Does immigration exacerbate inequality? Katy Long presents evidence from her new book, The Huddled Masses: Immigration and Inequality, indicating that freedom of movement can play a vital role in combating poverty and opening up opportunities for both immigrants and a state’s native population. She argues that a restrictive migration policy in a country like the UK would only serve to entrench divisions between citizens across both economic and social spheres.
New research published this week by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that rising inequality in Western societies is harming overall economic growth. This inequality problem has been called – in the words of US President Barack Obama – ‘the defining challenge of our time’. Governments scramble to promise citizens they will restore the lost promise of social mobility. But the real question is: how?
If you ask British politicians, one answer lies in restricting immigration. As the May 2015 General Election approaches, fears over immigration look set to remain centre-stage. And although their policy proposals vary, Cameron, Farage, Miliband et al. seem agreed on one fundamental, that mass immigration exacerbates inequality. ‘Ordinary, hard-working people of this country’ do not benefit from mass migration, instead they lose wages, jobs, opportunities that were previously theirs.
It’s a seductive narrative; the success of the anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party in the May 2014 European elections was partly a result of a campaign that insisted immigrants keep Britons poor. For if the problem is inequality, and ‘uncontrolled, mass immigration displaces British workers, forces people onto benefits, and suppresses wages for the low-paid’, then surely the equation is simple. Less immigration = less inequality.
Yet as my new book The Huddled Masses: Inequality and Immigration shows, this assumption is fatally flawed. There is in fact overwhelming empirical evidence that enabling freedom of movement can play a vital role in combating poverty and opening up opportunity, not just for immigrants and foreigners, but for the poor here too.
It is relatively easy to make the argument that freedom of movement furthers global justice. The World Bank has estimated that up to 50 per cent of a person’s income is determined by only one variable – their country of citizenship. And in a world where only 3 per cent of us are international migrants, our country of citizenship is overwhelmingly an accident of birth. Migration offers an obvious means to overcome these arbitrary inequalities of birth: the United Nations Development Programme determined in 2009 that migrants who moved from a low-income to a high-income country saw, on average, a 15-fold increase in income, a doubling of education enrollment rates and a 16-fold reduction in child mortality numbers.
What is more difficult is to work out when migration is in the interests of citizens. After all, the most persuasive progressive case for the continued relevance of nation-states isn’t to be found in an appeal to patriotic nostalgia: it’s to be found in the working of institutions and services – schools, hospitals, transport – that make the promise of equality at the heart of citizenship something tangible. Yet in insisting that immigration exacerbates inequality, we are ignoring the vital contributions that migrants – including the low-skilled and low-waged – make to the continued functioning of our social contract, not just as anonymous tax-payers but often as the human face of our health, social care and education systems.
And what is worse, we are also in the process of creating an immigration system that – supposedly bent on protecting “our” poor from “those” migrants – is in fact fast turning legal migration into a privilege accessible only to corporations or those with personal wealth. These new migration policies are not just cynical but regressive: they often harm the very citizens they are ostensibly designed to protect.
Two examples help illustrate to how migration law is entrenching divisions between citizens across both economic and social spheres. First, new minimum income requirements that mean 47 per cent of the British public – and 60 per cent of women – now fail to meet the minimum income required in order to sponsor a foreign relative into the country. Since July 2012, anyone wanting to sponsor their non-EEA spouse’s visa for the UK must show that their annual income exceed £18,600 (rising to £22,400 for a spouse and a child, with an additional £2,400 asked for every further child).
Those affected aren’t paupers, just average families, including many who work in public service jobs like nurses and classroom assistants. While this is a policy ostensibly aimed at keeping poor migrants out, researchers from Middlesex University have concluded that this policy not only risks creating a tier of second-class citizens, but it may in fact end up costing the UK taxpayer up to £850 million in the next decade. This is because UK citizens who have been left coping as single parents while their partners wait in immigration limbo are unable to take-up full-time employment and are forced to rely upon state benefits.
A second example of migration law entrenching division is the growth of the billion-dollar Migration Industry. At first glance it might seem less obvious why the industry – populated by such multinational conglomerates as G4S and Serco – also disadvantages poor citizens. After all, new detention centres and border patrols help to employ thousands of citizens, often for low wages and in geographically marginalised areas where job opportunities are scarce. As researchers found in March 2014, when interviewing locals in Weymouth about the opening of new detention centre the Verne, ‘‘everyone ‘knows someone who knows someone’ who will work at the Verne… it’s all about jobs”.
Yet these jobs are low-paid and precarious: these workers do not share in the profits of the migration industry. Trade unions have consistently produced evidence that employees of companies like G4S and state border agencies like the United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) are often poorly trained, constrained by unresponsive management structures that deliberately foster cultures of hostility. This means the migration industry does not protect Western workers from poverty as much as it entrenches them in it, taking advantage of immobility in socially marginalised and geographically isolated communities in pursuit of more profit.
What are really needed are enforcement mechanisms that protect all workers from exploitation, whether citizen or migrant. Yet as the government’s Migration Advisory Committee has pointed out, a firm can expect to be persecuted for breaking minimum wage legislation only once in a million years. And despite its vocal public critique of EU freedom of movement laws, the UK government has consistently opposed efforts to limit the ability of firms to sub-contract cheap “posted workers” from third countries, citing fears about harming British business’ “competitiveness”.
The result is an increasingly narrow UK migration debate, centred on the shared desire to keep poor migrants out. But the policies we’re pursuing will not protect “our” poor as much as they will continue to entrench the privileges of capital. So if we’re really interested in fighting inequality and furthering social justice, we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to post-2015 immigration policy. As Huddled Masses concludes, this shift doesn’t have to be radical one: it can be done through measured, incremental reform. But the first, crucial step is to recognise that blindly building walls won’t work. However a more positive and progressive migration system can help to open doors – and not just for migrants, but for citizens here too.
The Huddled Masses: Immigration and Inequality is published by Thistle Publishing.
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Note: This article is provided by our sister site, British Politics and Policy at LSE, and gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: UK Home Office (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
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Katy Long – Stanford University
Katy Long is a migration and refugee researcher: she is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Since completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2009, Katy has held positions at Oxford, LSE and Edinburgh universities as well as working extensively with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Her first book, The Point of No Return: Refugees, Rights and Repatriation was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. She is also the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (OUP: 2014). She tweets from @mobilitymuse
“And in a world where only 3 per cent of us are international migrants, our country of citizenship is overwhelmingly an accident of birth. Migration offers an obvious means to overcome these arbitrary inequalities of birth […]”.
This is a very widespread, however very ideological point. A person is not born in a certain country “by accident”, in the sense that he could have been born somewhere else. Ms. Katy Long could have not been born in a different country or family. There is no evidence that a “lottery of bodies” is taking place before we are born, whereby our souls (i.e. our “true” self) are attributed a body and a point of entry into this world, like in the Platonic myth of Er. We are what we are because we emerge from the succession of our ancestors and, in a political community or nation, we inherit their place within such a society. Politics is therefore always an inter-generational thing. It is not just about “us” but also about our ancestors, whose life we are the biological continuation, and our children, who will be the continuation of our biological life.
That is why I am not convinced that everybody has the “right” to go and settle anywhere. If we were in 10,000 BC, and everything had to be created from scratch, I would say yes. But people have worked for thousands of years to create complex material and cultural infrastructures, and their descendents deserve in my opinion to have privileged access to it.
I live in Japan, and I do not claim any “right” to be here. Japan is the country of the Japanese. They have built this country in centuries of work. I am not Japanese. I have been given the privilege to work and live here. If my presence become a problem or it is inconvenient for Japan, I will have to return to Europe, and rightly so. Otherwise we undermine the purposefulness and meaning of work, and of trans-generational political continuity, which has allowed our ancestors to look beyond the narrow confinements of the present.
Of course on the other hand, the question is how to create a more equitable world in all areas of the planet and not just in very few of them, as it is happening at the moment, where even ex-rich nations are plummeting (Italy is an obvious example), the countryside and the small towns are dying almost everywhere, certainly in Europe. But advocating unlimited movement of unlimited numbers of people is not a solution. On the contrary, I see this issue becoming a huge liability for the future, something which will continue to turn increasingly serious no matter how much we “debate” about it. If this is 2014, I cannot imagine what it will be in 2025. I cannot see how we will be able to avoid a repoliticisation of demography.
Yes but the difference between moving to a country like japan,w here I have also lived, and to the UK, is that in Japan, like in most countries, employers will prefer to employ local people ahead of immigrants. Even in preference to immigrants who speak fluent Japanese. The UK is unusual, because here employers prefer to employ immigrants ahead of the local population. There’s this belief amongst employers in Britain that immigrants work harder, cost less, make less trouble, don’t “agitate for their rights”. And they may well be right, in so far as their views would reflect their own personal experiences. But that attitude among employers, rare in most countries, (try getting a job in a Spanish company, if you’re a Brit, in Spain, even if you speak fluent Spanish and you would see what I mean) disadvantages the local people. If, given the choice, an employer would prefer to employ an immigrant rather than a local person, then wouldn’t it make sense, if the government’s priority is to put its own citizens first, to restrict access to their labour market for immigrants?
The article seems to miss the point of internal migration…such as the Chinese rural interior to the coastal industrial regions….Imagine the uproar there would be if Americans in New York had restrictions placed on their rights to move to California. Imagine how one union of nations the EU appears not to be compared with another union of nations – the United KingdomS. Is there any real difference in imposing conditions on the freedom of a Glasgow born person to move to Guildford as for calling for the end of a person’s ability to relocate from Bucharest to Birmingham. In both examples there is almost certainly the same cultural separation and even linquistic problems as demonstrated by subtitles used for certain Scottish produced TV! We can even extend that to Geordies, Scousers, etc !
Although I found your article very interesting i also found it very apologetic for the circumstances of your birth or any first world birth and you insinuated we should feel a responsibility for those with less advantages. That view came of as sounding a bit elitist.
Your writing also tended to focus mostly on the economic advantages of immigration. One of the reasons that the far-right is growing in Europe is because of this very reason. There is little regard to the watering down of native culture, the fact that tribalism is alive and well and there is growing racial strife-all byproducts of open immigration. Europe need only look overseas to America and see what 200 hundred years of multiculturalism has created.-an angry racially divided nation. Pretending they are not concerns worth addressing won’t make them go away either. It was once thought that Internationalism would end nationalism, wen in truth the exact opposite is happening and not only in Europe. Open immigration also robes poorer nations of their finest most hard working citizens, who might just be better served working to build their nation so those special advantages of being born in a first wold nation disappear. .
So, economists have proven that free trade agreements between rich and poor countries will not result in industries moving form the rich to the poor countries. They have proven that deregulating the financial markets will not make the economy more unstable. They have proven that letting industries form large monopolies does not harm the public interest. And now they have proven that government policies aimed at flooding the labor market and increasing the competition for jobs does not make wages go down, it makes them go higher. Surely only a racist could disagree with this.
Really, there is little else that any rational person need say about this article.
“It may appear to be the interest of the rulers, and the rich of a state, to force population, and thereby lower the price of labour, and consequently the expense of fleets and armies, and the cost of manufactures for foreign sale; but every attempt of the kind should be carefully watched and strenuously resisted by the friends of the poor, particularly when it comes under the deceitful garb of benevolence…” Thomas Malthus.