It's all immigration's fault

Lots of questions. A few answers

This post was sparked by two things. First, a thoughtful listener wrote to us after our podcast, thanking us for exploring tough topics with nuance and curiosity. He stated that the very questions we raised would, in his social and job environments, likely get him “cancelled” by one side or the other. With opinions so deeply entrenched and beliefs held so tightly, anyone caught in the confused middle - like our listener - often feels the safest choice is to stay silent.

Second, immigration has surged to the forefront of political debate in many countries. Right now, it’s dominating headlines in both the UK and the US. In Ireland, housing might still be the top issue, but try bringing it up without immigration entering the conversation within seconds - it’s nearly impossible.

I’ve mentioned one reaction to our pod. Many were complimentary. Some not so much. One or two commenters clearly didn’t listen to what we said and just put their fists up, unconsciously reinforcing the point that too many people are too dug into their silos. We are condemned if we merely ask the question ‘do anti-immigrants make any good points?’ Equal vitriol is elicited when we point out that some anti-immigration arguments don’t hold water. In fact, there aren’t many specific points made by the immigrations opponents. ‘It’s obvious why immigration is so awful’ isn’t much of an argument.

The ‘immigration is too high’ crowd rarely bother to tell us why it is too high. As broadcaster David Aaronovitch says:

…it is the height of metropolitan bad manners to query the factual claims made by those seeking to restrict migration. I’m told this so often that I sometimes wonder why people make these claims at all given that it is an article of faith that true, authentic Britons simply want – for whatever reason – to cut the numbers of incomers.

Take the question ‘is immigration good or bad for the economy?’ There is a vast literature on this: the balance of the evidence is that immigrants contribute to growth and the exchequer. But there are big questions over the size of the effects, not all of the evidence points in the same direction, and the sectoral data hints at relatively small distributional consequences (small downward pressure on unskilled wages).

Immigration is, in the round, an economically good thing. That’s what the data says. That’s the broad consensus amongst economists, at least those with no obvious axe to grind such as the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in the UK.

The left hand chart shows the future trajectory for UK government borrowing under various migration scenarios. On the right we see what happens to public sector debt levels under these same scenarios. Borrowing falls when more immigrants come in. Immigrants, in total, pay more in tax than they consume in government services. At least for the next five years. What happens after that - particularly when immigrants age and retire - depends on a whole host of factors. ‘It all depends’ is the only safe conclusion.

The UK’s Prime Minister has recently challenged these conclusions, without publishing his contrary evidence. Presumably he has some data that has thrown up some previously unobserved big negative economic consequences of immigration. Or maybe he, or his speechwriters, are just making things up. Whether or not they have data, they believe, according to Keir Starmer, that people in favour of immigration are

….contributing to the forces that are slowly pulling our country apart.

That’s quite a claim. Obvious to some I guess. But, again, where is the evidence for this belief? And, if the country can be shown to be falling apart, where is the evidence that says it is all the fault of immigration? We used to witter on about the consequences of Cameron-Osborne austerity, decades of under investment in the economy, the broken planning system, deindustrialisation, and many other suspects. When did it all become the fault of immigrants?

The answer to that last question should be obvious: it was the moment Nigel Farage’s Reform party took a 10 point lead across multiple opinion polls.

Here’s David Aaronovitch again with a sharply observed point about what the anti-immigrant brigade are really saying:

The trouble for Keir Starmer is that, for whatever reason, many people’s objection to immigration has little to do with borders (except in the case of the boats), or fairness or even to do with personal economics. It’s about otherness and a sense of loss. Or, to put it more concretely, people speaking foreign languages on the train. With mosques appearing where churches used to be.

‘Too much change’ is a legitimate objection. But what kind of change are you complaining about? Nobody in the UK ever objects to me, probably because I look and sound like a Brit. Yet I am an immigrant. Ireland has proportionately many more immigrants than the UK yet complains a touch less, as far as I can tell, than do Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage. Could it be because a lot of immigrants in Ireland are white Brits and other Europeans?

The anti-immigration thing in the UK has built up a head of steam ever since we stopped importing white EU citizens, replacing them with, mostly, Asians.

Here is normally sensible Janice Turner from the London Times, in a rant that anyone standing at a pub bar can hear any day of the week.

Reform is surging because the lanyard class refuses to listen to voters when the reality they describe conflicts with its liberal shibboleths. Voters are told crime is down, but they know shoplifting or vandalism goes unreported because police never act. They see the effects of unprecedented mass migration in rapid change to their high streets and NHS surgeries. With up to 1,000 small boat arrivals a week being dispersed, many more communities have a local hotel turned over to bored, undocumented, non-English-speaking young men.

There is a lot sleight-of-hand going on here, dots being joined that really shouldn’t be. First, the ‘lanyard' class’. These are the people who impose daily indignities on all of us; puffed up, self-important people doing jobs that shouldn’t exist and only do so to allow people to release their pent-up inner traffic wardens. People whose job it is to perform rather than to achieve. The private and public sectors are stuffed with them. It’s the organic way the system has evolved to provide universal basic income for people who would otherwise be unemployed. But what has this to do with migration?

We then have the 3-D, full technicolour, non sequiturs all over the place, word salad that includes ‘change’, ‘crime’ and ‘what mass migration has done to the NHS and our high streets ’.

Just see what your NHS would look like with its immigrant workers. Your high street looks the way it does because of Amazon and a hopeless planning system, not immigrants.

One of the most thoughtful anti-immigration journalists is David Goodhart. Not everything he says is wrong, but most of it is. The inventor of ‘Somewheres vs Anywheres’ is often superficially plausible but his ideas really don’t stand up to scrutiny.

the pace of cultural change is too fast, the economic benefit is overestimated, the pressure on public services and housing underestimated, too many visa routes are abused, many of the benefits of immigration have been privatised while the costs are nationalised.

In his own words, the population is divided into two main groups.

Anywheres (about 25 per cent of the population), the highly educated, often mobile people who value openness and autonomy and are comfortable with change; the Somewheres (40-50 per cent), the somewhat small-c conservative people who draw their identities more from particular places and groups, and tend to be discomforted by rapid change.

Over-simplification of types of people/beliefs/behaviours is normally the work of management consultants and astrologers. There is a good living to be made from pretending that everything is really simple. We might hate change but we also detest complexity and are prepared to pay, and vote for, hacks and charlatans who sell simplicity.

Goodhart’s Anywheres are, he asserts, comfortable with immigration. The Somewheres are not:

[Anywhere’s} have been broadly pro-globalisation and comfortable with high levels of immigration; they have preferred universal human rights over national citizens; they have been ready to sacrifice national sovereignty on the altar of economic efficiency and European integration; they promote mass higher education and knowledge economy “London/Paris/Berlin” jobs before vocational training and industry; they are content to pursue net zero even at the cost of much higher energy costs; and they have overseen the crumbling of state capacity, and GDP growth, thanks in part to the overzealous regulation promoted by an expanded “lanyard class”.

It would take another post to dismantle all this. Just two small points: Vladimir Putin is responsible for higher energy costs; solar and wind are dirt cheap. Globalisation is not responsible for our crumbling public realm; crap politicians are. And so on (and notice, like Turner, the gratuitous swipe at the ‘Lanyard class’ who, we might suspect, are often immigrants.

Goodhart’s key proposition is this: a large minority is responsible for everything that is asserted to be wrong and the fact that this minority is in favour of immigration links everything that is wrong to those dastardly immigrants. It’s a sly but conventionally populist way of arguing. Nigel Farage does it better, without the faux-intellectual wrapping.

The patina of intellectualism is seen again in an appeal for us all to discover meaning and identity under a Farage-led country. Goodhart says we will gain:

…belonging and community… tradition and authority… status and recognition for those who cannot thrive in the cognitive meritocracy race, for meaning and purpose in a post-religious age.

Let’s all give thanks to, and make plans for, Nigel.

The anti-immigration bandwagon has picked up speed. Keir Starmer asserts, without evidence, that ‘incalculable damage’ has been done to Britain by migrants. The real doozy is Goodhart’s suggestion that cutting immigration will solve our existential angst. That promise will take some honouring. Brexit’s ‘sunny uplands’ redux and on stilts.

Where is the debate that begins with the unarguable proposition that ‘we can’t let in everybody’? And then discusses in an honest way the facts, the evidence and what we actually like or fear about immigration?

Britain has an economic growth problem, a social care crisis, an abused immigrant visa problem and a decaying public realm desperately short of money. Just by putting those things in the same sentence we might be tempted to think they are all connected. They are not (not much anyway). Immigration will somehow be blamed when this government puts income taxes up.

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