In 2012, the UN's special representative for migration, Peter Sutherland, said that the EU should "
undermine" its "
homogeneity", by importing migrants.
Sutherland has attended meetings of the secretive Bilderberg Group and is a former chairman of oil giant BP. In 2012, he was the non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Sutherland explained to the House of Lords committee that migration is a "
crucial dynamic for economic growth (...) however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states".
Sutherland said:
It's impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the other argument can survive because states have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them. Just as the United Kingdom has demonstrated.
(…)
The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others.
And that's precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.
British higher education chiefs want non-EU overseas students to be exempted from migration statistics.
Immigration minister Damian Green has said exempting foreign students would amount to "fiddling" the figures and the current method was approved by the UN.
Committee chairman Lord Hannay, a peer and former British ambassador to the UN, said that Green's claim of UN backing for including students in migration figures "
frankly doesn't hold water - this is not a piece of international law".
Sutherland agreed with Hannay, saying:
Absolutely not; it provides absolutely no justification at all for the position they are talking about.
