Immigration versus social cohesion?

The elites benefit, so it's becoming a leftish issue

by Matt Ridley

It looks as if David Cameron is determined not to emulate Tony Blair over European immigration. Faced with opinion polls showing that tightening immigration is top of the list of concerns that voters want the Prime Minister to negotiate with Europe, he is going to fight to keep a Romanian and Bulgarian influx out as Mr Blair did not for Poles in 2004. It is the ideal ground for him to pick a fight with Brussels.

One reason is that he now has more political cover on the issue of immigration. It is no longer nearly as “right wing” an issue as it once was, though popular enough with UKIP voters. Migration as a political issue seems itself to be migrating across the political spectrum from right to centre, if not left. Where once any kind of opposition to immigration was seen by left-wing parties and the BBC as just a proxy for racism, increasingly it is now a subject for real debate.

The best example of this is the positive reception that Paul Collier’s new book Exodus has received from the bien-pensant Left. Collier has raised worries about immigration with which left-leaning commentators can sympathise: in particular social cohesion and the effect on the global poor. He is following a path pioneered by David Goodhart, whose book The British Dream argued that overzealous multiculturalism had “reinforced difference instead of promoting a common life”, putting at risk the welfare state.

Both books make the case that the generosity with which British citizens are prepared to hand welfare payments to others could be damaged if Britons no longer think of their neighbours as part of the same “country”. In effect they are voicing an old-fashioned nationalism. Collier warns that “while migration does not make nations obsolete, the acceleration of migration in conjunction with a policy of multiculturalism might potentially threaten their viability”. Nations, he points out, have fallen out of favour as “solutions to collective action problems”. It is not clear how large an unabsorbed diaspora could get before it weakened “the mutual regard on which society depends”.

Of course, the diaspora that the British migrants established around the world, swamping native Americans, Aborigines, Maoris and French Canadians, created a rather successful sense of supranational solidarity. Daniel Hannan’s new book How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters, published today, tells an extraordinary story about how the values of “the West” were actually a very peculiar set of Anglosphere traditions — above all, the notion that the State is the servant, not the master, of the individual.

He argues that this idea, carried by emigrants from one damp island to North America and Australasia, is quite distinct from the top-down traditions of many other European countries. Freedom survived the mid 20th century by the skin of its teeth, thanks almost entirely to the Anglosphere. When Boris Johnson says that the current system of immigration is mad, “cracking down on Australians and New Zealanders and high-spending Chinese students and tourists — but completely incapable of dealing with a sizeable influx from within the EU, some of whom show no sign of wanting to work”, he is partly echoing the idea that we feel solidarity with the Anglosphere but not the Eurosphere.

In a thought-provoking article for Wired magazine this month, Balaji Srinavasan, a Californian entrepreneur and academic, argues that many people now feel social solidarity with virtual diasporas, “finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location”. He then makes the startling claim that such virtual diasporas may be about to become real ones, as such people get drawn together to found some colony of like-minded folk, either within a country or maybe offshore or on Mars.

That’s a long way off. But it is a reminder that the migration argument in support of international solidarity is beginning to sound more like a right-wing one. Libertarian-leaning economists on the right continue to sing the praises of migration, arguing that free trade in people is just as valuable as free trade in goods and services. And the Right’s traditional supporters, the wealthy, are indeed the main beneficiaries of immigration in the form of nannies, cleaners, waiters and oncologists.

Perhaps as racial prejudice fades — and the number of white people who even secretly dislike non-white people merely because they are non-white must surely be falling with almost every funeral — a great realignment will become apparent, with migration being seen increasingly through the lens of what it does to what used to be called the working class: competition for low-wage jobs, houses, threats to their culture.

In short, Mr Cameron is right to pick a fight on the length of time an immigrant must stay before claiming welfare. It plays into the social cohesion point beloved of the Centre Left. When Collier says that “it may prove unsustainable to combine rapid migration with multicultural policies that keep absorption rates low and welfare systems that are generous”, he’s only rephrasing in academic lingo what plenty of ordinary people think.

The unprecedented wave of immigration that Britain received between 1997 and 2010 (about 3.2 million net immigrants) did not just put pressure on housing and welfare; it also put pressure on culture. The more that immigrants fail to integrate, either by sheer numbers or by the encouragement of multiculturalism, the more resented they will be. What America did so well for so long was to suck in millions of people from Ireland, Germany, Italy and Africa but turn them into flag-waving democrats who loved free enterprise.

As the history of America showed, migration has a tendency to accelerate because diasporas tend to draw more people after them. Collier adds that rising incomes in poor countries lead to still more acceleration, not less, since the very poorest cannot afford the price of a people-smuggler’s fee, let alone an air fare. The slave trade excepted, the people who flocked to the United States were not the poorest of the global poor from rural parts of Asia and Africa. They were the moderately poor urban masses of Europe. Likewise, today it is generally the people who have already migrated from village to city, and scraped together some savings who come to Britain. Even rising educational standards accelerate migration by allowing more people to surmount any educational hurdles in the path of migrants, Collier argues.

So there’s no prospect of immigration pressure easing even though poor countries are getting rich faster than we are. It’s obvious that this country cannot have unrestrained migration, and equally obvious that it cannot have no migration. The question is, and always will be, how much.

Put Collier’s and Hannan’s books together and you get one clear recommendation. A country like Britain should do its utmost to pull in as many talented people from poor countries as it can, turn them into fans of the Anglosphere tradition of freedom, and send them back home where they can help enrich and liberate the poor, while not threatening the livelihoods of poorer people here. In short, stop making life difficult for foreign students.