Why are people so opposed to immigration? #142538

As the evidence piles up that migrants don’t steal jobs (one of the implications of them being human beings is that migrants also buy stuff - so they create exactly as many new jobs as they “take”), some of the more sophisticated immigration opponents turn to the negative impacts of immigration on other things such as housing or public services instead to support their case.

So what does the research evidence say about the impacts of immigration on public services? Really very little actually. The University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory says that there is “no systematic data or analysis.” In health, we know that many healthcare providers are immigrants, but it’s hard to know the impact of migrants as users of health services as (rightly) nobody records people’s migration status when they go to the doctor.

Using household survey data, Jonathan Wadsworth at Royal Holloway found that (shock!) immigrants tend to use GP services and hospitals at roughly the same rate as natives (via Ferdinando Giugliano in the FT).

Taking another approach, a new paper by Osea Giuntella from the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, combines household survey data with administrative data on NHS waiting times. Do you need to wait longer for a referral or in A&E in places where there are more immigrants? Come find out at the CGD Europe research seminar on Weds 18 Nov (there will be sandwiches).

Let them drown

3,000 people have drowned already this year trying to cross the Mediterranean to the EU, in pursuit of a better life. It is official UK government policy to not try and rescue such people, because that would only encourage others. I somehow find it hard to believe that even staunch opponents of immigration really think we should just stand by and watch people drown. 

via Duncan Stott and Phil Davis

Breaking: The country is going to the dogs

One of many bizarre things about public opinion on immigration in the UK is the divergence in opinion between impacts "on your local area" and impacts on the country at large. People are much more worried about the country than about their local area. 

Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future who commissioned a recent survey showing this fact, said to the Guardian:

"People are obviously very anxious about immigration. But I was struck by how much higher it was as a national rather than a local tension. That to me suggests that managing local tensions is obviously very important, but it is probably not the answer entirely because people have this national-level concern. 

"I think it would be wrong to say that local concerns are real and national concerns are just driven by the media, but I think what is going on there is people asking: does the system work? And I don't think anyone has any confidence as how it is managed as a system. Also there is a concern around national cohesion, identity and ability to cope with the scale of change."

Clearly he's being polite here. How on earth do people know how immigration is affecting the rest of the country except through the media? Are survey respondents travelling up and down the country carrying out their own research each weekend?

A nation is an "imagined community." In your own local area you know people. By contrast: "[A nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".

So almost by definition it is true that national concerns about immigration are driven by media. 

This phenomenon is not just limited to immigration. A recent Populus survey finds that people systematically think that things are going worse "for the country as a whole" than for "you and your family". Is it even possible for things to be going well for all of us as individuals but badly "for the country as a whole"? What is the country as a whole but the aggregation of all of us individually? 

Maybe just maybe it is in fact our relentless diet of media pessimism that is giving us a distorted view of reality?

A new theory of why Brits don't like immigrants #awkward

"As it seems to be the day for chucking one's opinion into the fray, here is mine, as an immigrant of 23 years to these lovely shores. Many British people seem to find foreigners challenging. This a country which runs on rules, etiquette and routine. Foreigners are, de facto, more likely to be ignorant of those rules. Having to explain them is awkward. Awkwardness must be avoided at all costs. Don't get me wrong - you certainly like us individually and as individuals. But as one group to another, you tolerate us grudgingly; you tut a lot and roll your eyes, when we don't know that one stands on the right of the escalator."

Alex Andreou 

Social Spending and ethnic diversity

The core of a David Goodhart's "left-wing" argument against immigration is that racial diversity makes it harder to sustain high levels of social spending. 

I don't necessarily disagree with the point, but harder does not mean impossible. 

The argument is motivated by work by Alberto Alesina and other economists at Harvard. Alberto Alesina is a smart, original, and prolific thinker who does a lot of interesting work. But this particular paper, was never actually published in a peer-reviewed journal. The chart below is the main empirical result driving their argument (from this paper). 

As David is not an economist, I'll break this down for him slowly. This is called a "scatterplot". Social welfare spending as a percent of GDP is on the vertical axis, and an index of racial fractionalization is on the horizontal axis. You can see that there is a negative relationship between the two, but there is also a lot of variation around the fitted line.

A few observations:

- All of the European countries have relatively low levels of racial fractionalization - below 0.2 - but being European actually tells you very little about levels of social spending, which are spread widely between low spending Iceland and Greece, and high spending Belgium and Luxembourg. 

- Removing the European countries would remove the negative trend. Japan (almost no diversity) has almost exactly the same social spending as high diversity Brazil or US. Low diversity Costa Rica has the same social spending as high diversity Mauritius. 

- Looking at the UK - imagine that the UK began to approach New Zealand or US levels of diversity - does that mean we would have New Zealand levels of social spending (higher) or US levels of social spending (lower).

The key point from just looking at this chart is that even if there is a relationship, which it is not even clear that there really is if you consider Europe separately to the rest of the world, diversity is not destiny. Social spending is a policy choice. Diversity might influence this policy choice, but so do a lot of other things. Even if diversity did make social spending harder, it does not make it impossible. Correlation is not causation. Etc. QED. 

On Immigration

I need to get some of this stuff out of my head to make some space in there for my actual day job. Since the clusterfuck David Goodhart book-copy-and-pastes op-eds started coming out a few weeks ago my head has been all fogged up with rage. Half of the frustration is simply how poorly he structures his arguments.

So here is some structure.

At the highest level there are two things to care about
1. The impact of policy (this is the utilitarian, consequentialist angle)
2. The Kantian ethics (what is a just process? we should care about the means as well as the ends)

Point 2, made repeatedly by Michael Clemens and others in the open borders camp, is that regardless of what the consequences of immigration are, individuals have rights, and states shouldn't be able to prevent people from leaving countries. As a Brit with some education, I have the right basically to live wherever I want. The same does not apply to smarter and harder working people than me who happen to be born in South Sudan, or most developing countries. In technical terms, this is called "fucked up."

Back to point 1 - there are three areas of concern
1.1 - The impact on the receiving community
1.2 - The impact on the migrant
1.3 - The impact on the sending community

Now, the strongest evidence is clearly on 1.2 - there are massive overwhelming positive impacts for the migrants themselves, who can increase incomes by orders of 1000% overnight.

The weakest evidence is on the other two points. There are reasons, theoretical and empirical, to think that immigration can have both positive and negative impacts on communities at large.

On 1.1 - perhaps the strongest evidence amongst the lot, is that the labour market impacts on receiving communities are not large (they did not took our job). There isn't a lot of evidence on the impact on public services and the like - though on average the foreign-born living in Britain are larger net contributors to public finances than the native born. So we are left with something vague about identity and community (more on this in another post).

On 1.3 - there is strong evidence of positive impact through remittances - remittances are substantially larger than foreign aid flows. There isn't much evidence of a brain drain, and actually evidence pointing the other way towards a "brain gain." Neither is there any evidence of a damaging impact on political reform. On the contrary, there are reasons to think that diaspora can help fund and influence reform movements more effectively from outside a country where they are not subject to political oppression. More from Claire Melamed here.

So to conclude, strong positive evidence of positive impacts for migrants and receivers of remittances, and then a bunch of weak vague stuff about community and governance. Add to that, the ethical or rights-based arguments.

And finally back to Goodhart, and his line that we should not care about people from Burundi more than people from Birmingham. But do we really need to care about them more to be in favour of immigration? From my reading of the evidence, I don't think that immigration does impose a net cost on Britain, but even being generous and assuming it did, I would weight that impact to be of the order of 1/10th of the positive impact to the migrant. Caring about people from Birmingham is fine, but the question is how much more should you care about them than someone from Burundi. I would image that there is some ratio at which Goodhart would support imposing a cost on a Brummie for a gain to a Burundian. What if we could make a Brummie worse off by £1 to increase the welfare of a Burundian by £10 billion? Or is it really never acceptable for British government policy to reduce the welfare of a British person by any amount, no matter how small, in order to increase a foreigner's welfare, no matter how large the gain? Not even for £10 billion? Martin Wolf does make the case for a zero weight, which is at least a coherent and explicit position on the issue, even if I do think it is abhorrent. Elsewhere, in a long and math-y blogpost YouNotSneaky estimated that for Mexican-US immigration, you have to value a Mexican at less than 1/20th of an American to be against immigration.

Do you care about foreigners less than locals? What's your number? Exactly how much less? Are foreigners half a local person? A tenth? A hundredth?