Immigrants (even illegal ones) don't commit more crimes...

Of course, you all know this (just as you knew immigrants are more likely to work, pay a higher proportion of earnings in tax, are less likely to be ill and don't receive as much welfare - they also have fewer children so make less use of schools) but the continuing rhetoric about immigration - migrants, refugees, asylum seekers - still talks about such folk as a problem.

Here's the evidence on crime (it's from the US - one of those nasty right wing think tanks, no less - but I don't expect it to be much different elsewhere):

Previous empirical studies of immigrant criminality generally find that immigrants do not increase local crime rates, are less likely to cause crime than their native-born peers, and are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans.5 Illegal immigrant incarceration rates are not well studied; however, recent Cato Institute research based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety found that, as a percentage of their respective populations, illegal immigrants represented 56 percent fewer criminal convictions than native-born Americans in Texas in 2015.6 The low illegal immigrant incarceration rate is consistent with other research that finds more targeting of immigrants does not reduce the crime rate, which would occur if they were more crime prone than natives.7

The reality is that, almost everywhere, the net benefit from immigration is positive. Our problem is that we're full or that immigrants put massive additional strain on public services but rather that we're really bad at integrating new residents into local communities. Some of this is about racism but it's also a consequence of multiculturalism - in a society where nine out of ten people live in one culture, making a false equivalence for immigrants with a different culture won't work. And when that false equivalence becomes an obsession, the result is resentful behaviour by the majority culture.

Immigration is great but it would be even better if our expectation of immigrants was to be part of our culture not to live what Herman Ouseley called "parallel lives".


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Immigration is a success. Integration is a disaster.

Immigration is a success. Britain is a richer place with a stronger economy because of immigration. We have kept the wheels from falling off our health and care system, maintained the provision of cheap fruit and vegetables, slaughtered a lot of chickens and built the world's greatest financial sector on the back of immigration.

Immigrants are more likely to be working, less likely to be claiming benefits, contribute more in tax than they take out and bring a bewildering variety of new experiences to our great nation. Immigration is not the cause of NHS crises, the lack of school places or the shortage of housing - short-term policy-making and a daft planning system are far more to blame for all this. And compared to similarly poor communities, immigrants commit less crime.

So why is immigration such a problem? How did migrants and refugees arriving in the UK cause such an outcry and, in part, contribute to the decision to leave the EU? Are the British incorrigibly racist? Is it the result of the drip drip of nasty bigotry from dubious newspapers? Or is there some other reason such as lousy public policy?

Let's begin with a couple of myths. Firstly, "it was the media that did it".

The referendum was won on a drumbeat of anti-foreigner sentiment. It’s the same tune being played by demagogues in every corner of the globe. It’s the same tune that was played in the 1930s. It’s the same old beat that rises in volume when people are afraid. In the UK, it’s echoed by a rabidly right-wing press and unchallenged by a flaccid establishment media. Mixed by a band of unscrupulous liars and political zealots, it has become a tsunami of bile that has downed and drowned a once great nation.

Now I don't want to get sucked into the vortex of the Brexit debate but the gist here - from LSE economist John Van Reenan - is that the driving force for Britain's 'anti-foreigner sentiment' was that 'rabidly right-wing press'. This is pretty much received wisdom amongst the intelligentsia but is just baldly stated, no evidence is presented to substantiate the argument that the British people - and the English working classes in particular - have been led by their ignorant noses by a corrupt and Fascist press working hand in glove with those 'unscrupulous liars and political zealots'.

This just isn't true. Not that the press is innocent or perfect, it's a long way from that, but that Van Reenan has cause and effect in the wrong order. The Sun, Daily Mail and Express are commercial enterprises - they exist to make money for those who own them. This means they deliver what they think the public wants, they are like the advertisers they depend on for income - mirrors of society not the creators of society's mores or values.

The second myth is that the problem comes from the values of immigrants - most specifically that these are in some way not compatible with nebulous and vague 'British values'. We talk about honesty, decency, respect for the law, family and so forth as if these ideas only exist as values in the UK, that somehow immigrants - Muslims in particular - don't share these essentially fundamental views about behaviour. Now, while I'm happy for core values to be part of what we teach children and young people, I don't see that you can isolate a particular set of values and say they are in some way exclusive to Britain.

To suggest that, for example, Islam doesn't contain these values is to misunderstand that faith entirely. For sure different emphases are evident - more stress on justice than on rights for example - but these are nuances within those values not a different set of values. It's true, however, that these higher order values are a damn sight easier to elevate when we are economically successful and secure. And it is here, at least in part that the problem with immigration starts. Just as there is a tendency (not always without reason) for immigrants to see their status as a factor in their poverty, there's also a feeling among the poor communities where migrants arrive that these new arrivals contribute to the poverty of those already there. The lump of labour idea may be false but it is emotionally appealing.

So if it isn't media manipulation or differences in values and only partly economics, what is the reason for the rise in what Van Reenan calls 'anti-foreigner sentiment'? It seems to me that the problem is one of culture combined with a terrible failure of public policy. In economic terms immigration is brilliant and, for us successful folk with good jobs and good incomes, something of a boon but in cultural terms immigration over the past thirty years has been a disaster. We have left established communities across Britain - and particularly in England - with the feeling that, at best, their culture is something to be sneered at and, at worst, that it's based on bigoted, racist, Little Englander attitudes that have no place in the modern world.

In simple terms the adoption in the 1980s of a policy based on multiculturalism led to a complete failure of integration and sowed the seeds of today's 'anti-foreigner sentiment'. And once the feeling that the great and good considered immigrant cultures to be superior had established, it was a short step to concerns about immigrants taking jobs, stealing our women and generally ruining everything that's good about England. Public policy seemed to say that bangra was more important than brass bands, that Christmas should be turned into 'Season's Greetings', and the last night of the proms was a slightly sleazy exercise in jingoism. Strategies to 'celebrate diversity' featured every kind of imported culture and none of the home grown stuff. Integration failed because public policy deemed it unnecessary.

Nobody is suggesting here that English culture - and specifically English working-class culture - is somehow superior to cultures from elsewhere, merely that it ours and it deserves more prominence as the culture of the people who already live here. We tend to think that "when in Rome" refers to abiding by local laws but, while this is true, it goes a lot further - it's about respecting the mores, values and culture of the people you've come to live amongst. Multiculturalism, for all that it was well-meant, resulted in some immigrant groups feeling that this no longer applied.

None of this is to suggest that racism and xenophobia doesn't exist. Rather it is to say that multiculturalism is a failed policy that has contributed more to our current attitude to immigration than the media, populist politicians or misunderstandings about values. To go back to where we started, in economic terms immigration is a success, The problem is that in cultural terms we've allowed it to be a disaster. And unless we begin to give a greater prominence to indigenous culture and especially the culture of those some sneeringly refer to as 'the left behind', we will continue to face these problems.

Immigration is a success. We are all richer for people coming here and contributing to Britain's economy. We should direct our efforts to integration rather than pretending that closing the borders will solve the problem. Back in June I listened to some people express their concerns about immigration. Except, as I pointed out, their concerns weren't about immigrants but about people who were born here, for whom Bradford is just as much home. This makes it all our problem and not one solved by immigration control. It's multiculturalism that has failed us not immigration.

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Ted Cantle and Chuka Umunna are wrong - Britain is not getting more segregated

For many people in Bradford the 7th July 2001 is a date that brings back dreadful memories. Forget about the declining textile industry, the struggles of our city centre and our poor education system for a second - the one event that most damaged our city's image and reputation happened on that day. A small section of the City's population, in one relatively small part of the city rioted, looted, wrecked the livelihoods of local businesses and turned Bradford into a byword for segregation and racial tension.

And it was a small part of the city - from Westgate and White Abbey Road up to Carlisle Road, along Oak Lane and a part of Manningham Lane. I could walk you round the sites of that violent day, show you where the pubs and car showrooms were burned out, point to the shop that before that day was one of Bradford's oldest Polish delis and show you the spot where burning cars scarred the surface of the roads. That walk would take - with stops to reflect on this damage - perhaps an hour. Yet ask someone from elsewhere about our city and, chances are, that something referring back to that day will come up - perhaps a reference to our large Asian community, to crime, or drugs, racism or segregation. Even today, as the recent anti-semitism row shows, we allow the vocal presence of a large minority community - Asian Muslims - to dominate the discourse about Bradford.

There were two major reports commissioned into the riots, their causes and their consequences - one from Sir Herman Ouseley (Community Pride, not Prejudice) and one from Ted Cantle (which had a wider remit by looking at events on the same day in Oldham and Burnley). Cantle coined the term 'parallel lives' to describe communities in these places and, since Bradford was the biggest and most high profile of these riot-torn places, his characterisation of our city as a place divided became the basis for how elsewhere viewed Bradford.

From Cantle's work came the idea of 'community cohesion', a sort of catch-all phrase to cover working to reduce 'tensions' alongside the old concept of 'community development' and ideas around race, faith and integration. The premise of 'cohesion' is that it is an antonym of 'segregation' - cohesive communities are where different cultures not just share a place but live together in a place. Some people chose to see this agenda as a rejection of multiculturalism, arguing that integration is essential to cohesion whereas others took Cantle's argument as a case for embedding that multicultural agenda further into schools, workplaces and the wider 'community'.

When Bradford Council's Executive first sat down to consider the response to the riots - in a terrible irony on the afternoon of 11th September 2001 - we knew that our decisions would be subject to central government scrutiny and intervention, not least because we were then a Conservative-led authority under a Labour government. The Council's leadership (or which I was then a member) was not happy with either the Ouseley report - commissioned before the riots - or Cantle's 'parallel lives' report. We felt, and still feel, that the description of Bradford was limited, failed to acknowledge the wider city and ignored reasons for riot that were not about segregation at all but more to do with drugs, crime and racist policing.

This is a long context for a response to Ted Cantle's comments yesterday in The Guardian that suggest somehow segregation today is worse than it was back in 2001:

Speaking to the Guardian 15 years after he called for action to reduce polarisation following violent riots across northern England, in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley, Cantle said he was alarmed by the direction the country had headed since then.

“There is more mixing in some parts of our society. But there is also undoubtedly more segregation in residential areas, more segregation in schools and more segregation in workplaces,” he said. “That is driving more prejudice, intolerance, mistrust in communities.”

Superficially the evidence for Cantle's argument is strong and is set out in the article - a growing number of electoral wards with a non-white majority, schools with a majority minority intake and 'segregated' workplaces. I fear that this tells us only part of the story, problematises race and provides justification for the race or culture based special pleading that is such a driver of division. There is another, more positive story. Here from the Centre for the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at Manchester University:

Inner London has experienced a decrease in segregation for most ethnic groups, with an increase of 3% or less for the White British, Caribbean and African groups. The White British group saw their greatest increase in segregation in inner London, although this was very small at 3%. Outer London’s decreasing segregation is particularly notable for the Bangladeshi (-12%), Chinese (-11%) and Mixed (-8%) groups. Segregation has decreased in metropolitan districts for all ethnic groups except White British. The White British and Other White groups saw marginal increases in segregation in other large cities. For all other ethnic groups, segregation decreased in these urban districts, in particular for the African group, with a decrease of 20%. The picture is one of decreased residential segregation in urban areas. An important mechanism for this change is dispersal from major cities to suburban and rural areas, in particular by families.

What we have here is a very different picture from that presented by Cantle and others - rather than seeing the colour of people living in a place as a mark of division, we see the same process of dispersal from immigrant communities we saw for previous generations of immigrants. People from Indian, Bengali and Pakistani heritage, as more of them succeed in life, molve away from the dense urban places of their arrival (or, for many, birth) in the same way that the children of poor East End Jews moved outwards to Golders Green, Hendon and Mill Hill. These Jewish families did not lose their faith or culture but their otherness was diminished by the things they shared with their new neighbours. There is no reason to suppose that the same dispersal for Hindu or Muslim, Asian and Black communities will not result in greater rather than less cohesion.

The reason for those statistics and for the frightening agenda apparent from Chuka Umunna is that the past couple of decades have seen the most concentrated influx of immigrants to the UK in our history. Whatever we think about this fact - The Guardian reports 1.2 million into London alone (although these are defined as not "white-British" so could be white European I guess) - if we define the lack of cohesion by simply counting how many black people there are in a given place then we fall into company with racists. Moreover, we define people by the box they tick on an ethnic monitoring form (a pox on these things) rather than on what they actually think, do or say.

The South Asian population of Bingley Rural - the ward I represent - was 482 in 2011 (it has likely risen a little since then - so maybe 600) and was 164 in 2001. In a small way this illustrates this dispersal. This is around 3% of the population, yet we elected a resident of Pakistani heritage as a councillor this May. If I were to be blunt, I doubt this would have been possible in 2001. Of course there is racism, I met people who said they wouldn't vote for Naveed because of his race and faith but overwhelmingly people seemed to see beyond that fact to the person underneath.

The Guardian article - indeed much of what I read in the press about the affect or impact of immigration - fails to touch on the truth about integration. Just as people don't judge me as a Roman Catholic or my wife as Jewish (although we've some problems with this), we are beginning to stop judging people by their skin colour. We've a way to go with Islam - we still make assumptions about a woman in a headscarf, for example - but even there the extent of our experience and witness of what most Muslims are like is beginning to change how we view that faith.

The way in which Ted Cantle frames his argument - focusing on numbers and concentration rather than actual evidence of segregation - doesn't reflect the reality of immigration, integration and dispersal. There's nothing new about recent arrivals clustering together - this takes advantage of family links, community and faith institutions, and provides the necessary social capital to support the new community in a foreign environment. But every example of a new community has seen that concentration diminish as they become established. This isn't to say that there won't be continuing concentrations - Indians in Harrow, Jews in Alwoodley, Pakistanis in Heaton - but these places are no longer inward-looking ghettos but just places where a lot of the residents happen to be Jews, Hindus or Muslims.

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Racism and the integration of immigrants

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In matters of race, Sweden is one of the most tolerant nations on earth. Yet, for that country's significant immigrant population, the fact that the neighbours don't mind you being a foreigner probably doesn't make up for the poor economic outcomes. In a striking study, Nima Sanadaji looks at how good different places are at integrating immigrants with the concern that:

In particular, low-skilled immigrants from poor countries experience high unemployment and a range of related social problems. Much has been written about the extent of the problem. In many Western European cities, entire communities of migrants are living in social and economic exclusion. The state of poverty is often persists among their children.

We're not here considering whether those immigrants should be here in the first place - that's a very different debate - but how, when they get here (wherever 'here' might be) they get on in economic and social terms. What Sanadaji does is use the World Values Surveys to look at whether the barrier to integration is attitudes (essentially racism) or outcomes. And he concludes that:

...it is difficult to conclusively say what factors that favor integration and what obstacles that stand in the way of integration. It could, for example, be argued that the people in countries such as Sweden are giving politically correct responses. These responses do not necessarily have to translate to the discrimination actually faced by immigrants on a daily basis. At the same time, it is clear that the Anglo-Saxon countries are succeeding in integration. This could be attributed to having English as their main language. It could also be attributed to market-based systems with strong incentives for work and relatively free labor markets. In short, attitudes, at least as reported by the World Value Survey, do not seem to explain the differences in integration. Although all enlightened countries should strive for the tolerant views expressed in countries such as Sweden, this does not guarantee well‑functioning integration.

The lesson here is that, if we focus merely on reducing discrimination, we may still find that those immigrant communities sit outside the mainstream and struggle to integrate, at least economically. Sanadaji's observations about disincentives to work in European welfare systems and the significance of open, flexible labour markets are perhaps as important - put simply incentives and opportunities are critical to the successful integration of new communities. Without these factors, anti-discrimination alone does not work to integrate immigrants.

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The case for school choice...

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Some - mostly from the wealthy left-wing commentariat - seem not to get this simple truth:

Why is this important? Because it indicates that school choice leads to more integrated communities. The British system, which Fiona Millar & Co seem so keen on, entrenches inequality by increasing house prices around good state schools and decreasing them around worse ones. The rich live with the rich, and the poor with the poor. School choice has the potential to break this pattern of social segregation. And this is precisely what recent American research suggests: with more choice decoupled from residence, house prices and average incomes decrease around more sought-after schools and increase around less sought-after ones. In other words, we see an equalisation among communities – school choice reduces residential segregation.

I guess Fiona Millar and her ilk don't want to mix with hoi polloi?

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Integration and the shop as brand marketing....more thoughts on the High Street

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When I came to Bradford, I came as an account executive at a direct marketing agency. And, back then, direct marketing was flavour of the season. The advent of databases, the collection, manipulation and analysis of information, and the idea that we could tailor our offer or appeal to the target consumer - these things made us the scientists of marketing set against the flash, braces-wearing 'above-the-line' folk making those useless TV adverts.

But direct marketing seemed a stale term, more akin to door-to-door selling than to the white heat of information technology. With all our profiling, multiple regression, expert systems and data-mining we rebadged the business - firstly as database marketing, then as relationship marketing - before realising that the unreliable, untargeted advertising was still there, our clients were still spending more on this than on letters and leaflets.

So integrated marketing was invented. Or rather it wasn't, we simply realised that the different bits of marketing activity needed to work together if the campaigns were to succeed. Our clients needed brand marketing as well as targeted marketing.

What's all this got to do with the high street, I hear you cry? Put simply bricks and mortar based retailing has to make use of on-line promotion and sales - we know this and every retail strategist worth his salt is focused on making this transition. But what we haven't appreciated is that this isn't a shift from real to virtual with the high street vanishing but the integration of different channels and their use for marketing as well as selling.

Here's Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com:

“Our view from the marketplace is that there is going to be a form of humanity, and consumers are still going to be interacting with the high street,” he said, explaining that consumers will always prefer to look and feel products and connect with retailers on a face-to-face basis. “What Rakuten’s Play.com is trying to do is be able to offer the services so that high street retailers can have the services without the massive costs and infrastructure to build a digital proposition within a marketplace. So our position is very much not about Cannibalisation, but more about working together with the high street and being able to offer a digital proposition that works in collaboration with a tangible, physical, high street environment.”

All a bit wordy but, in essence, what Stewart is saying is that the virtual retail world needs the high street environment because customers crave tangibility. The problem is that those tangible retailers will struggle to succeed alone - the store becomes as much about brand development and promotion as it is a sales channel.

This can take the form of the spectacular - here's the Johnny Walker House in Beijing:

Diageo describe this as:

...the Johnnie Walker House serves to meet consumer demand for luxury with substance. Blending a bar, museum, retail outlet and an exclusive members club, the Johnnie Walker House Beijing is a response to the demand from Chinese consumers for in-depth knowledge, not only of the specific luxury brands they indulge in, but also of the broader categories the brands fall under.

If you want the more mundane you can check out Disney's presence in Walmart - for sure this makes sales but it's just as much about maintaining the ubiquity of Disney as a brand. Plus of course there's the wonder that is the Apple store - again there's no obvious need for a high technology brand to have a high street presence but the stores provide a strong brand impression in the real world (as well as flogging the odd iPad). When the new product launch comes along and all the fans want one it's better marketing to have all those fans queueing in the town centre than to have them invisibly poised over the 'enter' key on their laptop.

Just as importantly - and this matters in thinking about our centres - the customers that the brand owner wants in his store aren't simply any old customer who wanders by - here's Stewart again talking about retail banking:

 “A very good, corporate, customer, with a high lifetime, probably wants to go in to see a bank manager, and banks need to be able to facilitate that conversation and offer a good service,” Stewart explains. “But a customer who is churning on zero per cent credit cards, banks want them to interact digitally."

Just as Diageo wants high net worth customers in the Johnny Walker House, the future high street success wants high spending, high end customers - the every day buyer can shop from his computer and have it delivered or collect from the Post Office. In town retailing becomes an event, an orchestrated, animated marketing promotion. The customers walking into you shop are there because you've invited them - to a product launch, an anniversary, a preview. They're dressed up to party not slouching round the shops in jeans and an old t-shirt.

Inside you'll get them to engage on-line even more - to like the Facebook page, to follow on Twitter, to join an on-line club for the best customers. And they'll go away and become your best sales people - bragging and preening about the brand urging their friends to get involved.

This integration will be - for retailers - the essence of success. Without a strong on-line presence the retailer cannot compete once over a third, perhaps half, of retail sales are virtual. But that isn't enough - the best retailers will see the shop as one of their essential marketing tools, as a place of rewards, celebration and excitement. As the thing that captures the idea of that brand as fun - as leisure and pleasure.
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“Our view from the marketplace is that there is going to be a form of humanity, and consumers are still going to be interacting with the high street,” he said, explaining that consumers will always prefer to look and feel products and connect with retailers on a face-to-face basis. “What Rakuten’s Play.com is trying to do is be able to offer the services so that high street retailers can have the services without the massive costs and infrastructure to build a digital proposition within a marketplace. So our position is very much not about Cannibalisation, but more about working together with the high street and being able to offer a digital proposition that works in collaboration with a tangible, physical, high street environment.”
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99

Adam Stewart, marketing director at Rakuten’s Play.com
Read more at http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/07/22/true-value-customer-rakutens-playcom-marketing-director-why-understanding-customer#A2BGjJzbeSo66TWI.99