“LURID immigration front pages sell papers,” said a fellow journalist who had just joined the Daily Express when I asked him how he could join such a newspaper, which at the time seemed to be running as many front page asylum-seeker scare stories as it could get away with.

Though his argument was difficult to refute in economic terms, it was dispiriting when it comes to the other roles of the media, such as to educate, inform and hold power to account.

So today, sitting in a country that has just voted to leave the EU primarily on the premise of the need to reduce immigration, it can be argued that Britain has reaped what it has sown. The consequences could be dire for a country that has skill shortages in vital areas and a rapidly ageing population. The country needs a significant inflow of migrant labour every year to retain present standards of living.

It has been the positive side of immigration that has failed to register in the public consciousness as a result of the way in which the subject has been covered in the media.

Let’s make no claims that everything about migration is positive. Migration over the past 20 years has been badly handled by successive governments of both political persuasions. The Labour government allowed migrants from the EU accession countries to come into the UK in the early noughties with very little control. There were no minimum standards of pay, terms or conditions of work, so migrant labour could come in and undercut the indigenous workforce. The failure to set and enforce minimum standards meant that migration effectively became an incomes policy to keep wages down, which bred resentment in many areas of the country.

Many of the problems today could have been avoided had those minimum standards been enforced. Also migrants should have been encouraged to join trade unions. In addition, the revenues being generated from the migrant workforce should have been used for public services, including importantly housing provision.

Politicians have also singularly failed to tell a positive story about the benefits of migration. The government’s own figures show that net migration of 250,000 a year boosts annual GDP by 0.5 per cent. This growth means more jobs, higher tax revenues, more funding for schools and hospitals and a lower deficit.

Many of the jobs created over recent years have been done by migrants, with figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that three quarters of employment growth for the year August 2015 was accounted for by non-UK citizens. So what economic growth existed pre-Brexit referendum, was largely migrant driven.

Migrants tend to be younger, contributing more tax revenue than they consume in public services, and the majority leave before they get older when they would become more reliant.

According to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, migrants contribute 64 per cent more in taxes than they take out in benefits. A study by University College London found that EU migrants made a net contribution of £20 billion to UK finances between 2000 and 2011.

A large part of the migrant population of recent years has been students coming to study.

A study for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills found that since 2011, students had contributed more than £14bn to the economy.

These are facts that you won’t find in much of our media, determined as it is to present a totally negative view of migration.

So many tabloid papers highlight crimes committed by migrants on the front page — sending the subliminal message that migrants equal criminals.

What is lacking are any positive news stories on migration, such as the net tax revenues that migrants provide to the exchequer, the huge benefits flowing to the education sector, diversity and the everyday migrant workers who contribute to our health, education and social services.

This failure to balance immigration stories means that many of the readers have a totally negative view of immigrants.

The disconnect was well illustrated during the EU referendum campaign, when BBC home affairs editor Mark Easton got together a group of old and young voters in Eastbourne. The concern of many in the older group was migration, yet they live in a town where the care homes, hospitals and social services are propped up by migrant labour. The disconnect between perceptions and reality was breathtaking to behold.

Equally, if a nationwide view is taken, we find the somewhat ludicrous notion of high hostility to migrants in areas where there are very few actually living. So Clacton elects Ukip MP Douglas Carswell on that party’s anti-migrant ticket, yet levels of migrant workers in that town are low. Comparatively in London, where many of the migrant workers who come to the UK live and work, anti-migrant sentiment is lower.

The result of a public debate on immigration driven by a media trying to sell its products and pander to racism in the process has been to poison the public well on the subject. It has resulted in the starting point for any public discussion on migration being the reduction of numbers.

Success on migration is apparently to be judged according to how many migrants can be stopped from coming to the UK. The Conservative government has not helped matters in this respect, setting unachievable targets of cutting migration to the tens of thousands, then palpably failing to get anywhere near that target.

The only way migration will decline is if the economy plunges into recession because then there will not be the jobs available in Britain for migrants to come here to do.

And this is where another one of our media myths kicks in. The total misrepresentation of the immigration question has led to a public perception that migrants come here merely to get benefits.

The reality is somewhat different, most come here to work. If there is no work because the British economy has bombed, then there will be fewer migrants — the archetypal perfect storm.

Those of us who work in the media have now to question the role played by our sector over recent years in totally failing to represent a balanced and informative picture on migration. Newspapers, particularly at the tabloid end of the market, have helped build the anti-migrant atmosphere that exploded following the EU vote to leave. Broadcast media have also played their part, adopting the anti-migrant lexicon for its coverage also.

The wobbling lid that has been kept on anti-migrant racism over recent years has blown off, revealing a particularly ugly side of society. Responsibility for much of the violent racist incidents seen on our streets resides in editors’ offices up and down the land. Politicians too have been complicit in creating this situation.

The responsibility now moving forward is to repel that anti-migrant racism. One way of doing such a thing is to start telling a more positive story about migrants, not the simple lopsided hysterical view that may sell papers but also has pernicious consequences. The media has a responsibility to tell the good news on immigration, whilst the politicians must join that discussion. The politicians too must stop migrant labour being used to undercut indigenous workers and encourage migrants to join trade unions.

They must also use the revenues coming in from migrant labour to provide the services that the migrants and the wider community need and deserve — including housing. It is no doubt rather late to be making these moves since the racist genie has already been let out of the bottle, but a start has to be made. Otherwise we will all be staring into a particularly unpleasant looking abyss.

Paul Donovan blogs at paulfdonovan.blogspot.co.uk.