Curbing immigration is 'sawing off the branch you're sitting on' says MP
Labour MP Jim Dowd criticises the government's line on immigration, arguing that it is harmful to business and the economy
The Conservatives' election promise to curb immigration is a threat to the UK's economy and is like "sawing off the branch you're sitting on," according to Jim Dowd, Labour MP for Lewisham West.
Dowd told Computing that the government should be looking to encourage the brightest and best people to migrate to the UK.
"We want them to come here as students. We want to attract and retain them, but the most skilled people are the most mobile, everybody wants them."
London's hotbed of technology start-ups in the East End, dubbed "Silicon Roundabout", has had difficulties in recruiting sufficient numbers of quality staff to fill its available job roles.
"It's becoming increasingly difficult for business to recruit talented developers, which are the lifeblood of every digital start-up," said Senior. "At the current rate of growth, we may end up in a situation where we have more tech entrepreneurs than staff available with skills to help them grow."
Before the recent election, David Cameron pledged to put a cap on immigration, a promise the coalition government failed to fulfill. Dowd argued that this cap should never have been in place.
"I disagree strongly with this government's approach that you can put an arbitrary figure on immigration," said Dowd. "Cameron talked about [limiting immigration to] tens of thousands, but years later it was three times that.
"And Cameron has said again that [the cap is] what he wants. You can't put cap on it, you need a rigorous system which is applied fairly but properly, and enforced. That will automatically reduce the number [of immigrants], the appropriate number will emerge once you have a system in place."
Dowd also referred to the well-publicised issues of talented foreign students studying in the UK, but then being denied work permits.
"We fall over ourselves to get foreign students to study here, then when they say they want to stay [after their studies] we then make it as hard as possible for that to happen. We need to have a system to assess that," said Dowd.
He went on to discuss what he called "the cluster effect", with financial services firms clustering together in the City of London to create a hub, as one example.
The same phenomenon is seen with technology firms flooding to Silicon Valley in the US, and to a smaller extent in London's Silicon Roundabout.
"Silicon Valley has a huge reputation for innovation and invention. It's like a marketplace, and the best marketplace by definition tends to be the largest."
But can Britain compete when it is already so far behind in terms of scale? Dowd thinks so, and added that alongside a sensible immigration policy, the country should look to train its own people for the "knowledge economy".
"We can compete, we have to make the effort. Britain's days as a heavy industrial manufacturer are gone and they're not going to return. We're now very much into services and other activities. We need to have a knowledge economy. The people who feel most threatened by immigration are the unskilled, because the opportunities for the unskilled are limited and declining. So we need to encourage our own people to upskill."