What’s mufti got to do with it?

Essential reading and viewing for anyone covering immigration

Anti-immigrationists were given a shot in the arm this week in the shape of a report from the Lords which questioned the government’s claim that immigrants to the UK provided a net economic benefit.

A couple of articles in today’s Observer zero in on the topic. The first looks at the effect of immigration in Slough. It occasionally drifts into irrelevant territory, like when it discusses how Polish school kids turned up in school in their uniform on mufti day since they didn’t know what mufti was. But otherwise it contains lots of information that will help students consolidate their knowledge and understanding of an always popular UK issues topic. For instance, it quotes Stephen Castles, Professor of migration and refugee studies at Oxford, on benefits that arise as a result of migration:

‘You can’t have economic growth without migrants,’ Castles said. ‘There is no other way. Any country that tries to prevent migration is dooming itself to a stagnant or declining economy. Enver Hoxha’s Albania is about the only one that has.’

There is, as Castles pointed out, a further economic benefit - ignored by the Lords committee report - that frequently accompanies migrants: by their very readiness to take the risk of abandoning their roots to make a new life, they have shown themselves to be ambitious and energetic, and perhaps entrepreneurs.

There is also a very good information fact file:

“Ethnic make-up

The ethnic breakdown of the UK population, derived from the 2001 census - still the latest figures

Total population - 58,789,194

White 54,153,898 (92.1 per cent)

All Asian or Asian British - 2,331,423 (4 per cent total)

Indian 1,053,411

Pakistani 747,285

Bangladeshi 283,063

Other Asian 247,664

Black or Black British 1,148,738

Chinese 247,403

Other ethnic groups 230,615

Mixed race 677,117

All minority ethnic groups 4,635,296 (7.9 per cent)

Migration facts

Latest figures covering the breakdown of arrivals in the UK. Source: the Office for National Statistics

591,000 Number of long-term immigrants who entered the UK

400,000 Number of people who left to live abroad, up from 359,000 in 2005

191,000 Net immigration into the UK. Net immigration of New Commonwealth (Asian, African and Caribbean Commonwealth countries) citizens was the highest of all the non-British citizenship groups

29 Percentage of immigrants who arrived in London, the most common destination for migrants. This figure is down from 43 per cent in 2000

92,000 Number of Eastern European immigrants - from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia - up from 76,000 in 2005. Almost three quarters, 68,000, were Polish citizens, the highest number of any single non-British citizenship.

40 Percentage of immigrants who cited ‘work related’ reasons for their move

70,000 Number of immigrants (12 per cent) who arrived ‘looking for work’. 161,000 (27 per cent) had a ‘definite job to go to’

157,000 The record number of immigrants who came to the UK to study and stayed for at least a year. This was just over a quarter of total immigration, up from about a fifth in 2001. Eighty per cent of those coming to the UK to study were citizens from outside the EU, with 30 per cent from China and India

6,000 The net inflow of asylum seekers and their dependants”

The leader article in the same paper also presents a strong case in defence of immigration:

“As an aggregation of all available data, the Lords’ report is a useful exercise. As an economic analysis it is valuable, too, but with serious limitations. The problems start with the committee’s attempt to unpick who is benefiting from whom. The Lords assume that there is one ‘resident’ (ie native) population, and a separate immigrant population, and that for the immigrants to provide benefit to the UK, the average wealth of the established residents must go up.

As an analytical framework, this just about makes sense in the case of workers who stay for short periods. But it falls apart in the case of those who will settle and become British, as yet an unknown quantity. Historically, the transmission of immigrant wealth has taken place across generations. A portion of the current ‘resident’ population is in fact comprised of earlier migrants. If you go back far enough - to Irish, Huguenot, Norman, Saxon arrivals - nearly all of it is. So there is no fixed constituency of ‘immigrants’. There are groups of people with varying and shifting levels of economic, cultural and social attachment to the UK.
This problem is clearest in the attempt to discuss whether or not immigration has fiscal benefits for the UK: do newcomers pay more in taxes than they cost in public services? The Lords says they don’t. But by its own admission it cannot fix a point where foreign becomes native; or where public benefit is transferred.

Take, for example, the British-born son of a Pakistani immigrant. He has a UK passport. He is a consumer of public services while at school, a taxpayer when he works. Then there is the Polish nurse who spends two years working in a care home tending British pensioners. How do we calculate her contribution? By the tax on her income or the social care she provided? It is impossible to formulate the cost-benefit equation that distinguishes between the value Britain’s immigrants take for themselves and that which they share with the rest of the population.”

This Monday, at 8pm, Channel 4 will show the first in a series of programmes examining immigration in the UK. The related website was experiencing problems when I looked at it, but there were promises of links to teaching resources so may be worth a look.