posted 7th October 2025
Right now (October 2025) immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics in Britain. So much so that it is easy to get lost in attack and counter-attack and to lose sight of the big picture. The best debaters will go behind the details of numbers arriving and ways to stop the boats,. and reflect instead on the fundamental issues.
Do we have a moral duty to welcome immigrants?
Leaving your own country to come to another one is a hard thing to do. It calls for considerable sacrifices. You have to leave behind your family and friends. You may have to pay someone a lot of money to get you into the UK, and may not get what you thought you paid for. You may risk your life crossing the English Channel in a leaky dinghy. You may not be guaranteed a job when you come to the UK, and may experience a good deal of financial insecurity. Added to that, newly arrived immigrants are likely to experience culture shock as they adjust to a new way of life (Why is it so cold all the time? Why is the food so horrible? Why does no one say what they really mean?) They will have to negotiate a fiendishly complicated bureaucracy to gain the right to remain in the UK, made even harder if English is not their first language. They may face hostility, resentment and both covert and overt racism. In the worst cases, immigrants may fall victim to people traffickers, who keep them as virtual slaves, taking away their passports, effectively imprisoning them, forcing them to work in dangerous and unhealthy environments for little or no pay.
Why does anyone do it? The situation must be very bad in your own country to put up with all that. Many immigrants are fleeing appalling poverty; devastation caused by climate change; utter destruction of their homes and livelihoods as the result of war; brutal, often life-threatening, persecution on account of their race, religion, gender or sexuality.
All of the above means that we have a moral responsibility to give immigrants as much support as we can, and to welcome them with generosity and kindness. We in the UK are fortunate to have so much; we have a moral responsibility to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
Or, to look at it another way …
Just as a parent has a moral responsibility to look after their own children, and to prioritise them over other people’s children, we have a moral responsibility as a nation to look after and protect our own people first. It is simply unfair to share our resources with people who come from outside our community. Institutions like the welfare system and the NHS depend on a sense of national solidarity; that sense will be undermined if we share them too freely with immigrants from outside.
It is immoral for governments to impose the significant economic and cultural disruption caused by immigration on a population without their consent. Those in power do not feel the true effects of immigration (they are more likely to have cleaners than to be cleaners). The benefits of immigration (cheaper labour, greater profits for businesses) tend to go disproportionately to those who are already prosperous, while the harms (lower wages, job losses) are more likely to be felt by the less well-off.
Moreover, by encouraging often very well qualified immigrants to come to the UK, we are depriving their own countries of their skills. Every doctor originally from India working for the NHS is one less doctor working for the Indian health service, which is in much greater need of them, and has paid for their training. It is immoral to deprive poorer countries of these people. They, too, need to protect their own communities.
Motion
This house believes we have a moral duty to welcome immigrants.
