The movement of people across borders is the political issue of our times. It was central to the election of Donald Trump, twice, and it has driven many voters in Germany, France, the Netherlands and other European countries into the clutches of the far right.
Nearer to home, it was the wedge issue that got Brexit over the line and it appears to have halted, perhaps temporarily, the rise of Sinn Fein in the Republic.
Modern communication methods and ease of travel mean that migration between countries and continents is easier than ever before and huge numbers are attracted, naturally, to the richest and most liberal countries in the world.
Not too many immigrants seem to be attracted to China despite its status as the second largest economy in the world.
And you can migrate to the oil rich nations of the Middle East where you’ll be welcomed as a guest worker, but you’ll never be a citizen and you and your dependents will never have the same rights as the locals.
This two-part BBC documentary gives a comprehensive account of British failure over the last three decades but it was remiss not to mention that they haven’t struggled alone.
I guess it had to start somewhere and Immigration: How British Politics Failed sets the clock to zero at the election of the Tony Blair government in 1997.
Blair insists he didn’t have an ‘open door policy’ but the figures tell a different story.
Asylum claims to the UK were shy of 36,000 people in 1997 but had risen to more than 84,000 by the end of Labour’s first term.
Things became more strained in 2005 when the Blair government decided not to impose any restrictions on migration from new EU member states from Eastern Europe and the issue rose further up the agenda.
The Eurozone crisis of 2009 didn‘t help, and Angela Merkel’s 2015 open door brought further pressure across the continent.
One policy wonk in the Cameron government told how every weekend they got the results of an opinion poll and there was only one week in his time in Downing Street when immigration was not at number one.
Governments, Labour and Conservative, reacted to the public’s concern and made things worse.
Andrew Green, a former diplomat and the founder of Migrant Watch, was an influential figure with the Conservative Party and founded the now mainstreamed idea of ‘net migration’.
It seems to have been an effort to dispel any notions of racism against the campaign by focusing singularly on head count. Therefore ‘net migration’ was the number of immigrants arriving in a given time less the number of those who left the country.
This number was alighted on by the Conservatives as a useful campaigning issue but proved disastrous when they chose a target, suggested by Green, of a 100,000 increase per year.
Thus, Cameron’s pledge to get immigration down to the “tens of thousands rather and hundreds of thousands.”
The problem was that it seemed impossible to achieve and this in many ways led to the rise of UKIP and Cameron’s subsequent pledge to hold a referendum on EU membership which Nigel Farage had identified as the source of much of the migration.
Farage bookend the two-hour documentary with the now MP admitting that he conflated the issues for tactical reasons.
There were many other disasters along the way. Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” pledge made him sound like the BNP, Theresa May’s “hostile environment” to illegal migrants led directly to the Windrush Scandal and Boris Johnson’s ill-thought out “Australian-style points system” brought in more migrants than ever before.
And Farage, who else, got the last, prophetic word: “Just you watch, this issue is going to get bigger and bigger.”
We all know he’s talking about plans for himself.
