SINCE Gordon has, inadvertently, placed immigration centre stage in the campaign, I thought I would follow up a brief conversation I had on Twitter last night about the LibDems’ proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants.

I originally thought that Daniel “the Fink” Finkelstein had nailed the central weakness of the plan when he wrote:

How exactly does Nick Clegg’s amnesty work?

The central argument he advances for it is that we can’t deport these illegals because we don’t know who they are or where they are.

He gets pretty impatient if pressed on this.

But if we don’t know who they are and where they are, then how do we know that applicants have been here for 10 years and therefore qualify for amnesty?

I thought this was a rather clever and incisive argument that rather blew the LibDems’ policy out of the water. I realised I was wrong when I read this blogpost from LibDem Ben Rathe:

The vast majority of illegal immigrants in this country initially entered legally and then became illegal once they were already here. Broadly, these cases fall into two categories. Either they are asylum seekers whose application was turned down and have chosen to go on the run rather than be deported, or they are people here on short term visas (Students, travellers etc) and are ‘overstayers’ in Britain. Don’t let the BNP convince you that we’ve got hordes of people coming into Britain hidden in lorries and vans, because it simply doesn’t happen like that. So establishing how long people have been here would, in the vast majority of cases, be pretty easy

Ben’s right on that one. However, my own (and Labour’s) objection to the LibDem policy is not its impracticability; it is its utter lacking in any kind of fairness or political sense.

I debated this issue on Radio Scotland last week with Jo Swinson, the LibDem candidate in East Dunbartonshire and a member of Clegg’s front bench. The amnesty would not be automatic, she assured us; it would apply only to those who had not broken the law during their illegal stay in the UK. I pointed out to her that staying in the UK illegally is itself a serious breach of criminal law. Well, we didn’t mean that kind of law-breaking, obviously, she didn’t reply.

But more importantly, the amnesty is a bonkers way of addressing the issue of illegal immigration. The amnesty would be a one-off, the LibDems insist, specifically calculated to address the status of the many thousands of illegal immigrants in the UK today, not those who might arrive in the future. So what happens when those currently living here legally on visas which have not yet expired see what happens to others who have been rewarded for breaking the rules? Will that encourage them to return to their homelands when their visas expire? Seriously?

And when the number of illegals starts to rise again, thanks to the “one-off” amnesty, the usual suspects on the “progressive” left will demand yet another “one-off” amnesty. And a LibDem Home Secretary would, of course, comply. And after the next “one-off” amnesty…

On Thursday, I Tweeted that the reaction among electors in Glasgow South to GB’s comments about Gillian Duffy wasn’t as hostile or as negative as I had feared. Yesterday, doing streetwork in a busy part of the constituency, I can’t say that was the case. People were angry and felt that they, along with Mrs Duffy, were being accused of bigotry because of the concerns they had about immigration.

I previously blogged about the need for the “political classes” (I hate that expression) not to close off debate on immigration by shouting “racist!” at everyone who wasn’t overjoyed at current high levels of immigration. It’s commonplace to overstate the threat to our democracy posed by the “rise” of the BNP (“German Nazism started with the election of two MEPs” the Daily Mash headline ran last year). But there’s no doubt that many, many ordinary working class people are resentful about the changes they’ve witnessed in their local communities as a result of the arrival of new immigrants in large numbers. The resentment arises from a belief that they’ve not been consulted about these changes and certainly haven’t given their permission for them. And when politicians dismiss those concerns, that resentment, perfectly understandably, increases.

In all of this, the LibDems are by far the most out of touch and patronising of all the parties. Their response to concerns about immigration? Encourage more of it. Their solution to illegal over-stayers? Reward them with UK citizenship.

The British, like most other nations, are not fundamentally racist in nature. We are fair-minded, tolerant and welcoming. But we also expect everyone to play by the rules and we don’t think that those who successfully evade the authorities for long enough in some surreal game of hide and seek should be rewarded after the government has counted to ten and opened its eyes.

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