Britain and immigration - The Economist (blog)

THE AUGUST bank holiday weekend looms, so your blogger will allow himself a spot of sunny optimism (to offset the grey rainclouds scudding across the horizon, in traditional English fashion).

The official British 2010 immigration figures came out yesterday, and the newspapers are duly filled with angry or resigned reports of the headline finding: that net annual inward migration—which Conservative ministers have promised to reduce to "the tens of thousands" by the next general election—instead rose by 21% in 2010, as 239,000 more people took up residence in Britain than departed.

The right wing press was duly cross. The Daily Mail, casting around for someone to blame, attacks the Liberal Democrats, the junior party in David Cameron's Conservative-led coalition government, calling them "immigration-obsessed" and saying:

the Tories — shackled by Nick Clegg's obsessively pro-immigration Lib Dems — have not been remotely firm enough on reducing non-EU workers and overseas students...We can only hope yesterday's daunting statistics will serve as a wake-up call to Mr Cameron, and that he will realise that he cannot afford to pander to his junior Lib Dem partner for a moment longer.

Eleven million people voted Tory because, after the madness of the New Labour years, they wanted immigration reduced to manageable levels.  Mr Cameron will not be easily forgiven if he lets them down

On the left, the Guardian's focus is on findings by Oxford University's migration observatory that unemployment, especially youth unemployment, has not been reduced by the government's moves to cap non-EU skilled migration. The Guardian reports:

The government's cap on migration to Britain from outside Europe is being more than offset by a renewed rise in migration from Poland and other EU countries, immigration experts have warned.

British employers are increasingly turning to EU migrants to fill the gaps left by the government's clampdown on the recruitment of overseas skilled labour from outside Europe, according to Oxford University's migration observatory.

Given all the gloom, why I am still cheered by the debate? Well, the argument is finally becoming more realistic and nuanced.

The Conservative's pledge to reduce net migration below 100,000 a year was always a cock-eyed foundation for good policy-making, because it failed to acknowledge the huge role played by factors beyond the government's control, such as migration flows by EU nationals and emigration by British citizens. That condemned the government to tugging and yanking with reckless zeal on the few levers available to it, such as caps on non-EU foreign students or skilled workers, and hang the consequences for British universities and businesses.

At last, from left to right, these points are being acknowledged, and the futility of a net migration pledge admitted. Here is Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator:

Poor David Cameron. He pledged to reduce annual net migration from the current 240,000 to the "tens of thousands" and what happens? Net migration in 2010 was up by 21 per cent from 2009. In a way, he deserves the flak he'll get because this was a daft target that could only have been set by someone poorly-advised about the nature of immigration. And the target allows success to be presented as failure.

And here is the Daily Telegraph:

David Cameron's pre-election promise to reduce net immigration to the "tens of thousands" was always a hostage to fortune. In choosing to highlight the net figure, he risked seeing his ambitions thwarted by a phenomenon beyond the Government's control, namely emigration. The bald figures published by the Office for National Statistics yesterday showed a 20 per cent rise in net immigration last year to 239,000 – just short of the record set under Labour. But, in fact, the number of people coming to this country to settle hardly changed; it was the sharp fall in emigration that caused the net figure to rise

There is also a welcome acknowledgement that immigration is a fiendishly complicated issue, ill-suited to quick headlines, and what looks to me like an unprecedented effort to dig beneath the numbers and puzzle out what is actually going on. Several papers, noting the sharp rise in Britain's Polish population, now estimated at a half million, sent reporters to speak to Poles and ask them about their job prospects, their plans and what they think of Britain. Good. We all need to keep talking and listening to each other.

It is true that as the different outlets puzzle over the numbers, they do so astride their own favourite hobby-horses.

Thus the Daily Mail, a newspaper with a lot of retired readers who are very concerned about pensions, ponders the dramatic fall in overall emigration numbers in 2010, and suggests:

Fewer Britons are emigrating because falling incomes and pensions mean hundreds of thousands have abandoned the dream of retirement or a new life in France, Spain, Australia or the U.S.

The recession has also reduced the number of Britons able to take jobs elsewhere in the world. Emigration fell by more than a fifth in two years after the recession began in 2008

There is probably something to that, but Bagehot would add to that list of reasons falling house prices (or at least a flat housing market in much of Britain), which make it hard for Britons to sell up and move to the sun, the strength of the euro against the pound (which makes life expensive for retirees in the Dordogne and the Costa del Sol) and the spectacular bursting of a housing bubble in Spain (accompanied by lots of newspaper articles about desperate British retirees living in half-finished housing complexes in the Spanish sun, in flats worth half what they paid for them).

Fraser Nelson, a hawkish sort who never saw a tax he did not want to cut or a labour market regulation he did not want to revoke, decides that falling emigration is essentially a vote of confidence in the deficit-cutting Cameron government, but that immigration is a problem and can only be reduced by making the labour market more flexible. He writes that emigration:

is a compliment to Cameron: the most sincere vote people can make is with their feet. And in our globalised world, countries have to compete for people. Britain is as attractive as ever it was to immigrants, and more natives are staying put.  

Cameron should only ever have pledged to stem the inflow. Governments of free countries can't stop people emigrating, so the net figure, ie the inflow minus the outflow, is not something he could or should have given a pledge on. In my view, Britain's immigration inflow is driven primarily by a demand for migrant labour (foreign nationals account for almost the entire employment rise under Cameron so far). This can only be changed by radical labour market reform (tax, regulation etc), which I don't expect to happen. So I'd say Cameron has a snowballs's chance in hell of meeting his target. Today's figures will be the first of many over the next four years making that point

This is a blog posting, not a finished article for the print edition, so readers must be tolerant if I do not attempt a comprehensive immigration plan of my own. Instead, in addition to my sigh of relief that the British immigration debate seems to be growing up, bear with me if I offer a couple of small reasons why the numbers are even more confusing that today's reporting suggests.

For one thing, pace a lot of today's reporting, some "foreign-born people" are in fact British. To make it personal, four of Britain's 239,000 net migrants last year were Bagehot and his immediate family, moving back to London after many years abroad. On paper, our little band looks pretty foreign: out of the four of us, three are foreign-born. But we are all British citizens, and the three of us born overseas were born to British families who were posted abroad at the time.

For another, it is rash to assume you can keep track of EU nationals, who come and go without visas or passport checks, and often do not bother to register with their local embassy (I know that my family and I never registered with the British Embassy when living in Brussels or Washington DC).

For instance, a quick scan of the numbers released yesterday by the Office of National Statistics suggests there are just 58,000 French citizens living in London, and 111,000 French in Britain overall. That sounds low to me: there are parts of London where French is more common than English on the pavements, and French schools in London are full to bursting. The French consulate has 113,000 citizens registered in Britain, and I know French diplomats think there are many more who do not bother to register.

One last thought. The newspapers today give a lot of prominence to the immigration minister, Damian Green, a rather centrist sort whose job obliges him to stamp around saying fire and brimstone things about this government's "radically changed" immigration policy, and Britain's "addiction" to immigration. My hunch, though, is that the government minister with the best chance of re-shaping the labour market is the reformist education secretary, Michael Gove.

In all the welter of reporting today, to me the single most telling lines come from a commentary by the Oxford migration observatory:

as the Government continues to focus on reducing non-EU net migration, employers may turn increasingly to EU migrants to fill positions. In a recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development 34 per cent of employers said they intend to respond to the government's new policies by recruiting more EU migrants where only 23 per cent said they intend to respond by increasing the skills of their current workforce

If ministers really want something to think about, I would think about that finding, not least because they can do something about it.

Now, I do not mean ministers demanding that firms be bullied into hiring British workers first. It is not the job of a business struggling to survive the current economic crisis to fix a British education system that has been failing school-leavers and society for decades by hiring the wrong people.

I would go further: I think that Britain has been lucky to receive hundreds of thousands of hard-working, well-educated and energetic foreigners, and should be more grateful to such migrants, instead of blaming them for the weakness of our own young job seekers. But nor do I cheer the idea millions of young Britons condemned to joblessness by their own lack of employability.

Keep the borders as open as possible—in a globalised world, Britain has everything to gain by recruiting the best and hardest-working from around the world, and offering them the chance to work legally, rather than languish in a lawless black market. But equip the young growing up in Britain to compete for and create tomorrow's jobs. Let there be a contest for tomorrow's jobs, but let it be a fair one. Then Britain has a chance of being the kind of prosperous, energetic place people want to live in.