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Meeting of the Parliament 23 February 2011

23 Feb 2011 · S3 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Migration and Trafficking

Harvie, Christopher SNP Mid Scotland and Fife Watch on SPTV

I, too, thank the Equal Opportunities Committee for its report and Margaret Mitchell for her lucid and liberal introduction.

Having lived and worked as an economic migrant in Germany for more than 25 years, my experience has given me a certain insight into the problems that one can face. I ended up as a person sufficiently homogenised to stand as a candidate for the German Social Democratic Party in the Baden-Württemberg local elections. An even more desperate case was David McAllister, a Scottish Tory in search of a mandate, who had to go to Lower Saxony to become Minister-President there, on which I congratulate him. A fairly implausible prospect awaited him in Scotland.

Working closely with immigrant communities in Kirkcaldy, I have seen the problems that confront such groups. In that context, I wag a finger at certain universities in Scotland that, by closing down the European language departments that are so important, especially for areas of eastern Europe such as Poland and Russia, are not doing their best to facilitate integration. Such closures affect the linguistic capabilities of people who come to Scotland and makes it more difficult for them to adjust to the business of living here and making themselves into citizens of the country.

We need the devolution of immigration policy as a whole, the Scottish demographic being one that is favourable to migration. We should consider our need for the skilled labour that we are finding it difficult to produce in Scotland to tackle issues such as renewable opportunities in the North Sea.

We must also place the debate in the context of an international situation that is becoming much more fragile. Some members may have read Misha Glenny’s euphoric book “The Rebirth of History”, which was about the liberalisation of east Europe in 1991. I do not know how many members went on to read the sequel, which was called “McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime”. The book came out in 2005 and was a lot less idealistic.

People trafficking is only a segment of an enormous number of illegal transactions between countries. Every year, £390 billion goes on drugs, so the £30 billion that is formally attributable to the traffic in illegal migrants is relatively small, but the two can be linked, as we can see from the cannabis farms that have grown up in Scotland.

The weekend before last, the Financial Times did an article on the business of money laundering and the recycling of totally criminal proceedings. The article stressed that, because the financial transactions that are carried out in what we could call the world of moral hazard have become so extensive and complex, it is almost impossible for dealers in those businesses to tell which transactions are legal and which are dodgy. Whereupon, the reporter tells us, the various dealers concerned nearly laughed their heads off.

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