NEW MIGRATION SCHEME.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20708, 4 May 1929, Page 23

NEW MIGRATION SCHEME.

UNEMPLOYMENT PAY FOR SETTLERS. WILL THE DOMINIONS AGREE? (Feoii Our Own. Correspondent.) LONDON, March 14. A new plan to encourage migration is incorporated in a Bill which was read a first time in the House of Commons. In asking leave to introduce the measure, Commander 0. Locker-Lampson, Unionist M.P. for Handsworth, said that historians were agreed that a forerunner of dissolution among empires of the past was the presence of an immense excess of population, which had to be maintained in charitable idleness by the State. Today there were 1,250,000 unemployed many of whom had not worked since the war. _ The pittance which these people drew in the dole was of no real avail. It did not keep the persons who got it, and it blinded people to the bankruptcy of conditions here and to the illimitable solvency of conditions overseas. In eight years this country had spent over £800,000,000 on unemployment, and we had the incredible anomaly of the Government giving, on the one hand, to enable people to migrate, and on the other hand, paying them.to stop in this country. Instead of merely paying the unemployment benefit to those who were unemployed here, ho proposed that when the people migrated within the British Empire they should receive up to two years’ unemployment pay. He further proposed that there should be a scheme of training in this country under which farmers and other employers should be invited to take selected migrants, and given the amount that the trainee was drawing in unemployment pay towards the payment of the full local wage. In another six or eight years unemployment pay would cost the country another £400,000,000 to £500,000,000, and we should save £2OO per man if they emigrated. ' - _ The Bill was brought in and read a first time. . . The Daily Telegraph, while approving of the scheme, points out that “the dominions have declared with no uncertain voice that men whose strength and energies have been ■weakened by long periods of unemployment are not welcome. There might be much difficulty in persuading them to accept large numbers of migrants still drawing the ‘ dole.’ Agreement with the dominions for emigration on any considerable scale is obviously necessary. But if the Working of this plan needs further consideration there is no doubt whatever that in-the diminishing of unemployment an indispensable factor is the development of migration within the Empire.”