A day or so after I posted about Frank Field and immigration, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office. "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said.
Now that the leader of the Labour party is admitting unrestricted immigration might not have been such a good idea after all, perhaps the bien pensant will stop calling those of us with reservations about it racists.
Incidentally, when Miliband implies the economy has successfully absorbed migrants he's only half right - most of them got jobs, but that was at the expense of unemployed British people, a disproportionate number of whom have black or brown skins.
Actually that's one of the strangest ironies of the issue - cheerleaders for immigration have always enjoyed the see-I'm-not-a-racist glow which comes with it, deploring us provincials for their alienation from metrocentric multiculturalism. But actually most of the immigrants were white, and many of the people who suffered, either because they were shut out of the jobs market or because their pay levels languished as the liberal middle-classes forged ahead, were black. More bizarrely still, the people most enthusiastic about immigration tended to be the same people jumping up and down most frenetically about the rise in inequality under the Blair / Brown governments.
To return to Miliband, some of the "communities" (oh Lord) who couldn't "adapt" were the out-of-work community, who found themselves competing with migrants for jobs. Then there was the low-paid community, who found that an increase in the supply of labour meant that employers didn't have to compete for staff by raising wages.
Yes, immigration increases inequality and is bad for black British people. Who knew?
