← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Leveller
Thread ID: 8890 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2003-08-09
2003-08-09 07:44 | User Profile
The world comes to London Aug 7th 2003
[url=http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1974459]http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?...tory_id=1974459[/url]
Net immigration into Britain is higher than it has ever been. Good
THE huddled masses have a new destination. As a proportion of its population, and in absolute numbers, London now has a higher inflow of foreigners than do either New York or Los Angeles. More are coming, and staying, than ever before. According to many voices in the papers, politics and pressure groups, this must be a time-bomb.
For 20 years, until the early 1990s, net immigration to Britain hovered around the zero mark, plus or minus 50,000. Then numbers started rising. The end of the cold war led to civil conflicts that drove people out of their homelands. Growing prosperity gave more and more people access to air travel. The trains through the Channel Tunnel, which started running in 1993, offered them another route in to Britain.
And there were good reasons to come to Britain. Its economy has done better, over the past ten years, than those of the other big European countries. London was the magnet. Big Bangââ¬âthe liberalisation of the financial services industry in the late 1980sââ¬âled to a decade-long boom in the City. That meant jobs not just for American and French bankers, but also for Colombian and Somali cleaners. London, where the police never check your identity papers, is a great place for a foreigner, legal or illegal. Anybody can find a comforting bunch of people of their own nationality somewhere in the city. Anybody can turn up one evening and find a job, of some sort, the next morning. Anybody can disappear.
Immigration and asylum
Getting in became easier, too. The government has encouraged immigration by issuing more work permits, especially in areas where skills are in short supplyââ¬ânurses, doctors, IT professionals, for instance. In the mid-1990s, around 30,000 work permits a year were being issued. In 2002, 137,500 were. More people have been given asylum; and, as the system got bogged down, more people have waited longer while their applications were processed. So, by 2001, net migration to Britain as a whole had risen to 172,000, with 120,000 of them bound for London and the south-east. And they're only the legal ones.[Government immigration figures are notoriously inaccurate, suspiciously always underestimates - L]
Waiter, there's a foreigner in my soup
What has this done for Britain? Changed London dramatically, for a start. When did you last have a British waiter? Whatever happened to the famous British nanny? When did you last go to a City reception and not hear a mix of accents? Can you imagine the blandness of the place without them? At a macroeconomic level, the foreigners have inevitably boosted growth, in the not-very-interesting sense that more people means a bigger economy; but it has also, probably, made the economy work better. Giving foreigners access to the labour market has the same sort of effect as opening an economy to trade: more competition means greater efficiency.
Even so, many argue that Britain is paying too high a price for a cosmopolitan buzz and a smoother-working labour market. They fear two consequences in particular: population pressures in the south-east of England and ethnic tensions.
An extra 120,000 people a year in a region as densely-populated as the south-east is, the argument goes, too much. It means more congestion, more concrete and less beauty. Locals don't want more housebuilding. The government can impose it on councils only by giving itself powers to override the objections of local councils and decreeingââ¬âas John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, did last weekââ¬âthat hundreds of thousands of new homes should be built.
But there's no need for this. Over the past decade, London and the south-east have absorbed a net 680,000 foreigners, without losing much countryside. How has that happened? Partly through development of old industrial areasââ¬âsuch as Docklandsââ¬âin a place which remains thinly populated compared with the world's other great cities. But it is also partly because, as immigration has fuelled demand and London house prices have risen faster than those in the rest of the country, Londoners have cashed in, sold their houses and moved to cheaper, emptier bits of Britain (see article).
The alternative to concrete
Why, then, is the government so keen on all these new houses? Because public-sector workers are being priced out of the property market. Vacancies in London schools, for instance, are higher than anywhere else in the country. But concreting over the south-east is not the only solution to this problem. The government could always pay public-sector workers in London and the south-east more and those elsewhere less. That solution does not, however, appeal to the Labour Party's paymasters, the trade unions.
But what of ethnic tensionsââ¬âan unvoiced fear behind much of the unfavourable comment? Is a bit of economic efficiency worth many summers of race riots? Probably not; but, in Britain at least, there's not much connection between race and civil disorder. Certainly, the spotlight fell on Oldham and Bradford, which have big Asian populations, when they went up in flames a couple of years ago. But white Britons are quite capable of organising such entertainments without help from immigrants, as they showed in Blackbird Leys in Oxford in 1991 and Portsmouth in 2000[there is no comparison in the scale of those events - L]. What's more, London, with its dense ethnic mix, has not seen a good riot for two decades; and the disturbances in Brixton in the early 1980s were a reaction to heavy-handed policing, not a race riot.
That said, immigration is changing Britain, and people find change frightening. Governments need to be careful. That means, for instance, letting immigrants stay where there are lots of other immigrants, and where they are therefore inconspicuous. Some of the loudest recent rows have been over setting up camps for asylum-seekers in bits of the (still very white) countryside. And the government needs to address the question, raised this week by the Conservatives, of screening immigrants for infectious diseasesââ¬âa reasonable thing to do to those invited in for economic reasons (on work permits) but not those given sanctuary on moral grounds (asylum-seekers).
But the best thing for Britons to do about immigration would be to embrace it. It is nice to be wanted. And, economics aside, foreigners make the place infinitely more fun.
2003-08-09 09:27 | User Profile
Originally posted by wintermute@Aug 9 2003, 08:36 * ** P.S. So is it true that The Economist* is really a Rothschild paper?
One hears rumors, of course, but I still wonder.
Do you know anything about their finances, masthead, etc.? **
wintermute,
From their website:
"Who owns The Economist? Since 1928, half the shares have been owned by the Financial Times, a subsidiary of Pearson*, the other half by a group of independent shareholders, including many members of the staff. The editor's independence is guaranteed by the existence of a board of trustees, which formally appoints him and without whose permission he cannot be removed."
*Pearson: a multi-billion $ media company. I imagine they are owned by the usual mix, i.e. mainly large institutional investors.
I don't know any more than that.
2003-08-09 21:34 | User Profile
There is a simple solution to this chaos. But weakness determines the democracies.
2003-08-10 17:36 | User Profile
The Economist promoting Immigration as good. Oh well what can you expect from Materialist people who do not care about European natives and their respective Societies. It is good for them. :thd:
2003-08-10 23:13 | User Profile
This is exactly the same kind of :dung: The Wall Street Journal writes: "Immigration is great! Anyone who opposes immigration is an evil racist! Immigration boosts tired economies! Without immigration life would be soooo boring! Thanks to immigration, we can enjoy [u]real[/u] ethnic cuisine, like curry, burritos, and boiled dog!" <_<
[SIZE=2]Sure, let's ruin our societies just so some yuppie assholes can enjoy some "exotic" foods cooked up by "exotic" disease-ridden foreigners. Ever hear of a cookbook?[/SIZE]
2003-08-21 19:33 | User Profile
Well, unfortunately, the people of Britain feel differently. The latests polls show that 80% disagree with Blair's idiotic policies. Hopefully the BNP will capitalize on this.
2003-08-21 21:12 | User Profile
Here's a real "[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?showtopic=7579]Ode to Immigration.[/url]"