Immigration is a key issue across Europe and is one of the main campaigning points in the UK’s referendum on its EU membership. Randall Hansen writes that opponents of immigration have two main concerns: that immigrants are bad for the national economy because they force wages down, and bad for culture as they are at odds with the liberal views of European countries. He argues that anti-liberal attitudes need to be challenged whatever their source: whether in the case of minorities who oppose liberal values, or Europeans who scapegoat Muslims. He also notes that the focus should be on employment, and that immigration works only when immigrants work.
Immigration is among the defining issues of our time. For years, UK voters have ranked it one of the ‘most important issues facing the country’. As of December 2015, immigration was ranked the most important: 63 per cent of respondents indicated immigration, far ahead of health (39 per cent) and the economy (33 per cent). Anti-immigrant parties in the UK, France, and Denmark enjoy levels of support of around 25 per cent. The mass influx of refugees and asylum seekers over the second half of 2015 rejuvenated the moribund anti-Islamic Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA) movement in Germany, it increased the far right’s share of the vote to over 30 per cent in Austrian elections, and helped bring the nationalist right to power in Poland.
Anti-immigration sentiment is partly founded, particularly in Eastern Europe, on xenophobia and anti-Islamic sentiment, but opponents of immigration raise two concerns that cannot be dismissed. First, they argue that immigration disproportionately penalises the poorest members of society, as unskilled migration forces workers’ wages down. Second, it is said that when migration originates in Middle Eastern and North African countries, it brings to Europe individuals at odds with mainstream values on women, sexual minorities, and free speech. The great upsurge in refugees to Germany, Austria, and Sweden has obviously intensified the second concern, as did the coordinated assaults on women in central Cologne and in other German cities on New Year’s Eve.
Taking the first argument first, unskilled immigration does push workers’ wages down, but not by much, and this loss is more than compensated by an overall increase in wages. From 1997 to 2005, a time of large-scale immigration to the UK, wages of the lowest percentile fell by approximately £39 per year, while wages overall increased by £332. Tax and spending adjustments could thus transfer the wage loss back to that bottom percentile, and even increase their wages, while leaving a net wage gain from immigration. Immigration, even unskilled immigration, can pay.
Such are the economic issues at stake. But for many – frankly, too many – immigration is a question of the second concern: identity and culture. Since 11 September 2001, the global immigration debate has centred, often to an excessive degree, on Muslims and Islam, and it has occurred against the backdrop of an upsurge in anti-Islamic sentiment and a mobilisation by some political parties around the threat posed by Islam to Europe and European values.
As too many Europeans have rejected Muslims, too many Muslims in Europe have rejected liberalism. A depressingly familiar dynamic emerged in the 1988/1989 Rushdie Affair and continued through to the Danish cartoon controversy of 2006 and the Charlie Hebdo murders of 2015. In all three cases, artists produced works deemed by some (mostly) Muslims as offensive to Islam. Protests, threats and violence followed, and significant numbers of commentators argued that, though they in principle supported free speech, artists and intellectuals should avoid offending Muslims.
So where does this leave Britain and Europe? Coming back to economics, the case in favour of skilled immigration is clear, and no one can rationally dispute it. Unskilled immigration is more complicated, as it can impose a fiscal cost on society, but still produces economic benefits. These can only, however, be tapped if three conditions are in place. First, Britons and other Europeans must believe that their governments can manage immigration. When this perception vanishes – as it did in Germany between the 1990s and today, in the UK in the later 1990s and today, and in the United States in the early 1990s and the mid-2000s – public support for immigration collapses. It is therefore essential that the European Union regains control over its external borders.
Second, as migration can oscillate easily between a (low) net benefit to a (low) net cost, it is essential to bring and to keep immigrants in work. Training and education are of course essential, but welfare policy also plays a role: income assistance for the unemployed cannot be set above the market wage. Doing so can only encourage unemployment, as William Beveridge, who can hardly be qualified as a reactionary, has recognised.
Third, anti-liberal action has to be challenged, whatever its source. To tackle Islamophobia, existing legal prohibitions on anti-Muslim discrimination should be robustly applied and should be seen to be applied. Far-right politicians and a few mainstream commentators, who have constructed Muslims as essentially violent and extremist, need to be confronted. The arguments are well-known and well-rehearsed, but they need to be repeated: acts of violence are committed by a tiny minority, and we are too inclined in the case of Muslims to associate such violence with the faith itself or with all its believers. By contrast, when Jews or Christians commit acts of violence, we instinctively regard them as lunatics who are unrepresentative of their faith. Few people believe that Christian fundamentalists shouting ‘God hates fags’ speak for the whole of Christianity.
At the same time, European and British Muslims, like everyone else, need to respect the rules of the liberal game: respect for gender equality (the harassment of women, of the sort seen in Cologne, cannot be tolerated), rights of sexual minorities (the attitudes of some Muslim communities, notably British, towards LGBT people are thoroughly retrograde), and a right of free speech. In the last, the oft-made suggestion that publications of caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Muhammed go beyond the viable limits of free speech, should be treated as it is: absurd.
The right to mock religion, any religion, is so within the bounds of acceptable speech that the fact that there is a debate at all is mystifying. To be sure, publishing crude caricatures of the Prophet is disrespectful and offensive. Respect, however, is a matter of choice and cannot be mandated. Pious Muslims certainly do not respect philanderers, men who enjoy the delights of gay saunas, or women who like a drink. To suggest otherwise, to imply that Muslims should be given a sort of ‘pass’ in matters of free speech, is not only wrong but it is deeply condescending, above all to moderate Muslims, as it suggests that they are somehow not quite as good as the rest of us, that they need to be coddled and protected from offensive speech, and that they cannot grasp basic liberal principles. No less a thinker than the political philosopher Charles Taylor has confidently stated that Muslims cannot understand the distinction between religion and politics. It is hard to imagine a more patronising statement.
In short, a Britain and Europe of open but managed borders, high immigration and high employment, and a single liberal framework applying to diverse religions can allow European governments to welcome immigrants whilst maintaining public support. The most important issue is not, however, culture. It is rather cash: immigration can only work when immigrants work.
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Note: This article originally appeared at our sister site, British Politics and Policy at LSE. It draws on the author’s published work. It 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: Baigal Byamba (CC-BY-SA-2.0)
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Randall Hansen – University of Toronto
Randall Hansen is Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs and Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Immigration & Governance in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His published works include Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race and the Population Scare in 20th Century North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
What tripe, If you come to this country you integrate into society & become a part of it. If you want to come here & change our society into what you chose to leave then go back to wherever you came from we don’t want you. Those that were born here do not need lectures from those that flew here!
This happens all over the western world. A Government makes policy announcements that – without notice – and without seeking a mandate from the nation’s electorate – bring in a flood of foreigners.
Then the Elite seek to justify opposition to these invasions using regiments of publicly funded lobbyists posing as academics or journalists or ‘human rights’ activists.
The latter exist to Deny the right of nationals to self determination – as have all colonialists through time.
Meanwhile, you need to deal with the concept of commonwealth…
That a nation begets its children both personal and public wealth of infrastructure.
The Muslim flood to European nations brings next to nothing to this commonwealth. And yet the writer believes this is somehow ok?
And the writer doesn’t deal with the problem of exports?
For when a migrant hits a new territory, only imports can be guaranteed in the transactions that follow.
Exports are a happy accident.
Foreign debt accrues from foreigners impacting the nation.
Along with foreign ownership as hard presses authorities lacking any other means, sell off what’s left of the nation’s commonwealth.
Frank: You seem to be suggesting that all of the evidence contained in countless studies about the economic impact of EU migration is simply the work of “publicly funded lobbyists posing as academics or journalists or ‘human rights’ activists”. You can hardly expect people to accept that as a reasonable argument – though it is the standard point of view among those who, for pure ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the real world or genuine evidence, have a chip on their shoulder about immigration. If in doubt, claim everything is biased.
However you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain why British governments support immigration. It’s economically beneficial to have free movement within the EU. It reduces red tape for businesses (who no longer have to jump through 25 hoops to hire the workers they identify as capable of improving their firm), it improves competitiveness as businesses can hire better staff, and it improves tax revenues because immigrants from the rest of the EU typically come to the UK to work (i.e. you get them for their productive years without having to invest in their education or cover their retirement).
Don’t get me wrong, I love reading the same grandiose, apocalyptic, head in the sand gibbering that always crops up on the internet whenever anyone mentions immigration, but it would be nice if you at least tried to address the other side of the debate rather than redundantly ranting at shadowy “elites”.
Show all the studies proving that mass migration favours export performance over import loss?
Australia’s tertiary education sector is blighted by a reliance on tertiary institutions selling Visas to Australia under the guise of ‘education’ exports!
Heads of these universities literally make millions the more they sell out Australia.
The last estimate I saw of the export performance of the state of Victoria – a multiculture / multinational ‘rich’ state of Victoria, which is importing hundreds thousands of Foreign Sourced Consumer Welfare citizens per year has a contribution to our deficit of negative 44 Billion per annum( 2013-14) *
So called studies by compromised academics generally ignore appalling trade impacts.
Inconvenient truths tend to bring personal derogatory comments as encapsulated in your unhelpful reactions.
Try again for credibility Harris.
Prove the UKs flood of migrants is unlike that of Australia’s and is helping not hindering the UKs export performance.
How’s your debt going Harris?
*https://dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/Documents/australias-trade-by-state-and-territory-2013-14.pdf
Frank, if you’re going to try and argue about UK immigration it really is pretty bizarre to launch into a rehearsed diatribe about Australia and then throw out “prove the UK’s flood of migrants is unlike that of Australia’s” as a conclusion. That’s hardly much of a case when we already have countless studies on the effect of immigration in the UK, as well as the impact of free movement on EU economies, and when the basic situations are radically different given the UK’s participation in EU free movement.
About the best you seem to be able to offer is a point about bogus visas in Australia (zero relevance to UK immigration), and a point about a deficit in Victoria (zero relevance to anything outside of Victoria). In the latter case you seem to be trying to argue that because Victoria is multicultural and has a poor export performance all immigration harms exports. That’s a pretty laughable premise and the idea that you’re trying to present hopelessly crude arguments like that as a counter to the entirety of academic research on immigration (which is seemingly all agenda driven and should be ignored in your view) is pretty galling to put it mildly.
This isn’t so much a debate about substance, it’s a charitable effort on my part to try and coax you back to reality. There are plenty of real world examples where immigration has been damaging and plenty of cases where it’s been a positive development in a given country. Trying to argue that immigration is always bad/good is largely pointless. What matters is whether particular forms of immigration in particular contexts (such as EU immigration to the UK) are beneficial and you’re not going to find the answer to that in odd tangents about Australia or vague mewing about academics all being biased.
So, you really don’t know anything Harris – do you?
You provide no references to back your claims.
I’ve repeatedly invited you to do so.
Oz is perhaps the greatest immigration experiment on the planet.
Or was until Merkel left the reservation.
Key points are: the states with greatest population are worst performers when it comes to supporting trade performance.
I’ve invited you to prove I’m wrong.
You have nothing.
Considering this is an LSE blog, whats going on?
Surely you have the evidence somewhere that every extra 100k foreigners hitting the UK start exporting the debt down?
Don’t you?
You do have that research – don’t you?
Frank, what exactly are you asking for evidence on? You came into this comment section with some apocalyptic gibbering that essentially boils down to the idea that immigration (seemingly everywhere from Australia to the UK) is a disaster and that academia is in the process of brainwashing people to support it. You then tried to prove that point (which is so vague that it’s essentially meaningless) by making an obscure, amateurish attempt at an empirical argument: citing bogus Australian visas and random tangents about the Australian state of Victoria, which have literally nothing to do with the situation in the UK or Europe.
If you want actual statistics on the UK there are countless studies on the subject. The most often cited study on EU migration in the UK is Dustmann and Frattini (2014) which demonstrated that EU migrants have a net positive fiscal impact on the UK economy, largely for the reasons I described in my first comment. Your argument appears to be that we should ignore all of these studies (academic brainwashing again no doubt) and instead reject EU migration on the basis that “Australian states with the greatest population are worst performers when it comes to supporting trade performance”. Honestly, what on earth is anyone supposed to say to that? That isn’t an argument, it’s a complete nonsense.
I have read this article and it seems that you have only touched on some of the arguments against immigration. I see no mention in relation to the UK that we are simply “full”. We don’t have the infrastructure, housing and school places to handle many more people in the UK. The issues raised in campaigning in the referendum in the UK is not especially focused on Moslem populations but on the free movement of people generally from the EU especially who can be referred to as economic migrants.