On the benefits of migration...

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Let's begin by acknowledging that there's little objective difference between moving for work from Aberdeen to London or arriving in London for that purpose from Sofia. Other than the matter of language and some unspecified "cultural" distinctions.

Next we need to appreciate that population churn is important to the economy:

It is important to note how this ‘[population] churn’ helps cities. Knowledge-based economies run on the quality of ideas. Ideas are not only a function of intelligence or education, but also the depth of information a person, or a city, receives. Historically, a lack of information – via a lack of demographic inflow – has ‘Balkanized’ social networks in Rust Belt cities. This has led to a culture of parochialism, which has hurt economic development.”

This quote comes from a report looking at Cleveland, Ohio - long seen as a struggling city, even by the standards of the American mid-west. Importantly the work redefines 'knowledge' - rather than see it merely in terms of high order education or skill, it sees it as:

...the set of personal relationships and knowledge of other places and social networks that we all carry to some extent. Global cities not only score well on traditional knowledge measures, but because they are destinations for migrants, they excel in this more broader notion as well

In simple terms, the benefits of migration lie in diversity - if most of your migrants come from one place (as is the case with Bradford, for example), the 'knowledge' advantage is limited. What matters is that the inward migration - as in London - is from a multitude of places.

Thus Cleveland's problem - one repeated again and again elsewhere, not least in England's northern cities - is:

Attraction is very weak. Hence population decline, but also an inbred, closed society. About 75% of the people in metro Cleveland were born in Ohio, versus 30-60% in other, more globalized cities. Among large metros in the US, Cleveland ranks 6th in its percentage of the population living in the state they were born.

Mobility - migration - matters. The central advantage that London has over (most of) the rest of the UK is that it fits this model. People take their ideas, originality, initiative and spirit to the city - it is this rather than any sort of innate, local factor that drives London's success as a great city.

This work should make us stop and think about how we respond to migration. And to consider that by making it a problem we might damage our economic future?

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Why Jonathan Portes should shut up about migration - from someone who agrees with him...

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“These transitional places – arrival cities – are the places where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the next great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice and our willingness to engage” Doug Saunders

The problem with the discussion of migration is that the public debate is characterised by adherence to unquestioned and polemical positions – either migration is a bad thing that places undue pressures on jobs, culture and public institutions or else migration contributes to economic growth and underscores the idea of a free nation.

Now those who know me will know that I’m much closer to the second of these positions. Indeed, the idea that a nation is made up of people who want to be there (rather than who just happened to have been born there) is a far healthier idea than the sort of racially or culturally determined ideas of nationhood that are preferred by many opposed to immigration.

However, the comments from Jonathan Portes – a sort of “my carefully chosen facts are the only facts” commentary reveal a deep unpleasantness in the debate (an unpleasantness more usually associated with those who say we’re full up and call for ever more draconian restrictions on migration).

The real point here is that the presence of migrants in the UK – from wherever they come – must have an impact on the home communities. Portes presents statistics showing that immigrants are more likely to be working than is the case for the population as a whole but doesn’t recognise that this is only part of the picture. And then, without presenting any facts, Portes then makes this sweeping statement:

So, once again, we are left with the conclusion that in the absence of immigration the public finances would be in an even worse state – we'd be spending somewhat less, but we'd lose even more than that on tax, both in the short and the long run, as the OBR has pointed out.

So we move from a very specific assessment – of migration from EU accession nations – to a general observation about the economic benefits of migration. A benefit that reflects every sort of migrant – everyone from billionaire Russian oligarchs to penniless refugees from Burma. The problem is further confused by this:

But since the non-activity rate is lower in the EU migrant population as a whole (and remember many non-active EU migrants will be family members of those who are active) overall this simply confirms the conclusion found by other studies – EU migrants, like migrants in general, pay in more than they take out on average.

This simply doesn’t prove the point that Portes is making, certainly not in the short run and absolutely not in the case of migrants from Eastern Europe. Given that most of these recent immigrants are in low paid work, the amount paid in is less and many will be receiving in-work benefits (tax credits, housing benefit) and universal benefits (child benefits). So the fact of them working does not mean that they are net contributors to the system.

And beyond the discussion about the NHS, we have to provide education for children – including for many the £900 per child pupil premium - we have costs falling on social services and other exceptional costs. It is unhelpful and misleading for Portes to dismiss the short-term effect of migration on public services with what amounts to ‘pah’.

What Jonathan Portes needs to learn is that, if we are to make the case for migration as a benefit, we need to do so positively. Treating those who are concerned about migration as if they are a bunch of pseudo-racist nutcases does not help at all – rather it reinforces the view that migration benefits middle-class professionals like Portes and me, so who cares about the impact on working class communities or the worries about schools, hospitals and social services.

I headed this comment with a quote from Doug Saunders, from the preface to Arrival City, the story of how migration is transforming the world for the better. That is the message we need to get across rather than the grubby and snide use of selected facts to make what is, ultimately, a petty point.

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On the barriers to employment...

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And something of a reminder. But first those barriers:

1. The workings of the welfare system (the ‘benefits trap’), where wages were lower than what could be received from out of work benefits.
2. The low status and low levels of pay of some jobs, making them ‘hard to fill’.
3. A ‘soft’ skills deficit amongst the local workforce ... particularly around motivation, punctuality, reliability and absenteeism

No real surprises there. We know this about employment and have known it for years. Anyone who has worked with people trying to help people into work knows all about these barriers.

So that reminder.

The report looked at the role of migrant workers in the labour markets of Bristol and Hull. It found that in these two cities the arrival of migrants had not created a barrier to the long term unemployed finding a job.

So will someone please tell me why we keep blaming immigrants for our employment problems?

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...and Bradford Council want you to think there's a housing crisis

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For some while now the Labour folk running Bradford (into the ground) have been telling us that there's a 'housing crisis' requiring us to build loads and loads of houses all over the place to cope with our growing population.

However, it seems that this growing population is, in fact, leaving:

Internal migration statistics, released by the Office of National Statistics yesterday, show around 4,000 more people left the district than arrived in the year ending June 2012. 

We'll be finding out that the birth rate statistics the Council are using are wrong next.

Mind you in the same newspaper they're running:

Bradford’s Housing Timebomb, which calls for more affordable homes to be built on brownfield land to help the 21,000 local people stuck on social housing waiting lists. 

The 21,000 figure is, of course, a complete fiction - this is the number of people registered on the Bradford 'choice-based letting' system which isn't a waiting list. Anyone can register and no questions about housing need are asked. However, this doesn't stop self-interested lobbies like the National Housing Federation.

In Bradford there are perhaps 6,000 people actually in some kind of housing need in any given year and around 2,000 social rents coming onto the market in the same period. If a net figure of 4,000 people are leaving (mostly leaving behind an empty home), it seems to me that the housing development need in Bradford is pretty close to zero.

And this rather explains why there's over 5,000 houses planned that aren';t being built. Put simply, there's no-one to buy them.

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Immigration is (mostly) a good thing...

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And perhaps politicians need to stop telling us how bad it is - not just the tinpot poujadist Farage but all the others too. Miliband, Clegg and Cameron all lined up to tell us how jolly awful immigration is, how something must be done, how (in Miliband's case) how sorry they were that they'd not said nasty things about immigrants before. All accompanied by a stream of lunatic policies and controls - designed less to do anything about those dreadful immigrants than to get the juices flowing in a certain sort of upper lower middle working class person that the focus groups have spotted.

Let's be clear folks, what Britain has gained from immigrants so vastly outweighs what it has lost that to start on some ghastly line of "they don't speak English" or "they take our jobs" is to entirely miss the point. A point that goes like this:

Immigration is good for us. With every major party now promising to ‘get tough’ on immigration, it’s easy to forget that immigrants bring new skills to the country, allow for more specialization, tend to be more entrepreneurial than average, pay more in to the welfare state than they take out, and make things cheaper by doing the jobs that Britons won't.

So a little bit of me despairs when the last generation of immigrants turns on the latest arrivals - here's Rashid Awan from Bradford Pakistan Society:
 

“If anyone is coming to this country, he or she should have a job to go to or study,” he said. “Students coming here should have their financial backing in place. In my view it does make sense.

“Maybe some people will be affected by this, but I think this policy has to be observed. To bring back the economic situation of this country to normality, these small steps are necessary.

“I am not here to say people who are here genuinely should be penalised, but I think these people coming here genuinely are taken care of. We are in a very acute economic situation and we need to make sure no abuse is created as far as benefits are concerned.” 

But I'm not surprised.

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A question about jobs and immigration...

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An exchange on twitter with Chris Dillow whose stumblings and mumblings are always worth a read, raised the issue of immigration and jobs. A familiar subject most usually heard in the "immigrants come here and steal our jobs" kind of argument - or indeed in cries such as "British Jobs for British Workers".

For what it's worth, I take the view that this argument gets its cause and effect in the wrong order. Immigrants come here because there are jobs. Indeed Chris provided a link to an interesting piece explaining how the immigration/jobs link isn't as plain as it is sometimes presented and it concludes;

"...that there is absolutely no discernible correlation between the areas where new migrants from Eastern Europe settled and changes in the claimant count. More sophisticated analysis shows pretty much the same thing; and using other data sources, and other definitions of migrant, likewise."

So my question is this: why, when UK unemployment levels are high and rising, does economic migration - people moving to the UK to work - persist?

To bring it right down to Cullingworth -  why are all the workers in the chicken factories immigrants?

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Which came first - the job or the immigrant?

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In its latest piece of well-researched scaremongering, Migration Watch has been speaking of the number of jobs filled by immigrant workers - and now some government advisors suggest that immigrants have "displaced" UK workers:

The government's official advisers on migration say there is a link between immigration from outside the European Union and job losses among UK workers.

The Migration Advisory Committee said there were 23 fewer UK jobs for every 100 migrants from outside the EU.

The implication of this reporting (and it's the BBC so will have been written carefully) is that British workers are being sacked to make way for immigrant labour. This is, however you want to look at it, both a dangerous statement and utter rubbish.

The problem isn't with British workers, it's with British non-workers. Immigrant labour is (and I've heard this time and time again) more reliable, hard-working and less trouble than native British workers. But more importantly, immigrants are filling those jobs because the native British workers aren't. The jobs come before the immigrants - people don't trog across half a continent at their own expense if there isn't a pretty good prospect of work.

Here in Cullingworth there's a chicken factory. It makes a living (sometimes to the annoyance of residents) killing said birds and shipping them across the UK and Europe. All the work force are Eastern European. Yet Bradford has high rates of unemployment especially among unskilled young men. Killing chickens seems like a job they could do but, I guess, choose not to.

If those British workers took those jobs, the immigrants wouldn't come here to fill them. Rather than running scare stories about immigration, we should be asking why - during such tough times - British workers aren't taking those jobs?

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Beggars and fetid roadside camps - now where have I heard that before?

There is as the old sages say nothing new in all the world. You thought migration and its associated problems were new? Think again.

"It was the lodestone cities, the El Dorados of the dispossessed...which complained to governments that migrant labour mostly native but also foreign, was wrecking welfare and social control services that were adequate only to deal with their own drop-outs: the unprotected aged, the infirm, the mentally unstable, unwanted babies, those temporarily unemployed because of a downturn in the local economy. Droves of statutes, a Europe-wide spate of books and pamphlets dealing with jobless gangs, beggars real and phoney, fetid roadside encampments, terrorized suburbs, attested to the gravity of the domestic problems and to governments' inability to deal with it." (From "The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance" by John Hale)

Sounds a bit like a Daily Mail editorial!

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SHOCK: Mayor of Doncaster complies with Labour Government advice on translation!

A huge furore greeted the announcement by the newly elected Mayor of Doncaster that translation services should be scrapped. This was proof positive that said mayor was either mad, stupid or racist - or possibly all three.

However, Peter Davies' proposals are, in truth, pretty close to the best practice advice from the Department for Communities & Local Government (DCLG):

“As our guidance on translation makes clear, we believe translation needs to be targeted and evidence-based; and provide a stepping stone to learning English. So we would expect areas to find out whether new migrants can speak English, only translate where they cannot and then make information packs bilingual or be clear about how people can learn English.”

Given that the implementation of the Mayor's policy is resulting in the redirection of funding to the provision of ESOL courses and support perhaps we should applaud Doncaster for being one of the few local councils to follow John Denham and the Labour Government's advice? Courses that, in a classic piece of dysfunctional government, Labour cut!