But the findings change when people are presented with the facts.

The average respondent thought 3 in 10 people in the UK are foreign-born.

When told it’s actually 1 in 10, more than twothirds thought this was either “not many” (36%) or “a lot but not too many” (31%). Just 30% thought it was “too many”.

At at time when the government is relying on the private sector to drive the recovery as the public sector is cut back, and when the education sector is a particularly important export earner, the government is shooting itself in the foot.

Despite all the talk about Britain being “open for business”, it will become a more closed economy and society.

The new measures also betray a nasty double standard.

David Cameron spent a gap year working for Jardine’s in Hong Kong.

Nick Clegg worked as a ski instructor in Austria (before that country joined the EU in 1995).

Jeremy Hunt spent 2 years in Japan teaching English and learning Japanese.

I doubt someone from outside the EU could now do the equivalent in the UK.

In effect, what ministers are saying is that it’s fine for Brits to spend a year abroad working or studying, but outrageous if foreigners want do the same in the UK.

That’s shameful and wrong.

He then deliberately misinterpreted my response – or perhaps he’s just stupid? I said it was nonsense to claim that in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, I tried to shut down debate by calling opponents of immigration racists. I quoted at length from the book to show that this wasn’t the case. He conveniently ignored this. How can you trust anything that someone so slippery with the truth writes?

His basic argument is that large-scale immigration would transform Europe into Lebanon:

the demographic nature of their country makes it unstable; which makes long-lasting peace and prosperity, the sort we in relatively homogenous and stable countries take for granted, impossible.

This has echoes of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech.

Perhaps West should get out more: Britain is not ethnically homogenous – and nor is it at war.

If Britain became more diverse, it would look a bit more like London – which is hardly a hellhole.

A weaker version of this argument is that diversity undermines social solidarity. But while research by the political scientist Robert Putnam suggests that in the United States increased diversity correlates with diminished feelings of trust within a community, there is no evidence that this is the case in Europe. In fact, a comprehensive study of 21 countries concludes [see footnote]:

Despite several such findings for US society, in Europe it was not confirmed that rising ethnic diversity or even the rate of influx of foreign citizens had any significant detrimental effects on social cohesion.

West says “the immigration debate is about our vision of society, not economics.” In my view, it is about both – and much else besides.

It is about the choice between a closed, stagnant and reactionary society, and an open, dynamic and progressive one. And in economic terms, it can also bring big benefits.

West claims that these are trifling, and quotes the House of Lords economic affairs committee report to substantiate his argument.

But that report ignores the main economic benefits of immigration, which I discuss at length here.

Briefly, they are three:

1. Gains from trade. Migration is a form of trade. If you go to France for an operation, it is classified as trade; if a French surgeon comes here, it is migration. If free trade is such a good thing, surely so is free migration.
2. Greater flexibility. By moving to where the jobs are, migrants make economies more flexible, allowing them to grow faster for longer without sparking inflation. If it is a good thing for people to move from Liverpool to London if their labour is in demand there, surely the same is true of people moving from Lisbon or Lithuania.
3. Faster productivity growth. As outsiders with a burning drive to succeed, newcomers tend to be more hard-working and entrepreneurial than most. Newcomers of all cultural backgrounds are twice as likely to start a new business as people born in Britain. Both individually and thanks to the increased diversity they bring, they boost innovation and improve problem-solving. Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and many others were all co-founded by immigrants who arrived in the US as children. People with diverse skills, attributes, perspectives and experiences bring something extra to the mix and by interacting with people born in Britain, this generates new ideas and businesses, and hence economic growth that makes us all richer.

Anyone who doubts the economic benefits of migration should ask themselves this: Would London be half as vibrant and successful without a constant influx of hard-working and enterprising people from around the country and around the world?

Last but not least, migration is about freedom, justice and human rights.

West takes issue with the fact that that I have called the current system of immigration controls a form of global apartheid. Yet how is it right that  one class of people – the rich and the educated – can move increasingly freely while the rest are expected to stay put?

Anyone who doesn’t think that this is deeply unjust should put themselves in the shoes of someone less fortunate than themselves. How would you feel if you weren’t able to move freely to seek a better life for yourself and your children?

That is hardly an ignoble aspiration: it is what has driven millions of Britons to settle across the world – in Australia, America, New Zealand, Spain and many other places.

———————————————————————————————————————————————

Footnote: Marc Hooge, Tim Reeskens, Dietlind Stolle, and Ann Trappers, Ethnic Diversity, Trust and Ethnocentrism and Europe: A Multilevel Analysis of 21 European Countries, paper presented at the 102^nd Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 31 August-3 September 2006.

1) They defend their use of cumulative figures. They say it is legitimate because the “sole objective” of the study was to calculate “pupil place requirements stemming from net migration since 1998″.

Really? If the sole aim was to calculate the impact on pupil places, they wouldn’t need to calculate cumulative costs at all.

More likely, the use of cumulative costs out of context is to generate shock headlines in tabloid newspapers, which are then reproduced by the BBC and elsewhere, to create the impression that immigrants are a huge burden on British society.

If they weren’t aiming to scare people with figures taken out of context, why didn’t their report indicate projected education spending over that period as a reference point? Why didn’t it mention the taxes and other contributions migrants make to society?

2) They defend their decision to include children with one British parent and one foreign one in their calculations. They say this approach was “implicitly endorsed by the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords”.

As I’ve written loads of times, for instance here,  that report was biased and flawed – not surprisingly since it was chaired (and its conclusions spun) by John Wakeham, a former Tory cabinet minister, who used the report to advance the Conservatives’ anti-immigration position.

In this case, there is no need to go into technical details. MW’s assumption fails the common-sense test. Stop people in the street and ask them whether the deputy prime minister’s kids should be counted as part of the costs of immigration.

3) They quibble with the studies that show that migrants pay more in tax than they receive in benefits and public services.

Again, they refer to the biased and flawed Lords report.

Academic studies that try to estimate the net fiscal contribution that migrants make agree on one thing: if a country with a huge public debt admits migrant workers, native taxpayers benefit. Why? Because the newcomers help pay off the debts accumulated before they arrived. That is precisely the situation Britain is in now.

Even if one assumes that the taxes migrants pay only just cover the benefits and public services they receive, the net cost of educating migrants’ children over 10 or 25 years is not £100bn or £195bn, it is zero, nil, nada, zilch.

Does anyone want to chip in to send Andrew Green back to school?

Unlike Andrew Green of MigrationWatch, I don’t believe in trying to silence debate, so I’ll let this pass.

West later claims that in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them I try to shut down debate by calling opponents of immigration racists:

Legrain… wrote in his book that “the argument that tough immigration controls are needed for ‘good race relations’ is a quasi-racist canard”.

No proof was ever given for this assertion, but then who needs evidence for thoughtcrime?

This is nonsense.

In fact, I wrote:

Let me start by saying that I don’t think that it is necessarily racist to support immigration controls. Greens may support immigration controls because they believe that an extra influx of people would put a strain on the environment. Trade unionists may worry about the impact on the jobs of their members, black and white. People may worry that immigration undermines the financial basis for traditional welfare systems, which grant free or subsidised benefits and services to people primarily on the basis of residency rather than financial contributions. The people who believe these things may or may not be racists; but it is not intrinsically racist to believe what they do.

Nor is it racist to worry that immigration might undermine social solidarity for reasons other than foreigners’ foreignness. It is not racist to point out that if immigrants happen to be a bunch of thieves and villains, they might cause all sorts of problems – it is only racist to assume that foreigners tend to be thieves and villains. It is not racist to argue that if immigrants happen to have very different tastes and characteristics that clash with those of natives, they might also undermine solidarity. If millions of white American libertarians were to pitch up in social-democratic Sweden, support for its cradle-to-grave welfare system might fall. A non-racist might also observe that immigration could undermine social solidarity if natives themselves are racist, even if he or she isn’t – although this is slippery ground because it can allow racists to support racist positions on the basis of others’ purported racism while pretending not to be racist themselves: hence the common claim by British politicians, some of them doubtless racist, that immigration controls are needed for “good race relations”.

If anyone is trying to shut down debate, it is people like Ed West and Andrew Green.

The truth is that while it is not necessarily racist to oppose immigration, many people who oppose immigration do so for racist or xenophobic reasons. To pretend otherwise is frankly disingenuous.

Their shock report suggests the cost of schooling migrants’ children is astrononomical.

They do this:

1) By using cumulative figures. If you add up spending on anything over a long period of time, it looks much bigger than it really is. Using a single year’s statistics, 2009, and MW’s deeply flawed methodology, the cost of schooling the children of migrants who have arrived since 1998 is £4.6 billion, out of an education budget of £88 billion.

2) By counting children who have one parent who was born abroad as half due to migration. Since Nick Clegg has a Spanish wife, they include half the cost of educating their kids as being due to migration. Excluding that dodogy use of statistics, the cost in 2009 falls to £3.6bn.

3) By ignoring the taxes that migrants pay. Research by the Home Office, IPPR, Christian Dustmann at UCL and others show that migrants pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits and public services. Allowing for that, it is not UK-born taxpayers who are paying to educate migrants’ children, it is migrants who are subsidising the education of the children of people born in the UK.

4) There are probably lots more flaws in the stats. Those are just the ones I spotted in 5 minutes after getting back from a trip to Helsinki.

Yet again, #MigWatchFail

The new immigration cap could have prevented them coming to Britain.

Today, they and six other Nobel laureates warn that the immigration cap threatens the UK’s position as a centre of scientific excellence.

It would “damage our ability to recruit the brightest young talent as well as distinguished scientists into our universities and industries”.