When asked in 2010 to name the three groups Labour was closest to, people polled by YouGov named trade unions, benefits claimants and immigrants. Ed Miliband’s speech on Friday was a clear and brave attempt to address those voters concerned about immigration and the belief that Labour is still not aligned with the public’s views on the issue.

The speech sought to acknowledge the drawbacks many voters saw with the increase in immigration overseen by Labour, and to plot a different course where these problems could be avoided without sacrificing either our compassionate values or the economic benefits immigrants bring. Though moderate in tone and limited in its ambition for new legislation, the speech will have generated the right headlines in the right newspapers for the tactical objective Ed set. When in government, though, Ed will have to grapple with immigration in a wholly different, and altogether more difficult way.

Immigration is, and always will be, difficult. The extent to which immigration is encouraged, permitted or restricted is a non-obvious choice for government: every level at which the immigration needle can be set brings both benefits and problems. Unfortunately, people on every side of the debate have insisted on both having their cake and eating it for too long.

Consider first those who could be considered to be in favour of, or relaxed about, immigration – a category I would willingly place myself in, and suspect many Progress readers fit into as well. They – we – rightly point out that there are undoubted benefits to immigration. For most British workers immigrants are complements, not substitutes. Many jobs done by migrants would simply not exist in the UK if immigration were restricted: supermarkets would import their fruit from lower wage economies. Most of the sectors which employ the most immigrants are part of complex supply chains, where the jobs with the highest value-add are largely done by indigenous workers. Restricting immigration puts all of these economic gains in jeopardy.

The problem with this isn’t that it isn’t true: it’s that it elides the problems people identify with immigration. Although they are outnumbered by the unwitting beneficiaries of immigration, there are plenty of workers for whom immigrants are unwanted competition – and often they’re the worst off. And quite aside from economic concerns, there is a widespread pessimism (on which Ed Miliband drew heavily in his speech) about the non-economic effects of immigration: the impact on community integration, on cohesion, and the rapidity of the change people see around them.

Opponents of immigration are alive to these concerns, but they are no more honest or enlightened than its promoters. Either though mendacity or wilful ignorance, they present the choice to restrict immigration as being cost free to the British people. But at a time when the economy plainly struggles to provide enough employment for all who want to work, removing immigrant labour is simply impractical, and could be calamitously counterproductive.

To illustrate, consider an example from my favourite place. In my home town of Flint in north Wales, there are plenty of light manufacturing plants where a significant proportion of the workforce is from the EU accession states: take them away, and the jobs of local workers are staked on a gamble that the factories will not follow these workers to countries where wages are lower. The alternative to 300 Poles working in Flint may well be 1000 extra jobs in Poland and 700 fewer in Flint. Even for those workers for whom immigration is competition, this alternative is a material threat. And for the cultural concerns raised about immigration, even halting further entrant to the UK cannot turn this tide back unless a future government is willing to entertain the sort of policies even many Tories consider brutish and inhumane, and which would render Britain an international pariah.

Labour’s immigration problem, then, is even worse than that Ed identifies. Whatever choice Labour makes on immigration will be fraught with difficulty and populated with more angry losers than contented winners. The only consolation is that this difficulty is met equally by the Tories and the Lib Dems, and by any party which aims to escape politics’s fringes.

I wonder, though, whether there might be more benefit in making immigration more a test of Labour’s willingness to face difficult decisions than it is a choice on the issue itself. David Cameron, seeing Labour’s polling weakness in the 2010 election, dropped hints of a toughness on immigration that he knew then he cannot fulfil in government: Labour’s ability to capitalise on the issue itself as government policy unravels is undermined by our own reputation for softness, but it is credible to identify a prime minister who was unwilling to face a difficult reality.

Perhaps a Labour approach which put the immigration choice in uncompromisingly stark terms, and promised most of all not to feed the public any more immigration baloney, might fare better. It would not attract the passing approval of commentators with an axe to grind – but it would have the crucial benefit of honesty, and be a clearer guide to effective government policy than a thousand well meaning speeches.

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David Green is a member of Progress and a former Labour party organiser. David tweets @itsdavegreen

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