THERESA May was absolutely right to tell her fellow EU heads of government on Thursday night that the three million foreign EU citizens living in the UK will be able to stay after Brexit.
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Theresa May with European Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels on Thursday
Those EU citizens who have moved here in recent years arrived in good faith, with freedom of movement guaranteeing their right to come.
Many have put down roots with families, friends and jobs, and it is not their fault that we have since decided that we want to leave the EU.
In that sense, and because it is the right thing to do, we have an obligation to the EU citizens who have moved here.
But Mrs May was equally right to say that there must also be a similar guarantee in return from the rest of the EU towards British citizens living abroad. The same arguments apply in reverse.
How telling, however, that the reaction of some EU leaders has been not to welcome this offer but to use it to try to cling to as much power as possible after Brexit.
The EU’s official position is that the residency rights which Mrs May has promised should still be monitored by the European Commission and enforced by the European Court of Justice, even after we have left the EU.
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In other words, despite our once again being an independent, sovereign nation, they are demanding that Brussels and the ECJ should still be able to interfere and dictate UK law.
Do these people never learn? The very reason we are leaving is because we want to be free of the European Commission and the ECJ. We will have made a binding promise to EU residents here which will be enshrined in law and upheld by our courts.
That is more than enough. There are no circumstances in which we can allow the ECJ to hold power over Britain after we have left the EU. But there is one other aspect to this which is also critical: the cut-off point.
To qualify automatically for residence, Mrs May says EU citizens will have to have lived here for five years before a given date, at some point between the official notification of our leaving (March 29 this year) and the day when we actually leave (expected to be March 29, 2019). That’s entirely sensible, to avoid a sudden late surge of migrants over the next 18 months before Brexit.
The EU says, however, that the relevant date should be the day we leave. But the timing of Mrs May’s announcement could hardly have been better chosen because it came on the very day when it was revealed that the population rose last year by 538,000 – largely as a result of immigration.
Nothing better illustrates the issue that has to be dealt with.
So although we should be generous to those migrants who came here entirely legally, it is vital that we get a grip on the number of people who are allowed to come and join them when we once again take control of immigration policy.
I believe that immigration has been and will continue to be a good thing. It helps employers, it has benefited us culturally and it refreshes us as a nation. But while immigration is indeed a good thing, uncontrolled immigration is getting out of hand.
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Last year’s population rise was the steepest for nearly 70 years, the equivalent of a city the size of Bradford.
But this is largely par for the course nowadays. Between mid-2005 and mid-2016, our population increased by just over five million, at a growth rate varying between 0.6 and 0.8 per cent. The UK population now stands officially at 65.6 million.
And don’t forget that these are the official estimates.
Only last week I wrote here about the huge levels of illegal immigration the Home Office refuses to admit to.
This is not merely unsustainable. It is also profoundly undemocratic since there has never been any national debate – let alone a consensus – around such huge increases in our population.
It would be one thing if this was the result of so-called “natural change” – the number of births minus the number of deaths. But the figures show that only around a third of the population rise (35.8 per cent) is from natural change.
The rest is accounted for by migration. This has profound consequences on society, such as the burden on public services such as schools and the NHS through to social care services which are already in crisis with strains on public spending.
Just look at social care. Eighteen per cent of the population is now over 65 and as we saw in the election campaign there is no remote agreement as to how to deliver, let alone pay for, increasing demand.
This is relevant because migrants age like everyone else, and need to be looked after like everyone else.
There is also the wider issue of identity and culture. While immigration may be a good thing in moderation, on the current scale it risks causing huge problems of integration.
This is one reason why it is so wrong-headed for Remainers to float the idea of staying in the single market.
A fundamental pre-condition of membership is free movement – the very problem that has stopped us controlling immigration and which helped fuel the desire for Brexit.
When we leave the EU, we simply have to get to grips with our borders.
There really is no choice.
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http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/820825/Theresa-May-Brexit-EU-citizens-new-arrivals
