The Truth about Immigration: Introduction/Key Concepts
This is the first of seven (yes, seven!) planned articles looking at the evidence base that lies behind perhaps the most poisonous political issue of the last forty years – immigration.
What I’m going to attempt here is a fairly detailed exploration of the facts of immigration and what the statistical evidence that is available can tell us about its impact on Britain over the last twelve years in particular, although some of the trend data extends back to as early as 1991, providing scope for looking at how a range of different factors over that period of time have impacted on patterns of migration to, from and within the UK.
For reasons of space, if nothing else, these articles are limited in scope. The purpose here is to inform the wider debate and provide a set of platforms and frameworks for ongoing discussion rather than attempt to encompass the totality of the public discourse on immigration. As such, important topics such as crime, social cohesion, multiculturalism and the tensions that exist at the intersection of different cultures brought into close proximity by immigration are likely to arise only tangentially. The aim is here is not to try and sway your opinions towards a specific view of the costs and benefits of immigration but to provide honest, unbiased, information of a kind that should, hopefully, help to arrive at your own, properly informed, position on this issue and the many other complex issue that spin off from it.
As such, comments of the ‘why haven’t you covered…’ variety are likely to get one of two answers, either ‘it’s in one of the upcoming articles’ or ‘that’s an interesting point – why don’t you go and write something about it yourself and link back to here?’. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover so I really don’t have the time to go off on tangents or riff on issues that are outside the main scope of this series.
Key Concepts
Before we start on the meat, we need to bottom out a few important concepts that will run through this series and how these differentiate what I’m attempting here from the kind of coverage you’ll often see in the mainstream press, especially the tabloids and mid-market titles, i.e. the Daily Mail and Daily Express.
First, much of the data we’ll be working with relates to net migration, which takes into account the fact that migration is a two-way street. People come, people go and it’s the difference between the numbers going in each direction that matters not just the numbers coming into the UK.
Second, it needs to be understood, when looking at population demographics, that migration is not the same as settlement. Many migrants stay in the UK for only a limited amount of time before returning to country of origin or moving on another country. Even when talking about net migration and population growth it has to be remembered that a sizeable proportion of migrants currently domiciled in the UK will eventually move on elsewhere, taking their families with them.
Third, we’ll be dealing with trends and time-series data not annual figures, unless they can be shown to be linked to specific alteration in immigration policy/practice. The out-of-context use of annual figures and relative statistics is a common feature of coverage that intends to provoke fear and anxiety [to sell newspapers]. Readers are fed a ‘shock’ headline which tell them that something ‘bad’ has gone up this year by a certain (high) percentage without any reference whatsoever the prevailing trend. You’ll most often see this trick pulled by the press when reporting crime statistics, where you’ll be told that; for example, murders have gone up by 10% this year without any reference to the fact this follows a fall of a similar amount the previous year, so the 10% increase only takes you back to where you were two years ago.
Sadly this is a ubiquitous feature of almost all reporting of issues in which statistical evidence is a significant feature, across a broad range of public policy issues.
Reliance on the lump of labour fallacy to paint a negative picture of the impact of, in particular, economic migration is an all too common feature of media coverage of immigration issues and of contemporary political rhetoric of course. The BNP’s hard-line protectionist position on economic migration is predicated entirely on this fallacy as is the ‘British jobs for British people’ line for which Gordon Brown was rightly pilloried. We’ll pick this up fully when we get on to the subject economic migration but there is a need to mindful of the fact that examples of this particular fallacy at work can be readily found across the broad spectrum of issues that make up the wider immigration debate.
In evaluating the impact of immigration on local or regional economies, rather than on the UK as a whole, it has to be remembered that internal migration will also be a significant factor in terms of its impact on demographic changes to local communities and the extent to which this has a knock-on effect on everything from employment to local economies to the provision of local public services. A clear picture of the impact of immigration must necessarily take account of internal population movements where this is relevant to a particular set of local conditions and/or issues.
Finally, one needs to be cautious in drawing inferences about the ethnic origins of migrants from immigration data, which is recorded in terms of nationality and citizenship. South Africa is, for example, one of the main sources of inward migration to the UK from the ‘Old Commonwealth’ of countries granted de facto independence by the 1931 Statute of Westminster, yet one would be unwise to make assumptions about the ethnic origins of migrants from that country on nationality alone as one would when dealing with the inward and outward migration of British citizens.
Where next?
That’s the preamble over and done with.
In article two of the series, which should go out alongside this one, we’ll be looking at the core demographic evidence before moving on to examine the single biggest source of net migration to the UK since 1991 – students.
In article three we’ll be tackling the thorny subject of asylum and placing it in its proper international context before moving swiftly on to cover economic migration in article four.
As a follow-up to article four we’ll then move on, in article five. to look at patterns of internal migration and its relationship to patterns of international migration into the UK’s regions.
Article six will deal with patterns of settlement and citizenship, after which we’ll wrap up the series in article seven by looking at how immigration issues are presented in the press and how this affects public perceptions of migrants and the wider immigration debate. For any BNP supporting trolls looking in, this will be the one with the Daily Mail-bashing in it, so you can feel free to skip the rest as I know that statistics really isn’t your strong suit.
That’s the battle plan for this series; now let’s get on with the show…
We only want the earth! Land rights and conflict
The Humanitarian Policy Group of the Overseas Development Institute are launching a book on land and conflict this week, the details of which can be found here.
Land issues are often central to understanding the dynamics of conflict and post-conflict settings, particularly in contexts of large scale displacement, but there has been very little serious discussion of their actual dynamics. It has been a fairly central part of my work over the last 10 years, and I have a chapter in the book based on the situation in Angola. Other contributors include: Alex de Waal, Liz Alden Wiley, Jon Unruh and Scott Leckie. The book is edited Sara Pantuliano who previously led UNDP’s Peace-building unit in Sudan.
Land dispossession has often been the cause of rural resistance and insurrection. Land issues are rarely the sole cause of conflict. But in places like Afghanistan, Colombia and Darfur they have been a major factor. The most common form of land conflict is often played out at the local level between communities (along borders, between pastoralists and farmers), frequently in the context of a state that has little interest in seeing a resolution, or where the state has collapsed or is powerless.
Conflicts over land occur in extremely different settings, though – from Rwanda to the Balkans, and the international community’s response to these problems is still weak, uncertain and under-analyzed. A failure to tackle land-grabbing in Afghanistan when I was there was one of the first signs that western governments were prepared to tolerate the corruption and lawlessness which have now fatally compromised its government’s legitimacy. An early reluctance to engage with institutions of customary law is also now widely recognised to have been a catastrophic mistake.
The book notes that humanitarian actors have been reluctant to address with land rights issues, because of their complexity and sensitivity can clash with our more limited mandates. What is more surprising is that politicians, policy-makers and pundits also rarely face up to the challenges that they pose.
Jean Charles de Menezes: price of a life
One three year old boy strikes another 11 times with a metal bar, leaving the victim toddler covered in blood and in need of stitches. Should the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority pay out?
Yes, the Tribunals Service ruled earlier this month, and probably rightly, too. Perhaps I should reconsider the forgiveness I have since freely extended to my younger brother for that nasty incident, circa 1969, which saw him bounce a half-brick off my bonce, resulting in a wound that also had to be sewn up.
On the other hand, it was just a little bit cheeky for Sajad Suleman to sue MI5 for £365,000, after the Funny People turned him down for a vacancy as a mobile surveillance officer.
I won’t vote for any MP who supports Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill
I’ve just started a new facebook group: I won’t vote for any MP who supports Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill.
The Digital Economy Bill plans to disconnect people from the internet if they’ve merely been accused of filesharing, or if anyone sharing their connection has been so accused. This is a breach of our human rights, and must be opposed.
No-one should be disconnected from the internet or otherwise punished for illegal filesharing unless they’ve been found guilty in a criminal court. Nor should anyone be punished merely for sharing a connection with an illegal filesharer; collective punishment is an infringement of human rights, and a war crime.
The group’s name is pretty much self-explanatory. While Lord Mandelson wasn’t elected, all 646 MPs in the House of Commons were, and most of them would like to keep on being MPs.
Normally, politicians care more about vested corporate interests than they do about mere citizens, but we’re lucky in the timing of this, because there has to be a general election within the next 8 months. There are roughly 7 million filesharers in the UK; if we all make our voice heard, they have to care what we think, at least until the election is over.
If you want to fight this unjust law, join the group, invite all your friends to join, and publicise it on your blog or website.
How New Labour ignored the focus groups
Part of the conventional wisdom about New Labour is that its leaders are obsessed with focus groups, and this is part of the reason why in the 1990s Labour shifted to the ‘centre ground’ and abandoned divisive ‘class warfare’ attacks on the rich and powerful.
As with so much of the conventional wisdom, it turns out that this is rubbish.
Stan Greenberg ran focus groups for the Labour Party between 1994 and 2005. Here’s a couple of excerpts from his book about what they found:
1994:
“Strategically, we knew we wanted it to be a ‘change election’, but we knew more: the cry for change was closely correlated with the feeling that the Tories “don’t care for the ordinary person” and are “on the side of the rich and powerful.” Change meant getting rid of a government which had failed ordinary people.”
2004:
“When Labour had lost its lead in 2004 over the Tories, I sat with Blair in his study in Chequers and dwelled on a single graph that illustrated the power of our message: “In a modern and uncertain world, hardworking people, not just the few, have the opportunity to make a better life.” It was 15 points stronger with the added reference to the privileged. But he felt it smacked of old and not the new politics that had opened Labour up to so many former Tories, though the data did not support that conclusion.”
*
New Labour ignored the data which showed that more people would support them if they governed for the majority and stood up to the rich and powerful, because many of its leaders had an ideological preference for a “One Nation” message and wanted Labour’s support to come equally from all sections of society. However laudable it seemed at the time, this approach has clearly failed.
So when self-styled moderates warn that Labour must not lurch to the left and must fight for the centre ground, they either mean that Labour should do more to take on the rich and powerful, or they are out of touch with what focus groups have been telling Labour for fifteen years.
More calls for windfall tax on banks
Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, is the latest to back the proposal for a windfall tax on the banks:
Over the past half century, UK bank capital has remained at between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of assets, these assets have risen tenfold, relative to GDP, and returns on equity have averaged 20 per cent. Such high returns, in an established industry, must mean either high barriers to entry or excessive risk-taking. The former are undesirable and the latter terrifying, particularly in view of the huge rise in the state’s exposure to the risks.
We will never have a better opportunity than now to redress the deteriorating terms of trade between the banks and the state. A big part of the solution must be to shift incentives. The more credible are the pre-announced limits on support from government, the more effective will be the changes in incentives inside banks, and vice versa. The less we are able to shift these incentives, the more important it will be to impose heavy regulation. The combination of today’s incentives with today’s safety nets and yesterday’s “light touch” regulation was devastating.
Yet, regardless of the success of reforms of incentives in – and regulation of – the financial sector, it is reasonable to recoup not only the direct fiscal costs of saving banks but even some of the wider fiscal costs of the crisis. The time has come for some carefully judged populism. A one-off windfall tax on bonuses would make the pain ahead for society so very much more bearable. Try it: millions will love it.
Britain’s first green city
Arguably, Stoke is already England’s greenest city on the grounds that there isn’t much industry left, or that much employment of any other kind. Still, nowt wrong with making a virtue out of necessity:
This evening, in St Margaret Ward Roman Catholic high school, Stoke-on-Trent is set to become the first city to sign up to the 10:10 pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 10% during 2010…
… Out in the cavernous main hall, waiting for the bingo to start, members Dave Athersmith and Julie Hulme agree: “We car-share to come here. We’ve all got to do our bit, haven’t we?” John Clowes, a retired ceramic tilemaker of 76 (“There’s tiles of mine in the Houses of Parliament”) has just had his loft insulated, and turns everything off at the mains at night. “It’s the young people you need to worry about,” he says. “Those electronic games. What happened to a kickaround in the street?” (In two days in Stoke, by the way, I met only three people prepared to dismiss climate change as a notion cooked up by a control-crazed government (or as one local put it, “absolute bollocks”). Most confessed to at least some concern.)
It’s conventional wisdom that the stout yeomen of the working classes will have no truck with all this environmental nonsense: conventional wisdom, that is, amongst rightwing or otherwise anti-crusty middle class types. continue reading… »
Climate change and Cumbria’s floods
Imagine, if you please, a kettle. The empirically-minded may wish to actually fetch one and 3/4 fill it with water. Examine the water in this imaginary (or actual, for the science geeks) kettle. It’s pretty much stationary. Now turn the kettle on and watch very carefully. You will quite quickly notice that the system becomes less predictable, less stable, more active and wilder, as the heat in the system increases.
If you increase the temperature far enough, your system will change radically and comprehensively (all the water will change state and leave the system through the cracks) leaving you with a barren, parched shell of what was once a nice cup of tea in potentia.
This is the image you should have in your mind when you hear an Environment Agency spokesmen using words like “unprecedented”.
The Second, Law, of Thermo, Dynamics.
The flooding in Cumbria is not quite Hurricane Katrina, but then we’re not in a hurricane belt. For Britain, even a Britain recently flooded a number of times in different areas, this has been a pretty wet week. Most specifically over a foot of actual rain fell on the Lake District and south-western Scotland [1] over the last 24 hours alone.
continue reading… »
How to commit a global warming fraud
If you’ve spotted this story in the newswire then you may well be wondering just what the hell is going on.
The short version is that sometime in the last couple of the weeks, hackers managed to raid a server at the University of East Anglia and download a large number of emails and other documents relating to the work of the University’s Climate Research Unit.
As a result, just over 61Mb of files were released onto the internet prompting climate change deniers into a full scale hue and cry.
As I write this, a coalition of the misguided, misinformed and, well, just plain old wackaloons, are heatedly pouring over the contents of the CRU’s mail server for any traces of ‘something dodgy’ in a vain attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming theory once and for all. It’s like watching a road traffic accident unfold in front of you in slow motion.
One of the hot topics of the moment is a number of emails which show CRU scientists trying to find ways to avoid releasing raw data into the public domain in response to FOIA requests from known deniers. Sounds dodgy, eh? Not when you understand what’s actually going on in the background.
Climate change conspiracies debunked
RealClimate.org has a good analysis of the e-mails written by climate scientists that were recently hacked and made public:
“There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.
Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.
It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.
No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context…But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.”
You can see one example of a cherry-picked ‘gotcha’ derived for these emails roundly debunked here…
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed. You can also get them by email and through our Facebook group.
» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
|
62 Comments 14 Comments 23 Comments 8 Comments 24 Comments 16 Comments 16 Comments 83 Comments 203 Comments 85 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » Chaise Guevara posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Eric Marcus posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Mo Ali posted on Watch: Obama sings the blues at White House » anarchic_teapot posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Pablo Navarrete posted on How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists » Rob posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Peter Ahern posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Jessica posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Clemency Evans posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Humphrey Cushion posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Humphrey Cushion posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » the a&e charge nurse posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Cal Bryant posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Cal Bryant posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Five considerations before working for free « Aim High, There Is Plenty Of Room posted on Is Guardian as bad as Tesco on experience? |
