Peter Sutherland of Goldman Sachs - "EU should do its best to Undermine National Homogeniety"

Mr. Peter Sutherland, Chairman, Goldman Sachs International
(Chairman, British Petroleum PLC; Chairman, Allied Irish Bank PLC; Chairman and Managing director, Goldman Sachs International; Former member, Commission of the European Communities; former Director-General, World Trade Organisation.)

To:

The Select Committee on the European Union
Home Affairs, Health and Education
Inquiry on

"GLOBAL APPROACH TO MIGRATION AND MOBILITY"

 "If one looks at the key arguments and issues relating to the need for migration, the demographic is the most fundamental. The demographic challenges in a number of European member states, however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states, is absolutely unquestionable in terms of a crucial dynamic for economic growth. A declining and ageing population is destructive of prosperity—forgetting entirely about the moral aspect of migration. That is particularly relevant to a number of countries in central Europe—Germany has a major issue—and some southern member states. So demographics are a key element of the debate, and a key argument for the development of—I hesitate to use the word because people have attacked it—multicultural states. It is impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the alternative argument can survive, because states have to become more open in terms of the people who inhabit them, as the United Kingdom has demonstrated. ...
But if the European example is much poorer in terms of the integration of workers into their society, in terms of their getting jobs, that is related to the fact that the United States or Australia and New Zealand are migrant societies and therefore accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others, which is precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine. "