The Day the Immigrants Left, Wednesday 9pm, BBC One

Posted by Stewart Turner

The old line about “foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs” has been trotted out since around the time Eve lost that fruit-picking position in the Garden of Eden, and politicians of all persuasions are always eager wheel out guff about “British jobs for British workers” if they smell a few votes in it.

But do we Brits really want to do the jobs that’ve been stolen? That’s what Evan Davis attempted to find out - by plucking 12 long-term unemployed from the town of Wisbech and giving them a couple of days work while the immigrants took a well-earned rest.

With 3000 foreign workers and 3000 unemployed locals, the East Anglian town was a perfect place to test the theory. It’s also a place of back-breaking work in stark asparagus fields and eight hour shifts in front of conveyor belts full of maris pipers – not exactly dream jobs by any stretch of the imagination. As the potato factory owner pointed out, applications from local workers for jobs were running dry well before the influx of foreign labour anyway. Stealing our jobs? Pah.

Predictably enough, the first day on the job suffered from a setback or 10. Slacker Lewis texted the spud factory at midnight before his shift to say he was too ill to come in, and three of the people signed up for a shift at the local curry house failed to show, leaving poor Ashley with the thankless task of learning an Indian menu inside out in less time than it takes to crack a poppadom.

In a lot of ways the “experiment” was deeply unfair. Everyone’s first day on a new job is fairly unproductive and accident-prone, and we all need a week or so to bed into our new roles. Why, I’d bet even Evan himself stumbled over the autocue on his first day at the BBC as an eager young newshound. I’d also wager that the prospect of being made to look like a total goon on national TV was as much of a motivator for calling in sick as being a work-shy benefit scrounger, too.

Still, despite its flaws, at least The Day the Immigrants Left managed to look at the question of immigration with a more reasoned approach than the usual soundbites and posturing. Whether it'll have any effect on the volume of applications down at the asparagus farm remains to be seen.