Before the PM had shaken the first lean and sinewy business hand at his jobs summit yesterday, the selectively lugubrious duo behind the Balanced Migration group - the MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames - had declared the exercise as destined to fail.

Their argument was that, in certain categories, non-EU economic migrants are still allowed to seek or take up jobs “for which British unemployed people have not had the chance to apply”, and that unless “British unemployed individuals have a first crack at all jobs that become available” how could the Government's unemployment policies be taken seriously? Arrangements permitting foreigners to take up jobs not advertised in Britain, argued the pair, “should be suspended while the recession lasts”. However long that is, and however it is defined.

A flavour of Balanced Migration's attitude towards job-sucking outsiders can be gleaned from their proposals for graduates. They note that foreigners who have taken their degrees in the UK are allowed to stay and work for two years, at the end of which they may apply for a work permit and, if the employer so chooses, keep their jobs. Mr Field and Mr Soames discern a terrible injustice in this because of the “direct competition with British graduates who will have incurred heavy debts in acquiring their degrees” (they have no interest in whether foreign students, who typically pay higher fees, are similarly indebted). Their proposal is that employers should be forced to advertise the jobs of these foreigners, whether they want to or not.

I think this idea is both rhetorically unpleasant and practically daft. It is clear to me, if not to the parliamentary pair, that if such a policy were to be enacted any foreign students of reasonable talent would be entitled to feel that Britain does not want them, and act accordingly. We would also soon discover that not a few of these jobs will go abroad. And then there's the issue of retaliation.

Too bad, because the fact seems to be that we liberals are not winning this fight against the economic and cultural nationalists. I realised this when listening to a Radio 4 programme on the politics of immigration last Saturday. There was a report from Peterborough where some locals were complaining about foreign young men in vans and pressure on parking spaces, and employers were praising the same young men's willingness to pick fruit from orchards that indigenous youth preferred not to visit.

There was an economist, an interview with an under-führer in the BNP, another with Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of the anti-immigration Migration Watch UK, and then representatives of the three main parties. And it was this last segment that was so depressing that the radio (no more to blame for my distemper, of course, than immigrants are for the recession) nearly ended up as several garden ornaments.

Not one of the pols, Chris Huhne, of the Lib Dems, Damian Green, of the Tories, or Phil Woolas, of Labour, could find anything good to say about immigration, except in passing on quickly to how tough they would all be. Mr Huhne: “Clearly we made a big mistake in allowing entry for new entrants to the EU when others didn't.” But didn't we get a lot of talent, he was asked. “Yes, we did,” he conceded, “but there is a pace of change issue and an absorption issue...” Oh heroic Huhne! And so we should have a “points system as operated in Australia” and - incidentally - as recommended by Migration Watch.

Damian Green: “The central problem is the rate of change and the rate of increase that the Government has allowed over the last ten years. Services can't cope with the sheer numbers that have come in. That's what gives rise to the various complaints you have heard from Peterborough [parking spaces, Damian?]. And all those problems will get much sharper during a recession unless we do something about it.”

And Mr Woolas: “It's assumed that Labour is soft on immigration. In actual fact the largest influxes of migrants into this country came during Conservative periods of government - if you look at the 1950s and early 1960s and indeed the situation with Eastern Africa.”

“The situation with Eastern Africa”? He means the time when the Kenyan and Ugandan Asians were expelled, and arrived in a Britain for which they had passports, where they were called “Paki”, and where they became some of the most successful and dynamic citizens this nation has possessed. And this is used by a Labour minister, a Labour minister, to attack past Conservative governments for softness on immigration! I wanted to throw up.

Of course, they all tell us, none of this is about race and it is politically correct to suggest that it is, as well as an attempt to avoid necessary debate. It's about overcrowding and the prospect of 70 million Britons (a prospect that is most unlikely). It's about jobs (despite migration helping to create jobs). It's about pressure on services (despite migrants disproportionately providing them or paying for them).

It isn't the fault of Migration Watch UK - now so respected by all the parties - that it is described by the BNP as “the respected Migration Watch UK organisation”. And it isn't the fault of its gentlemanly chairman that an article of his in The Sunday Times 15 months ago was headlined “Hold back the immigrant flood”. And he cannot be blamed, either, if people don't bother to read carefully what he says.

He pointed out, rightly, that the Poles and Slovaks would stop coming, and that after May 2011 they would also work in EU countries, such as Germany and France, that had delayed admitting their workers. But others would come in, he said, and “failure to act now will mean that our society will be changed beyond recognition - and especially our cities... According to one academic study [from a Migration Watch supporter, Dr David Coleman, as it happens], the ethnic community in Britain will grow from 9 per cent to 29 per cent by mid-century.”

I spoke to Sir Andrew yesterday who, courteous as ever, confirmed to me that “ethnic community” denotes “non-white”. Not, please notice, non-British and also notice that this figure includes anyone classified as mixed-race. Therefore “our society will be changed out of all recognition” means, not to put too fine a point upon it, a Britain which is nearly a third touched with the tar brush.

No more cant. This is still part of what scares our pusillanimous partymen, who are all now involved in a revolting public auction to show who can be the “toughest” on the economic migrant - that miscreant who comes over and does our jobs and pays our taxes and adds to our pool of talent. And who may well, if Sir Andrew Green is right, be ethnic.

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