STEPHEN GLOVER: Why won't our politicians admit that the housing crisis is being fuelled by LEGAL immigration?

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History is full of examples of governments concentrating their effort in one direction, only to discover too late in the day that the real threat comes from elsewhere.

The Maginot Line was famously a massive system of fortifications built by the French in the 1930s, intended to provide an impregnable defence against German attack. The Germans simply went round it, and invaded France via the Low Countries.

In matters of immigration — an issue that still matters to many people — the Government has devoted all its energies to stopping migrants in small boats from coming across the English Channel.

I applaud its efforts, and support the recently passed Illegal Migration Act, which gives the Government greater powers to deport those who enter the country illegally and (if the Supreme Court agrees, which it is yet to do) to send some of them to Rwanda.

Rishi Sunak has been admirably focused on this problem. Ministers have succeeded in reducing by almost 90 per cent the number of migrants coming from Albania, none of whom could be said to have been fleeing persecution.

Let's hope there is more progress. But we should remember that the numbers likely to cross the Channel this year are tiny in relation to the overall number of migrants arriving in this country perfectly legally.

In matters of immigration — an issue that still matters to many people — the Government has devoted all its energies to stopping migrants in small boats from coming across the English Channel

Rishi Sunak has been admirably focused on this problem. Ministers have succeeded in reducing by almost 90 per cent the number of migrants coming from Albania, none of whom could be said to have been fleeing persecution

In 2022, 45,755 people were recorded as having crossed the Channel in small boats. Yet in the same year, the figure for net legal migration was 606,000. I make that just over 13 times greater.

These people, along with those so-called illegal migrants who are allowed to stay, must have places to live, hospitals and doctors' surgeries to look after them if they are ill and schools to educate their children.

I reflected on this earlier in the week after Levelling up Secretary Michael Gove announced that the Government intends to build more homes on brownfield sites in cities, which happens to be a policy advocated by this newspaper for at least 20 years. Well done, Michael!

In particular, I was fascinated by an exchange between the BBC's Nick Robinson and Mr Gove on Radio 4's Today programme. There was talk of brownfield sites, of the undesirability of concreting over the countryside and of the possibility that tens of thousands of new homes will be built in Cambridge.

What wasn't mentioned, either by Mr Robinson or Mr Gove, is that there is one factor above all driving rapid population growth, and with it the need for more housing, which the Government is failing to provide in sufficient quantities.

You've guessed it. The elephant in the room, which almost no one dares acknowledge, presumably for fear of being thought racist, is immigration. Not so much illegal immigration, notwithstanding the time it occupies and the passions it generates in our national debate. I principally mean legal immigration.

In 2022, 45,755 people were recorded as having crossed the Channel in small boats

READ MORE: UK's newest migrant landing spots: How asylum seekers evade capture by using 'dangerous' alternative routes across the Channel after crackdown on Calais to Dover passage - as figures show another 600 arrived yesterday 

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Despite Brexit, this is running at an all-time high, and there's nothing to suggest it's going to be reduced significantly in the foreseeable future. Why, you may ask? A large part of the answer is that this country is hooked on foreign labour, and I doubt we're ever going to kick the habit.

Before Brexit, Poles, other East Europeans and then Romanians came here in the greatest numbers. In other words, EU migrants predominated. Now, non-EU migrants, from countries such Ukraine, Hong Kong, India and Nigeria, constitute the lion's share of what has become a much larger overall figure.

It's true, of course, that not all of them are here to work. Many come to study, and bring their dependants with them. Most of those in this category will return to their countries when their visas expire, and will be replaced by another cohort of foreign students. Our universities require a constant supply.

A great churn is going on, with many legal migrants staying, others returning and new ones coming. The overall effect — unless the Government chooses to do something about it — is to increase our population, year by year, by a significant amount, and therefore to boost demand for new housing.

Here I turn to Migration Watch, an organisation which has an impeccable record in predicting migrant flows, as was the case in 2014 when Romanians were first allowed to come here freely. I trust it. If present trends continue, Migration Watch reckons the population will rise by at least 16 million to between 83 and 87 million by 2046.

Note that between 1973 and 1998, the population of the UK only grew from 56 to 58.5 million. Then came New Labour's scheme of encouraging mass migration. Over the next 25 years the population surged to 68 million.

If Migration Watch is correct, unless this and future governments reverse the process, population growth will continue unchecked. Under its projections, 260,000 more homes will be needed every year, which is appreciably more than are being built at the moment.

According to Migration Watch, we'll need at least 15 new cities the size of Birmingham over a 25-year period. All the brownfield sites in the country won't come close to satisfying this demand. Vast swathes of England — and particularly southern England, where many new migrants tend to live and work — will be concreted over.

Will successive governments press the brake pedal? It hardly seems likely. This administration, which has some sensitivity to people's fears about uncontrolled immigration, has nonetheless presided over a boom in legal migration. Labour would surely be even worse.

Whatever noises Tories and Labour have made over the years, ministers are in thrall to the overriding belief that migration is beneficial to growth. This is certainly what the influential, all-powerful, Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) believes.

Since the OBR's foundation in 2010 — one of David Cameron's and George Osborne's innumerable mistakes — it has championed net migration as a source of economic growth.

Members of RNLI escort migrants into Dover Docks, Kent last week before Border Force helped them ashore

As it happens, we've had little growth and an awful lot of net migration over the past 13 years. Pictured: Members of RNLI escort migrants into Dover Docks, Kent. And Border Force helped them ashore

As it happens, we've had little growth and an awful lot of net migration over the past 13 years. That should tell the OBR something. Even if migration did help growth at the margins, the OBR makes no allowance for the social costs, including pressure on housing.

But what the OBR believes, so does the rest of Whitehall, and probably No 10. Moreover, the cry from big business for endless cheap labour is almost unquenchable. No one wants to make much effort to tempt 8.5 million economically inactive people between the ages of 16 and 64 into the workforce.

Without some popular revolt, it seems very unlikely that this country's appetite for foreign labour is going to abate. It follows that the pressure on housing — and the exclusion of many young people from the housing market — will get worse.

So we have the idiotic spectacle of an intelligent politician such as Michael Gove talking about need to build more houses without ever mentioning, even parenthetically, the major cause of the housing shortage.

These feel to me very much like the days of New Labour, when net migration soared every year and any informed discussion about the subject was virtually banned.

Rishi Sunak may, or may not, succeed in dealing with the challenge of the small boats crossing the Channel. But the far greater problem of uncontrolled legal migration remains unaddressed.