications. The state doesn’t have a clue about what people want, and by rigging the system towards EU migrants, the industries requiring Asian migrants are losing out as a consequence. If there was a points system put in place, Monsieur Sarkozy’s father wouldn’t have been allowed into La République, and we wouldn’t be seeing Obama making a bid for presidency either.
