I read the piece by Oliver Jacques earlier this week with some interest. As a second-generation migrant myself, you might not be surprised to find that my views on migration are relatively liberal. I tend to the view that migration can be a good thing, which in turn tends to put me amongst that group that right-wing campaigners describe mockingly as “open door liberals”.

But migration is like free markets, in that nobody really believes in an unfettered free market in the same way that nobody really believes in open borders – there have to be rules and limits. Indeed, even that small minority who claim to believe in unfettered free markets or open borders, when pushed, have caveats.

My family story is no different to many others, an exodus from the homeland in search of a better future. They were not persecuted in the sense of being threatened, and they played by the rules of the countries that they applied to. Points systems were navigated, choices made based on probabilities and opportunities.

For most non-imperial countries, that was a straightforward choice as to what migrants they wanted, and in what numbers. It is a bit more challenging for those countries who had empires, because of the flows of population from their colonies, but the principle is generally the same. Economic migrants tend to follow the opportunities – why go to a country with high unemployment or low wages?

For the United Kingdom in recent years, there have been plenty of vacancies to be filled. Brexit led to an exodus of Europeans, opening up jobs for willing workers from further afield, whilst an aging population created vacancies in health and social care. And so, Conservative administrations issued more and more work visas to fill the gaps in the workforce whilst, simultaneously, stoking up concerns about all of the foreigners entering the country. It was truly cynical, and it is no coincidence that a number of the key figures responsible for the increased numbers of migrants have sidled over to Reform UK where they can blame others for the consequences of decisions they blithely waved through at the time.

But migration does bring with it dilemmas to be solved. Housing, education and infrastructure require investment, and supply and demand issues impact on inflation, particularly in terms of house prices. The Conservatives rather ignored that, failing to address the housing market and leaving it to the private sector to deal with.

Ironically, the rapid fall in net migration over the past three years, allied to government steps to dissuade more people from applying to come here, means that the supposed problem is effectively solving itself, leading to a new set of problems – how do we fill emerging vacancies in key employment sectors? What is a necessary and sustainable level of net migration for the United Kingdom? And that’s a debate that politicians don’t really want to have. Given that the British public have some pretty wild ideas about migration and ethnicity already, that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Convincing voters that you need net inward migration to keep the economy on the rails is a challenging sell, and would be at the best of times, and these really aren’t the best of times.

Now, I’m not an economist or an expert on manpower planning, so if you were to ask me what would be appropriate, I’d have to say that I haven’t a clue. But there is a sense that, even if politicians don’t feel able to have a national conversation on the subject, they ought to be taking a holistic view of the economy and public services in order to build capacity necessary to support the changing population. Instead, we see the policy equivalent of pushing a piece of string – it moves, but probably not in the direction you’d want it to.

And whilst I have some sympathy with Oliver’s conclusions, the British public’s response to polling on migration does suggest that many of our fellow citizens have some fairly exaggerated ideas when it comes to the scale of the problem. So, by all means address the actual challenges that migration (or the lack of it) brings, but stick to the real problems, not those invented by those too dishonest to admit their real reasons for objecting.

* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice.