FOR at least the past decade, States policies on population have leaned heavily in the direction of accepting that significant immigration is always likely to be necessary to feed the needs of the economy.

Successive Chief Ministers and their ministerial colleagues have promoted the line that no upper limit could be set on the number of people living here because this could constrain vital growth through broadcasting the message that the Island was closed for new business and also by stifling enterprise through starving it of skilled personnel.

Under the leadership of Senators Frank Walker and Terry Le Sueur, who were the political heirs of Senator Pierre Horsfall, the dominant faction in the States was even known unofficially as the ‘growth party’, but there are signs that the doctrine espoused by them and their supporters is about to be seriously challenged.

The Council of Ministers, led by new Chief Minister Ian Gorst, has begun to consider new immigration strategies which would prevent the population from exceeding 100,000. If the proposals under consideration are radical enough, they could well lead to a much-needed States Chamber event which, in recent years, has been conspicuous by its absence – a no-holds-barred debate on the generality of the population problem.

There are, of course, those who will continue to insist that it would be absurd as well as wrong to set an absolute population ceiling – not least because it would interfere with the operation of the free market and the further expansion of our major industry, finance.

Unfortunately for those proponents of relentless growth, the contrary argument that it is utterly unrealistic to expect a community such as Jersey, with the most finite boundaries imaginable and equally finite resources, to accept unlimited immigration is even more compelling.

Although Senator Gorst’s promises to set a limit and to revisit the present targets for immigration with a view to reducing them are unlikely to please all his colleagues in the newly constituted States Assembly, they will receive substantial political support.

It will also strike a highly favourable note with the many Islanders who have long pointed out to a hitherto unreceptive governmentthat the limited restraint exercised on immigration in recent times amounted to a recipe for the long-term destruction of the quality of Island life.