Your editorial (The rise in net migration shows up the hollowness of government policy, 28 February) is right to bemoan the lack of a coherent, long-term policy on immigration. A key consideration must be the future ability of the government to ensure the country’s food security. Last week the National Farmers’ Union warned that in a world of food price volatility and potential shortages, the UK today imports 40% of the food it eats, compared with just over 20% in the mid-1980s (UK faces losing battle to feed itself, warn farmers, 24 February). This is hardly surprising given that the UK population has grown by 7.5 million during this time and annual net migration has soared more than fivefold to nearly 300,000 today, compared with 58,000 in 1985.

Of course a healthier, less meat-rich diet, improved farming and perhaps the odd ploughing up of excess golf courses could improve things. But this would soon be overtaken by the food needs of a UK population projected to increase by 10 million in the next 25 years, ie one and a quarter Greater Londons. Not to see these population pressures as a huge difficulty in a world of rising food insecurity and climate change is surely an act of gross political irresponsibility.

Isn’t it time the left, the right and the greens initiated a debate about the need for a long-term population and immigration policy for the UK? This might include a future whereby people with more than one child could be asked to consider having no more children and where the immigration policy becomes one which eventually halts future permanent migration. This would of course allow students to study here and people to work here for a set period and for us to keep our immoral policy of stealing doctors and nurses from poorer countries, until such time as we finally train enough from within our own shores.

Colin Hines

East Twickenham, Middlesex

Do we want mass immigration or a living wage? We can’t have both Yugo Kovach

• You make a welcome call for the urgent development of an honest, coherent and workable immigration policy which is informed by something more than short-term political calculations based on fear. This would involve complex social, economic and political issues, but it would be a pity nevertheless if any such development ignored the importance of relevant academic work such as that done by Professor Paul Collier of Oxford University, who has argued in Prospect magazine that the right way of posing the ethnic diversity question is not whether it is good or bad – pitting the xenophobe against the progressive – but how much is best.

Variety is fully consistent with a society of mutual respect, but at some point the benefits of variety are probably subject to diminishing returns. Equally important are remarks by Sir John Sawers on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday: we need to recognise that for various religious and social and economic reasons the Muslim community is less well integrated into UK society than most other ethnic minorities, and substantially the remedies lie not with us but with Islamic leaders over the long term.

Cecil Fudge

Hindhead, Surrey

• You would have an immigration policy “tempered by generosity, humanity and imagination”. So are we to be generous, humane and imaginative to home-grown labour or would-be migrants? Do we want mass immigration or a living wage? We can’t have both.

Yugo Kovach

Winterborne Houghton, Dorset

• The need for market efficiency referred to in your editorial appears to have led to a health service dependent on cheap immigrant labour that is replacing those that have left to work in the sex industry because they cannot live on their NHS salaries (Survey reveals former lives of UK sex workers, 28 February).

Richard Wooller

Bream, Gloucestershire

• Did the Oxford University-based Migration Observatory consider the possibility that net migration was a key factor in stimulating Britain’s economic growth (Net migration to UK higher than when coalition took office, 27 February)?

Philip Green

Brentwood, Essex

• I share Giles Fraser’s anger about slovenly lawyers dealing with immigration cases and his praise of those who through intelligence and dedication deliver people from impossible situations (Our immigration policy creates only misery for the vulnerable, 28 February). The case won for his parishioners was argued by legal representation in front of an independent judge. I am incandescent about sanctions imposed by jobcentres forcing people into impossible situations without a fair trial. There is no independent judge as in the courts; jobcentre decision-makers are implementing government policy. No opportunity for the accused to be represented. The jobcentre computer cancels JSA/ESA, which sends a signal to the local authority computer to cancel housing and council tax benefits; the applicant has to reapply for them; they take weeks to reinstate, even longer when the benefit claimant is so fazed by the total loss of income that they miss the need to reapply. The DWP is content to make people hungry. Total cancellation of the means of subsistence for up to three years is a disproportionate and unjust punishment under all circumstances. All this in a year in which we celebrate 800 years of Magna Carta.

Rev Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty