My new piece for the Telegraph is on immigration. It turns on the distinction between people who enter the country by following the rules, and those who don’t:

Immigrants into the UK fall into different broad categories. Rich people buying an exclusive UK pad. Foreigners ready to invest their money to open a business here. People from EU countries looking for jobs and opportunities that don’t exist where they came from: not just poorer Poles and Latvians ready to work in coffee shops, but also better-off French people fleeing France’s stupid tax laws. Students from around the world who sign up for our excellent higher education system, some of whom settle here after their courses finish. Foreigners who marry Brits. International experts needed for specific skills. Foreigners who persuade the system that they deserve political asylum.

All these categories and others like them enter the country, in principle,according to rules. Some of these rules are fiendishly complicated, to try to prevent systematic abuse of loopholes. Plus sanctions against people who break the rules are hard to enforce swiftly and fairly. Nonetheless there are rules, and that makes a difference.

However, plenty of people try to enter the country outside the rules, not least poor people from developing countries desperate to smuggle themselves into the UK illegally by ship or plane. See pitched battles at Calais as crowds of Africans try to cross the Channel. A Labour MP told me how he had used video footage to try to convince the then Labour home secretary that large numbers of African immigrants were entering the UK illegally via the container port in his constituency, only to be told that this could not be happening: such ports were not places where passengers disembarked. The scale and impact of illegal immigration are by definition far harder to assess with even modest precision…

… The common-sense proposition that anyone who enters our country illegally should not have free rider advantages at the expense of people who have followed the rules is busily denounced as “unfair” or “discriminatory” or “racist”. A huge supposedly progressive push on many fronts simultaneously is presenting ‘migrants’ (legal or illegal) as one supremely noble category of people who a priori deserve equal rights, benefits, free housing and everything else. Rules designed to stop abuses of marriage or family requirements are under attack on specious human rights grounds. Even the phrase “illegal immigrant” is rejected. No one is a foreigner any more.

This way of looking at these issues is fundamentally unfair and creates inevitable public unease. If there are “healthy” levels of immigration, there must be “unhealthy” levels too, and ways to enforce them (a proposition that few on the Left will now accept).

In short, in the face of planetary migration pressures, every country needs robust rules to maintain basic social cohesion. UK and European and American democratic politics in the coming decades will turn on how this is managed.

As the Rochester by-election result, political tensions in Italy and the Obama mass amnesty in their different ways all show, the Western world as a whole is struggling to maintain minimal political consensus on how to manage these problems.

This piece appears under the Telegraph News heading. It seems that their Blog section where I have written previously is mutating into something else, so keep your eyes peeled for my articles in different Telegraph places.

As always the comments are a mixed treasure:

I always enjoy reading Charles’s articles. I remember his comments while he was in Poland – in particular I remember his comments at the 2004/5 AGM of the British Polish Chamber of Commerce in which he suggested (using South Korea as an example) that the Us/Uk intervention in Iraq should be considered in a 50 year framework…

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This is a good article, willing to look at how issues like housing and inequality are adversely affected by immigration. I read the Guardian as well as the Telegraph, and writers there just cannot join the dots, although they waste plenty of column inches in other articles bemoaning the housing shortage and growing inequality…

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At least this article actually addresses the issues many of us have been aware of for years and which Liblabcon politicians have totally denied until the situation has reached crisis point. Labour of course deliberately encourage mass uncontrolled immigration – we must never forget…

Quite simply we have to stop it to save ourselves. Humanely but firmly and decisively. We have to close the door. What else can we do – just keep on giving way to the constant pressure on our borders? The message has to get out to the third world – Europe is not an open door you will not be allowed just to come and settle here, you will be sent home. Work permits for some for fixed periods yes, access to benefits permanent residence and British Passports, no

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It may be lost on the author but there are some of us old enough to remember it was perfectly possible to work and visit overseas with a visa. Some of us still do it. Why is it that the MSM and British Political Class can’t be bothered with control of our borders anymore?

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If it is possible to microchip dogs for unique identification it is equally possible to microchip humans. It would be a long term project; but no chip: no benefits, NHS, education, housing, it’s eminently straightforward and one day I could see it happening, given the way the political classes wish to treat us all

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The West is going to end up just like Brazil with a largish, Whiteish, wealthy minority and productive sector who live behind gates; and a mixed race majority who are low income with lots of crime and social disorder. Add in the sectarianism and racial fighting of the Middle East. This is the left’s gift to the West.

And thus the debate, such as it is, unfolds.

What is absolutely clear is that the ruling establishments of this country and of the wider European space (and now the USA too) cannot identify any practical or (worse) philosophical way to limit immigration. It’s this sense of an open-ended process with no real rules that so many people living here quite reasonably find so unsettling.

Bad. Potentially dangerous. Getting worse.