They're Fellow Humans, It's Not Rocket Science!

As most of us have known for years, migrants and refugees are good for economies - and now there appears to be 30 years of evidential data to back this up. This ought to be considered though in line with an important distinction between the benefits of having free movement of labour, and the problems of having free movement of people instituted in regulation (I blogged about this distinction here).

Because, you see, the thing that human beings ought to do, that they don't do enough, is think primarily about the benefit of immigration to the immigrants themselves, not through the very parochial lens of counting costs of immigration on indigenous folk. The two key benefits of immigration for immigrants are:

1) They work hard and try to make a better life for themselves and their family.

2) The better life they are making for themselves and their family is better here than it would be in their home country.

Some people assert that “It’s alright for you, you don’t live in a community that has been negatively affected by immigration!” This is true, but I would swing the twit-ometer back their way by saying “It’s alright for you too, you don’t live in a community like the ones from which the immigrants were escaping when they chose to come here!”

And we all know about Schrodinger’s immigrant – the one that simultaneously comes here to steal your job and sponge off the state on benefits. Schrodinger’s immigrant is largely based on the phenomenon of being angry at immigrants whatever they do, putting on your parts when immigrants work, and putting on your parts when they claim benefits; putting on your parts when they integrate too much, and putting on your parts when they stay in their own communities.

Lastly, you'll also know of those who complain about foreign aid, declaring that we have people on our streets that we should be helping first. It's a familiar piece of virtue signalling, but I would suggest to you that the kind of people who wish to care more about people in their own country by caring less about people in even poorer countries are not likely to be the kind of people who care about either group of people very much.

Edit to add: In this debate, most people forget to ask the primary question: why are wages low in a poorer foreign country and higher in the UK? The reason they are higher in the UK, of course, is because productivity is higher in the UK, thanks to better technology and advanced capital investments. Consequently, higher wages in the UK are the result of economic growth and prosperity - but equally, where wages are low in foreign countries that have the competitive advantage over the UK in a particular industry, this is wrongly seen as a threat, when in fact, it is another part of the UK’s increase in prosperity. 

This is also where confusion comes about lower foreign wages that are thought to be ‘unjust’ relative to UK wages. If industries in the UK cannot compete with industries abroad, it is not because of low wages abroad, it is because of high wages here: we have bid up wages so high that domestic industries are no longer as profitable and better off outsourced. This is another reason why tariffs are only pursued by economic imbeciles - they add weight to inefficiencies and starve efficiency by keeping prices high for consumers, and keeping competition and innovation down. They also misallocate resources, as industries that are protected from competition keep people and raw materials in areas of the economy that deny other areas of the economy those resources.

Immigration brings about similar benefits in terms of all the above!! 

Free Movement Of People Does Not Equal A Level Playing Field

In the air at the moment are grave concerns about EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, and whether both groups will get to securely live where they want to. To me, the problem smacks of politicians having too much interference in people's liberties. With increased liberty comes a reduction in problems concerning free movement of people.

A policy that enforces compulsory free movement of people also mandates an open borders policy, which most certainly does not necessarily mean freedom if the policy impinges on the freedoms of the indigenous population, particularly if it affects their economic infrastructure.

As with everything, a market approach to border control and movement of people has to factor in all the costs as well as benefits, and to all groups too. I'm going to assume that readers will have already worked out the various permutations of who benefits and who has costs imposed upon them.

For that reason, I'll assume you can see the obvious corollary, which is that there would be far fewer problems attached to freedom of movement if so much of a nation's infrastructure was not tied up in politics and taxpayer-funded state spending. A nation that has schools, hospitals, social care and welfare paid for by taxpayers cannot very easily endorse a politically-mandated complete free movement of people, because of the burden it can place on those taxpayer funded services (not to mention problems surrounding social and cultural integration).

That is to say, even a market approach to movement of people has to, for the time being, be consistent with a level of border control, and the protection of its citizens against those that damage cultures by not contributing to its economy, or make the society more divisive, fractionated and vulnerable (with immigration from Islamic countries being the obvious case in point).

The best way to protect the liberties of the people contributing to a nation's economy while also protecting the liberties of people wishing to work wherever they wish is to have free movement of labour but not have complete free movement of people (note: I am not talking here about situations involving refugees and asylum seekers - that is a subject beyond the scope of my intention here).

As long as people are free to work (and retire, of course) in any country they wish, nations avoid almost all of the costs of migration and enjoy almost all of the benefits. They have less chance of suffering from labour shortages, and wage inflation, and inflexible labour markets - and they enjoy the numerous additional benefits, which I documented quite comprehensively here.

The problem with having complete free movement of people disconnected from their ability to work is that in a bloc like the EU with severe wage differentials there is a strong pressure for labour migration that has a knock-on negative effect of the citizens of the wealthiest countries. If all countries in the EU were of a similar economic standard in terms of wealth and jobs there wouldn't be so much of a problem.

But a quick Google search tells me that a Hungarian worker migrating to the UK could earn in one year here what would take him about four years in Hungary. For perfectly understandable reasons, the economic incentives for people in Eastern Europe to seek employment in countries such as the UK, Germany and France is far greater than the other way around. Consequently, then, unless everyone who migrates is guaranteed a job, there will be a disproportionate migration strain on countries like the UK, Germany and France.

Because of this, a more prudent solution would be to tie labour to free movement rights. Rather than having border controls based on a woolly perception of what the nations possibly wants, it would be better if they were based on what the nation definitely needs. I was reading in Forbes that in late 2013, an estimated 13.5% of points-tested immigrants who had arrived in Australia earlier that year were unemployed, whereas just 1% of immigrants who arrived by being sponsored by a company were unemployed.

 

Clearly, businesses could be much better than politicians at overseeing a successful migration policy. And as for the matter of the security of EU citizens already working here, the government would be absolutely mad to jeopardise their status, and they jolly well know it.

Deporting UK-Based EU Migrants After Brexit Would Be As Foolish As Scratching Your Car Because You Don't Like How Others Are Driving

Theresa May is under fire for not unequivocally ruling out deporting EU migrants after Brexit, and the UK government believes it would 'unwise' to guarantee that EU migrants can stay in the UK unless they can secure a reciprocal arrangement from other European countries about Brits living abroad.

It would be absurdly imprudent to entertain the idea of deporting EU migrants living here, not to mention horrible - but for reasons that run deeper than the media is telling you. It's all to do with the free movement of people, and for that we need to start with perhaps the primary edict of libertarians - the non-aggression principle.

The non-aggression principle (while nothing like as absolute as many libertarians would have you believe) is an ethical axiom which says persons should not initiate force on other persons. In other words, your right as an individual and as a property owner must not be violated against your will.

It's a knotty issue and there are all sorts of ways (such as taxation) in which people semi-voluntarily trade off a proportion of their earnings into a state treasury fund for the perceived cross-national benefits and stability such a system brings. But generally, in a Sorites-type manner the principle holds for the majority of life.

To see why deporting EU migrants would be a bad idea, and why welcoming their ability to carry on living and working here is a good idea, we have to understand when free movement of people is a problem. Without an intelligent policy as a substratum, free movement of people can violate the non-aggression principle, because many of the citizens of the countries in which free movement is being enabled are not voluntary participants in the policy.

To take an extreme example, suppose there was a free movement of people arrangement between the UK and Somalia. With such an arrangement but also with disproportionately different size economies, populations and welfare states, there is asymmetry in the gains and losses (although one must also include the gains of the immigrants themselves).

This can lead to a situation where large swathes of people from the less-prosperous nation pour into the more-prosperous nation on the basis of a state-mandated arrangement and add all kinds of economic pressures and social duress on the citizens of the latter country.

A system that just allowed any number of prospective welfare claimants from some of the world's poorest countries into more prosperous nations would come with all kinds of strains on the health services, housing, school places, plus a drain on the economy through increased unemployment benefits and other financial entitlements.

However, a system intelligently managed whereby any citizen is free to travel, live and work in any nation is most welcome, and it would be an infringement on their liberties to have this denied to them. This is because a person going to work in another country is, by definition, bringing value to the economy in terms of consumer and producer surpluses.

Because the free movement of people policy is fairly well constructed in Europe, among nations that can offer each other beneficial migrations, we have, largely speaking, the positive kind of free movement of people where there is not too much asymmetry in the gains and losses.

So not only is it pretty evident that deporting EU migrants would be an opprobrious thing to do morally, it is also the case that robbing our nation of people that bring value to our country on the grounds that we are no longer in the EU would be a pretty foolish thing to do as well.

Of course, being a globally-minded citizen, it's important that human beings do all they can to help the world's most deprived people, and that is largely done through opening up their trade opportunities.

Alas, though, an awful lot of the problems nations face with mass immigration are problems created domestically by politicians (not to mention through their foreign policies): it is politicians that cause an awful lot of the shortage of jobs (minimum wage price controls, green taxes), the shortage of housing (over-regulated industry, environmental laws, and in some countries, rent controls), the shortage of school places (by not freeing up some of the education sector to the market of competition), and more generally, with far too much taxation.

The Dangers Of The Past's Prologue

Although media headlines are completely dominated at the moment by the EU referendum result, we still shouldn't lose sight of the fact we are currently in one of the most severe and globally unsettling refugee crises of the past 70 years.

Irrespective of domestic political leanings or views on the EU, let's never forget that we are human beings first, and that across the world right now there are hundreds of thousands of displaced people seeking a safe haven because they have suffered or have been in danger of suffering persecution by horrid groups like Islamic State or murderous dictators that run their country.

There's also a lot of feeling (correct feeling, in my view) that we in the UK are not doing enough to help refugees - particularly with the current crises in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the countries like Yemen, Mali, the Central African Republic, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma, Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan that have endured decades of open-ended war and civil unrest from which many of their citizens have fled.

Because of this, there is repeated talk of whether our domestic politicians are doing enough to help (and I haven't exactly been silent on the issue myself). Given the foregoing, I thought you might be interested in this little bit of history that has been pretty much airbrushed from British and American discourse.

Once upon a time there was an initiative called the Évian Conference which was set up in response to the plight of the increasing numbers of dispossessed Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution throughout Europe. Hitler's response to the conference was to say that if the nation state members (including the UK and USA) could offer them refuge he was ready to put them at their disposal and even send them on ships if necessary.

In response, most of those nation states were extremely reluctant to take in very many of the persecuted Jews - a mistake that was exacerbated when shortly after in that same year Britain and France gave Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, which led to a further 120,000 Jews becoming stateless.

After a multi-national failure to deal with the problem of so many persecuted Jewish refugees, we all know what happened next - Hitler dealt with them through his genocidal Final Solution, in which he systematically looked to eradicate as many Jews as he possibly could, and ended up exterminating two thirds of Europe's Jews.

One hopes that we'll never see anything so horrific on that scale again - but it's certainly a sobering lesson regarding the hell that can be unleashed when political leaders are casual and reticent about offering refuge to some of the world's most persecuted people. Let's hope we don't find what Antonio and Sebastian found in Shakespeare's The Tempest when conspiring to kill Alonso the King of Naples - that, unfortunately, "What's past is prologue".

If you're familiar with The Tempest you will recall that Antonio and Sebastian were thwarted by Ariel. Politicians by nature are usually narrow and provincial, and internal in-country political disagreements (what Freud called 'the narcissism of small differences') often means they are allowed to get away with most of it.

Consequently, unless we become a nation of caring and kind individuals that is outwardly vocal about wanting our politicians to represent that care and kindness in helping the world's most vulnerable people, they will continue to get away with their far too indolent attitude towards the refugee crisis. And given that there are some forces in the world who desire to unleash a hell even worse than that of Hitler, indolence and complacency is not something we should allow to continue.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Immigration (But Were Afraid To Ask)

You’ve probably heard of Schrodinger’s immigrant – the person who migrates to Britain to simultaneously steal your job and cause a drain on the economy by being a benefit claimant. Although in reality few people actually believe in the existence of Schrodinger’s immigrant (for obvious reasons), there is an awful lot of nonsense spoken about immigration. It’s quite easy to see why. Unless you think about immigration by considering the whole picture, your analysis will be partial, and skewed in an unhelpful way. Let me try to help.

First, are working immigrants a net gain on our society? It's tempting to say yes, as many people do, because, so the narrative goes, most immigrants work, and therefore bring gains to our economy. True, but that's not the best way to look at the net contribution question. Over a lifetime some UK citizens will pay more in tax than they get out of the system in terms of public services, and some will pay less. Long term welfare claimants tend be net beneficiaries, lower earners will tend to be a mixture, but most are not net beneficiaries, and higher earners will all tend to be net contributors. When you consider that the poorest 50% of the population pay only 5% of the total tax collected, it's clear that most people do not get much more out of the system than they put in.

Further, given that most immigrants tend to be among the poorest 50% of the population, then on those figures alone (stress 'alone') technically immigration may not constitute much of a net gain on our society, but it is a gain nonetheless. The graph below shows the fiscal impact of migration on countries in Europe – and as you can see, migrants in the UK are net contributors.

But that's only one corner of the picture, because we have to also factor in the people who gain most from immigration - the immigrants themselves. I think it’s a shame that whenever the subject of immigration comes up (recent Middle East crisis excepted) most people seem to primarily think of the matter in terms of how it affects ‘our country’ by which they usually seem to mean the people already here, by which they usually mean Brits. It’s rare that they think of the effects of immigration from the perspective of the individual immigrants themselves, not the immigrants already here. But, still, there are plenty of people around that are able to think beyond how immigration affects Brits to how it affects immigrants (of which more in a moment). 

What you hardly ever find, however, or at least find too infrequently, is a Brit thinking of the effects of immigration from the perspective of the people left in the immigrants’ country of origin. Given that in most cases when it comes to the poorest countries it is often the poorest people that cannot leave, how much of a negative impact does it have on them when they lose many of their brightest people with the most potential to countries already much more advanced and developed than them (this is what they call the ‘brain drain’)?  

It's quite easy to see why immigrants gain so much from immigration by seeing the situation in reverse - when investment is made in their countries. Developing countries don't have much material prosperity compared to wealthy countries like ours, but they do often have resources and labour to sell. Depending on the nature of their government and the internal civil set-up, what most people in developing nations have as their only genuine chance of working their way to prosperity is their opportunity to sell labour. Because those countries are usually rich in labour (and often in natural resources) but poor in capital they often only get the chance to increase their prosperity with outside investment from large corporations. 

That is why it is important to see that corporate investors are about as attractive to impoverished nations as impoverished nations are to corporate investors, as long as the nation is question has the requisite stability, basic human rights and rule of law to facilitate economic growth. So, far from being the capitalist bogeys that lefties love to excoriate, foreign investors are actually the main drivers of increased capital in developing countries, as well as, along the line, higher wages and increased human rights. In calling for less foreign investment by corporations lefties are also calling for fewer opportunities for many of their citizens by holding down their earning potential. 

The situation works in reverse regarding the subject of immigration, where instead of capital-rich investors coming into labour-rich countries, we have labour-rich immigrants coming into capital-rich countries like ours. Increased immigration to the UK increases the ratio of labour to capital. This would bring almost endless benefits both to the UK and to migrants themselves, but those benefits are reduced slightly by the fact that as our nation has a limited infrastructure (land, housing, schools and hospitals) immigrants also decrease some of the ratio of these things to labour and capital.

This usually would have a knock on effect of decreasing the marginal value of labour and increasing the marginal value of land, housing, schools and hospitals. Given that numerous government regulations impede the natural process of supply and demand curves being in equilibrium, it is obvious that the full benefits of immigration are not being enjoyed.

Take the most obvious example of those four - land, which is obviously also tied in with housing as houses are built on land. A country that has political and special interest group restriction on the supply of land being closely matched to demand naturally is a country in which the benefits of the relationship between labour-rich immigration and capital-rich employers are not being fully realised.

Immigrants aren't a threat to my job, but they might be a threat to some jobs. That's not an argument for reducing immigration, it is simply a point to understand how things work in a competitive market economy. Generally immigrants make the country better off, but more so for highly skilled people, and less so for low-skilled people who are competing for the same jobs. Skills are a resource just as a chocolate cheesecake is a resource. If chocolate cheesecakes are a scarce resource, I'll be paid well for a slice of it in my patisserie, and if skills are a scarce resource then people that have them will be paid well (assuming a demand for those skills).

In other words, if the nation is short of consultants and overflowing with factory labourers then wages for consultants will rise to attract more consultants and wages for factory labourers will be kept low. New people entering the labour market with assets that are in short supply are good for the market, whereas new people entering the labour market with assets in abundant supply are bad for it, but particularly bad for others with similar skills. That's why, in actual fact, the people who are worst affected by immigration in the UK are other immigrants already here, as well as indigenous people who are low-skilled or un-skilled.

For balance, the gains for immigrants have to be measured against the losses felt by their countries of provenance, because if the most skilled people from Africa, Europe and Asia are flocking to more prosperous countries, then our gain is their countries' loss. Given the intrinsic gains by those going to better themselves, all the inward investment in their countries of origin by entrepreneurs, and the benefit of experience they can offer their country by benefiting their own lives (called the 'reverse brain drain'), it's probable that the overall the economic gains outweigh the losses, particularly when you consider that according to the World Bank, migrants will send back well over $400 billion in remittances to developing countries this year, which is triple what the developed world gives in development aid and, because it goes straight to immigrants’ families, avoids some of the corruption problems that bedevil aid money.

Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia are thought to be three of the countries worst affected an exodus of skills and intelligence through human capital flight, which has been very damaging to their nations. But on the other hand, China and India have recently topped the list of those nations experiencing the biggest exodus of human talent, yet not only are they two of the world's fastest growing economies, they are two of Africa's biggest investors too, so to the largest extent it probably plays out that when skills and intelligence leave a country to become more prosperous, some of that prosperity finds its way back into those nations still ripe for overseas investment.

Besides, even if we could enumerate all the cases in which the human capital flight has drained a developing country of important skills and talent, we really just have to take that as a given that humans are naturally primed to look after themselves and their family first, and that the drive to better their situation will always come first. It's not as though we'd ever want any restrictions on people's ability to move upwards on the economic ladder.

Returning to the economic benefits of working immigration to a place like the UK, on top of all the intrinsic benefits we've talked about, there is also the additional benefits immigrants bring in terms of job creation. As we’ve seen, in terms of the economy immigrants bring net benefits to the UK, but a lot of people don’t seem to understand why. This lack of understanding is down to something called ‘the lump of labour fallacy’, which is the mistaken belief that allowing immigrants in to work reduces the availability of work for native born workers. But, of course, this isn’t the case.

Not only do immigrants brings many skills not available in the indigenous workforce, not to mention a work ethic, they also bring with them additional job-creation and also consumer needs too, as well as a rich diversity of culture to enrich indigenous folk. In other words, when immigrants work they create jobs for other people, both in the people they employ directly, but also in the consumer demands they bring with their wants and needs (clothes, groceries, cuisine, mobile phone contacts, haircuts, books).

The lump of labour fallacy mistakenly asserts that jobs are zero sum, in that there is a fixed amount of work to be done and once the right quotient of people have those jobs there are no more to go round. But a simple look at the history of the UK would tell anyone that this isn’t so, so quite why they fall for it with the immigration issue is beyond me. If you think about it carefully, then by the same logic all school leavers who get work must be stealing jobs – but of course we know that isn’t true.  In reality, of course, the opposite happens – when school-leavers get jobs they make the economy larger and the nation more prosperous.

An even further benefit can be seen by looking at the chart below. 

This chart shows the projected UK government debt over the next fifty years under high, low and no net migration projections. Because Britons are getting older and living longer, immigration is probably going to carry on being a vital vehicle to generate the tax to pay for all those pensions and healthcare bills.

One final point and then I'm done. The economic analysis may well look at all those benefits for the UK – the jobs, the taxes, the consumer goods, the diversity and the cultural enrichment - but you may argue that what it doesn't do is factor in the negative effects on the home nation, namely the two biggies: increased security threat and increased friction with locals when integration is a problem. 

On the issue of increased security threat, well yes, immigration may ever so slightly increase threats, but by a similar measure going out in your car increases the risk of car accidents, but no one seriously thinks we should stop driving our cars (while we await driverless cars, that is). Even if we ignore the fact that a lot of the atrocities committed on British soil were not perpetrated by immigrants, it is difficult to claim increased security threat as a problem with immigration, because the government's inability to stop would-be terrorists coming in illegally and thwart the complex problem of home-grown Islamic terrorism is not really a point against the merits of working immigration and beneficial diversity. 

On the issue of friction with locals and lack of integration - yes that is a significant problem in parts of the UK, especially with the sheer volumes of immigration over a relatively short space of time. Pockets of Britain where immigrants do not integrate, and have values that are radically different from ours, are natural sources of tension and frustration in some communities, especially in areas with high unemployment, rapid immigration influxes, low levels of social integration, pressure on public services, and specific challenges linked to certain Islamic groups. It's also a problem that genuine concerns about the issues just mentioned are too often rubbished or written off as mere intolerance or xenophobia, which is sadly too typical of the left. 

Regarding what politicians could do to help the situation; a good start would be lessening some of the restrictive measures that affect planning and building. Britain has a lot more capacity for people, jobs, transport, education and increasing city sizes, but the recipe for its fruition needs to be better in place. Clearly open borders that allow any number in, is problematical, because there's the danger that immigration moves too fast for the more-slowly changing infrastructure. More market forces would improve the balance of supply and demand, but with anything on this scale there are trade offs.

As far as the majority of the general public is concerned, the narrative we have with immigration is the irresistible force of not curbing people's freedom of movement coming smack bang up against the immovable object of not overfilling the UK at the expense of all its infrastructure - and something has got to give. As my blog on big cities argues, places like London are wonderful social and economic metropolises, and there is plenty of scope for many more cities like London, as long as market forces and state governance can see this happening at the optimum rate. You may not know this, but cities currently only cover 2% of the entire planet's land.

Providing options are not retarded, people will still be able to choose the urban or rural settings commensurate with their preferences, even when the UK has hundreds of millions of people. Immigration is currently so high here because so many jobs are being created. What would help the rest of Europe (and us) would be if they enjoyed a similar success - but for that to happen there'd need to be a serous reduction in legislation and interferences in the market.

* In 2011 Michael Clemens looked at the economic estimates https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.25.3.83 of the global GDP growth that would come if every country in the world abolished restrictions on the movement of goods, capital and labour across national borders. According to the papers Clemens looked at, removing all barriers to trade would increase global GDP by between 0.3% and 4.1%; removing all barriers to capital flows by between 0.1% and 1.7%. Those are big gains that would make the world a substantially richer place. Clemens also found that similar estimates suggest that removing all barriers to international migration would increase global GDP by between 67% and 147%.

·        

The Economics Of Terrorism, And Why Islamic State Will Eventually Crumble

A recent poll revealed that just over 70% of people in the UK think that immigration increases the likelihood of terrorism. They are right, but not in any way that should cast aspersions over the merits of immigration, because immigration increases the likelihood of terrorism only in the same way that having roads increases the likelihood of speeding. The cause of an increased likelihood of terrorism is down to something else.

Terrorism, like fruit, vegetables, cars and holidays has a supply and demand curve. Consider terrorism as a good with a demand curve - by which I mean that terrorism is an activity that currently some people wish to engage in to achieve a religious or political goal. The price of engaging in terrorism is paid in the form of the risk of death, injury or imprisonment.

Similarly, there is a demand curve for burglary, speeding, and fraud, and the price paid to do these things comes in the cost of a fine or a prison sentence. To put it in formal terms, we could in theory draw a demand curve for all of these crimes and then plot the likelihood of punishment on the vertical axis, and the number of crimes committed for each on the horizontal axis.

Ascertaining the steepness of the demand curve is like asking whether an increase in the probability of punishment will amount to reduced instances in crimes committed. Measuring the slope of the demand curve for, say, burglary is equivalent to measuring the deterrent effect of the punishment for burglary. Crimes like burglary, which are often committed to feed a drug habit, are likely to have steep demand curves because drug demand is usually fairly inelastic for an addict, which is why recidivism rates for drug addicts are so high. With speeding, on the other hand, the demand curve seems to be pretty flat. In other words, the single appearance of a speeding sign or a camera leads to a huge decrease in the incidences of speeding.

Now when it comes to terrorism and the sort of people who are likely to commit terrorist acts in the name of ISIS, the demand curve is about as far from flat as it is possible to be, because most of the causes with which the terrorists identify are causes bigger than the crime deterrents (including even death). In other words, many terrorists are perfectly willing to die for their cause, believing that in doing so they are offering a noble service to Allah, meaning in most cases there is no deterrent to flatten down the demand curve for terrorism.

If terrorists have no care for the consequences in terms of punishment for the crime, and if Islamic State continues with the same momentum in recruiting willing participants to fight for their cause, then terrorism is going to continue to be a problem, and immigration only changes where the incidences of terrorism take place - be it Britain, France, Germany, Holland or Belgium.

Regarding the aims of Islamic terrorism, and the fact that those aims even seem able to subvert the moral compass of the perpetrators, I see no signs of incidences of terrorism decreasing. The wide scope of this evil regime is that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wants to establish the Caliphate of all Caliphates, unleashing terror everywhere he can, and ruling Islamic State nations under the thrall of their terror-inducing domination.

There is, though, perhaps one fly in the ointment - if only he was a bit more familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle, or even a bit more cognisant of historical antecedents, he and his fellow Jihadi thugs would see that their aspirations are probably unrealistic in the longer run.

Here's why. A general pattern throughout the history of military or political coups is that even when they are brutal and catastrophic for the citizens, they soon reach a point of relative stability, not least because it's nigh-on impossible to rule a country under continual internal strife. In other words, good conquerors, even Caliphs, totalitarian as they were, still allowed at least a semblance of autonomy and harassment-free administration of people. That's why, even though it is likely that these horrible terrorist incidents will continue to occur, and Islamic thuggery will continue to pop up, the idea of ruling nations consistent with the backward, brutalised, oppressive, freedom denying methods of Islamic State is wholly unrealistic in the long run.

Racism, Nationalism, And Why Britain Has Too Few Working Immigrants

Last night on BBC3 there was a programme called Is Britain Racist? It had all the predictable exhibitions of prejudiced behaviour, plus the reiteration of already quite well know facts about how we harbour subliminal racism based on an evolutionary legacy of groupism (the tendency to think and act as members of a group, and conform to group patterns).

Clearly, although we are evolutionarily primed for groupism, the best way to diminish human prejudices is to integrate, be kind and accepting, and look to mutually understand one another. Mobs that are overtly nationalistic have their priorities the wrong way around - they supplant ordinary acceptance of others in favour of prioritising country, when they should be supplanting passion for country in favour of acceptance of others. I'm talking here not of the divisive topic of immigration, about which I've blogged before and probably will again, but about how to treat people who are in this country.

Those that are overly-natavistic should give up this insidious nationalism: it is an unworthy demi-god that seductively calls for our allegiance by playing on our worst fears and insecurities. It is using 'nation' as a projection of the many ways humans can feel marginalised and hostile towards past issues they've never dealt with - most notably their inferiority complexes. Because you know really, what we attack is that which we hate, and what we hate is that which we fear - it is what Evelyn Waugh eloquently called 'The concealed malice of the underdog'.

All around us we see the United Kingdom becoming less united by the year. We have a Scotland whose citizens are getting more and more enchanted with independence, and surely will soon be breaking away. We have Wales, whose assembly is not independent, but many of whose citizens are enjoying the devolution of powers that will likely grow and grow into eventual independence too (unlike Scotland, however, the majority of people in Wales do not currently want independence, as they know they rely too much on money from central government, and are fully aware that they would be hopelessly poor without it). And lastly, we mustn't forget Northern Ireland - which, while much more peaceful in this present period, is still a hotbed of division and dissension, and is very hard to govern. Even England is experiencing a stratification between north and south, with London and the South East enjoying far more growth than other regions in the country.

To top it all, in this rather Disunited Kingdom, at least in terms of nation states, the speech today from Home Secretary Theresa May hasn't gone down too well due to her stirring up various divisive sentiments in terms of immigration. The reality is something you'll not hear a Tory say, but there is an awful lot of pressure on this country in terms of immigration, not because we have too many working immigrants, but because we actually have too few, coupled with an over-regulated economy that fails to enable market supply infrastructure to keep up with market demand infrastructure.  

The reason we have too few working immigrants is because we are going to keep needing a high immigration of low-skill workers to cope with the supply-side needs of the growth of large businesses, and also because the civil service desperately needs as many people as possible paying taxes in order to sustain the welfare payments to the rapidly increasing number of elderly folk and the welfare payments to the steadily increasing number of young people without the requisite education, literacy and numeracy skills to compete in the current labour market - people who are, I'm sad to say, likely to remain marginalised and forgotten in a subterranean subculture of welfare-dependency to which the government has no realistic antidote, and may never have.

Heck, If European Leaders Can't Help In This Humanitarian Crisis Then What Exactly Are They Fit For?

The dreadfully upsetting crisis involving families leaving war torn countries to seek help in Europe is something to which we all desperately need to react - but it goes even deeper than that. I've never been a fan of this big EU super project, and goodness knows they have ballsed up the monetary system thus far - but for heaven's sake - if such an agglomeration of nations into a so-called cohesive European project is to be good for anything at all, then surely it is now, in crises like these, that we really need to see that demonstrated, and see them show their humanitarian mettle, don't you think? That is to say, it is precisely in tragic and precarious situations like this that the very qualities a union like the EU ought to possess can come to the fore in helping so many desperate human beings that need our help.

Families are trying to enter Europe largely on three fronts - people entering by land from Central Asia, people fleeing from Middle Eastern strife and entering through Greece, and people leaving Africa and coming through Italy. If our European leaders are to respond to this in anything like the right way, they must work out a conscientious and humane plan of action that will result in an agreement that these desperate people can be taken in and cared for, proportionally to each country's capacity.

The big problem with this crisis, of course, is that the better Europe becomes at providing refuge to people escaping their plight in Africa and the Middle East, the more migration it will encourage, which sadly will involve many more deaths in the process.

European leaders - and not just European leaders, world leaders too - have a mammoth task on their hands: they have to provide refuge for desperate people, whilst simultaneously doing plenty more in the blighted nations to tackle those crises and stop many more desperate people getting washed up in the Mediterranean or dying through starvation along the way.

As I said at the start, this is precisely the kind of crisis where nations chewing on the cud of this European project really need to come into their own and demonstrate how collectively they can respond to this multi-continental tragedy in a way that shows what can be achieved with a continent united.

But what can we individuals do - those of us ordinary citizens who don't have the same kind of clout as national leaders? There are two things primarily: one is donate to a good cause that will help - here is an excellent list of very good places to donate to - please share this blog as widely as you can if, if nothing else, it spreads around this link. And secondly, here's the other big thing that can be done - we must keep challenging anyone and everyone who talks of these people merely in terms of 'refugees' 'asylum seekers', and 'migrants', or who thinks of them as pests and nuisances - because fundamentally they are people: they are human beings who are hurt, terrified, vulnerable, and in desperate need of love and compassion and kindness from people much better off than them.

 

So it'll be great to donate what we can - but let's not just donate money - let's bestow a wealth of human kindness in speaking out against all those who forget the basic notion that everyone is a human being, and that when human beings desperately need help, the need to respond in a way that shows us at our most loving is a desperate need as well.

Foreign Footballers Are Like Foreign Foods – They Benefit Us At Home

England captain Steven Gerrard thinks reducing the number of foreign players in the Premier League will make the league better, and enhance the quality of our international team. Rio Ferdinand thinks the same. Greg Dyke is right on board with this, claiming that having a maximum of two non-European Union players will bolster home talent. I had a few choice words to say about it in this blog here.

Now it emerges this week that the Adam Smith Institute has unsurprisingly found what we suspected all along, that:

1) There is no link between native play time in the Premier League and performance of English national team

2) There is no link between amount of minutes played by Englishmen ten years ago and performance today

3) There is no strong link between foreign players and Premier League quality

I have a few more comments to make on this issue. If people involved in football understood more about economics they would know even without doing much research that diversity into the market improves the market. Anywhere you look, you find that competition improves goods and services, in terms of quality, prices, and choices available. A country that trades globally performs better than a country that only trades within its own borders. A university that invites students from all over the world does better than one that constrains entry to one country. The examples are endless. But here’s the key point in analogy to football – extending the quality through diversity doesn’t just improve the system overall, it improves the home grown participants too.

Let’s take food as an analogy that explains why it’s the same for football. A few decades ago in England there was almost no foreign cuisine. If you walked into the city centre your choices would be limited to British food; roast dinners, fish and chips, pies, fry-ups, bread, pastries and stewed meats and broths. In the modern day, take a walk into a busy city in the UK and you’ll find your dining options are much more plentiful. You could enjoy all those British options, but in addition your choices extend to a meal from places as diverse as China, India, Spain, Italy, France, America, Bangladesh, Australia, Japan, Greece, Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, and if you are in a very cosmopolitan city, African and the Caribbean too. 

If you are a provider of British cuisine you currently have to compete against all of the aforementioned nationalities. The couple who would have had a Sunday roast decades ago now could have a Mexican fajita or a Greek lamb moussaka for their Sunday lunch. The chaps who used to leave the pub and get fish & chips on the way home could now acquire any number of takeaways – pizza, Indian, Chinese, kebab or McDonald’s, to name but a few. A pub or restaurant that serves a mediocre Sunday roast, and a fish and chip shop that serves horrible fish and chips, will lose custom to their foreign counterparts, or to other providers of better English cuisine.

That’s why more foreign food is good for British food too. The importing of foreign cuisine puts intense pressure on the quality of British cuisine, and makes it better. The same goes for football players. 30 or 40 years ago UK players pretty much made up the entire league’s quota of players. If you were a good English player you had a fair chance of being picked for your club because your competition would have been only other players from the UK. Nowadays, a good quality English player has to compete with talented players from the rest of Europe and South America, all looking to earn their living playing in (usually) England, Spain or Italy.

Just as with cuisine, having foreign players in the English league improves both the quality of the league and the quality of the performers, including British players. In recent times, and just taking into account Englishmen, it takes players as good as the likes of Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, David Beckham, Ashley Cole, Gary Neville and Alan Shearer to make it in teams predominated by foreigners. Not only are they all world class players who did a lot to contribute to the successes of their clubs, their talent would have been enhanced by being in an environment in which they competing for places alongside world class foreign players. If they’d have been competing only against other UK players I’m certain that neither they, nor the clubs for whom they play(ed), would have had anything like the same talent or success.

England has done poorly at international level (since 1966) not because we lacked good players, but because other teams had better players. As good as Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry and Ashley Cole were for their clubs week-in week-out, it’s just simply the case that due to a mixture of being outperformed, and perhaps lacking a bit of luck, other nations (like Spain, Brazil, France, Germany and Italy) had technically better players, and did better in the international competitions. Besides, apart from one or two disastrous campaigns, we haven’t been a million miles short of another trophy, as those who can remember Italia 90 and Euro 96 could testify. Plus, we only lost on penalties in several of the other tournaments (France 98, Portugal 04, Germany 06, Poland/Ukraine 2012). Apart from this World Cup just gone, we’ve had good enough players to excite the fans’ hopes and expectations, even if they’ve soon turned to disappointment. 

But one thing’s for sure, as the Adam Smith Institute’s research has shown us, reducing foreign players will not make all this better, and turn us into world-beaters like we were in 1966 – it will diminish the quality of the overall English League, and it will enable us to produce fewer high quality English players for our international team.

* Photo courtesty of skysports.com

The Absudity Of The 'UK Overcrowdedness' Myth

It is ridiculous to claim that the UK is overcrowded, as many people are eager to claim in this current political climate. Crowded cities are popular because people like to live in them.  They like crowds because crowds have more people, and more people bring greater benefits to society.

Consider it from the perspective of what your being born brings to the world by way of benefits to others. Apart from all the obvious benefits you bring to your closest family, consider all the other good things you bring to the people in your city; you contribute skills, you work and earn money, you are a friend to many, a caring neighbour, a parent, a lover, you think up new ideas, you bring a unique perspective based on a unique experience of the world, you bring help and support in people's tough situations, and conversation, and with that comes anecdotes, wisdom, retrospective prudence, humour, and many more things. The reason why your existence is a blessing to others in your city is the same reason why increased population has made the world more prosperous; you have brought much more into the world than you have drained from it*.  

Regarding overcrowdedness, the upshot is, rural areas are quieter because fewer people like to live in them - and house prices are very expensive in Central London and Manhattan because more people want to live there.  Its simple logic - the reason London has 8.6 million people and rural towns have only a few thousand is because more people prefer to live in London than they do rural towns. The reason being, not only is there is a greater abundance of the aforementioned benefits in more populous areas, there are also better career prospects, higher salaries, better nightlife, greater choices of restaurants, a richer choice of entertainment, more tourist attractions, better public transport, greater diversity of people – the list goes on. 

So what I wonder is this: of all its citizens, who is statistically more likely to complain that the UK is over-crowded – people in crowded places or people in non-crowded places having a perception that other busier places are overcrowded? If it’s the former then they would do well to read this Blog post because it should show them that they don’t know how good they have it. If it’s the latter then I don’t get their complaint because life is not overcrowded for them in their rural provenances.

In terms of probability, the highest number of complainers will most likely come from a highly populated area, which probably explains why to them the UK feels overcrowded. Most people who pontificate on overcrowding are likely to be pontificating from a vantage point of high population density. The people with the highest probability of feeling an intense population density are those who live in the densely populated areas. For example, if city x has 7 million people and a village y has 1000 people, and only x and y exist, there is only a 1 in 7000 probability that you don't live in city x.

Let's get one thing straight, though - the UK is not overcrowded. The mistake people are making is that they are trying to average population density of people instead of averaging over square miles. You can't get a proper picture of the UK's people to area ratio by counting how densely populated a populated area is - the only way is to assess how densely populated the average square mile would be when considering each square mile as a weighted average of total population and total area. A tube station in the rush hour can be overcrowded; so can a concert venue without proper door control - but take a trip around the UK by plane and look down, and for the most part you won't see crowds of people, you'll see fields and woodlands.

The rate of urban areas in relation to square miles is vanishingly small - there is potential for literally millions more people living in the UK. Of course, just like all sensible immigration policies, a nation must ensure it has the schools, hospitals, roads, etc to support more people, but given the myriad qualities and benefits one distils from living in places like London, that ought to be something that's greatly encouraged.

It certainly is the case that in some areas of the UK the infrastructure hasn't quite kept up with population demand, but once you accept the general maxim that more people means more cultural and social benefits, it's easy to see that inadequate facilities does not mean the nation is overcrowded, it simply means that the UK infrastructure has not progressed conterminously to facilitate the social and cultural benefits that come with an increased diversity of people.

* For a much more comprehensive analysis of this, see my blog post Why The World Is Not Overpopulated. 

On Farage’s ‘Romanian Neighbours’, And Why The Worst Thing He Said Went Unnoticed

A whole host of renowned political twits have come forward to condemn Nigel Farage's 'Romanian neighbours' comment as racist – most notably David Lammy, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, and Diane Abbott (whose own history of closet racist utterings makes her an ideal candidate to look for it in others).  

While he has lots of odious ideas, technically Nigel Farage is right when he says that if a group of Romanian men moved next door to you, you would be a bit concerned (I stress the point that he said ‘men’, not ‘people’). Clearly that comment needn't mean that all Romanians are a threat - but given the ever-expanding number of male crime gangs in this country, you wouldn't be human if you didn't at least consider that a group of men moving in next door does involve at least a small chance that they might be a crime gang. This is a natural reaction that just about anyone might feel, without being the slightest bit racist about it. Your house is one of the primary assets in which you've invested hugely, so to expect people to be devoid of alert in gauging potential dangers is a rather unrealistic expectation.

Nigel Farage may well have it in for most of the UK's immigrants, or he may just be genuinely concerned about what he thinks is a too-relaxed border policy that sees too many undesirable criminals enter the UK (make your mind up which it is) - or maybe it's a bit of both - but simply stating that most people would be concerned if a group of Romanian men moved in next door isn't factually incorrect, particularly in the initial stage before they had got to know them a bit.

Personally I think Nigel Farage would have been better trying to vindicate himself the next day along those lines rather than following it up by saying: "Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door" – which, when you substitute ‘men’ for ‘people’, does sound a bit dodgier. Green Party leader Natalie Bennett certainly seems to think so, saying:

“That is a statement that can only be described as bigoted, racist and disgusting. Those Romanian people might be doctors, or IT professionals or care workers, or Roma seeking a better life away from prejudice and as likely as any other people to be good neighbours, who'll feed the cat or lend you a cup of sugar.”

Well yes, quite – but that’s trivially obvious, and beside the main thrust of Farage’s point. If you’ve arrived at the knowledge that your new Romanian neighbours are doctors, IT professionals or care workers, and you’ve already engaged in sugar swapping and pet-feeding, you no longer are in the position where you are concerned that they might be a dangerous crime gang, so the point is somewhat academic.

I’m perfectly willing to agree that Nigel Farage is not the most desirable of politicians – it just seems surprising that the “Romanian neighbour” point was the one for which everyone is choosing to vilify him when there are so many more indictments to which he could be subjected.

Speaking of which, I said in the title that the worst thing Nigel Farage said went unnoticed. The comment to which I'm referring is when he said on Newsnight last night that 'foreign aid should be cut'. Let’s get this straight – Mr Farage thinks the piddling support we currently offer to the poorest people in the world should be even less than what it is? It's shameful that politicians are trying to score political points with Romania-Gate, but yet lack the discernment to see why suggestions to cut the already miniscule foreign aid is actually a far worse form of discrimination than being concerned about the probability of a Romanian gang moving next door to you.

Foreign aid helps the world’s neediest people – not enough – but it is recognition that outside of our comparably comfy UK surroundings, there are people out there still dying through lack of access to fresh drinking water. When Nigel Farage says ‘cut foreign aid’ he’s asking us to champion even further neglect towards people far far worse off than us in favour of people who happen to share the same nationality as him. Of course, we understand why he says it – there are no votes to be won from foreigners who lack drinking water, and there are plenty to be won from British people who’d be the beneficiaries of a foreign aid cut – but I’d have much more respect for a politician if he or she was brave enough to castigate Farage for that comment, and show that they could put integrity and solicitude before popularity-mongering.

Finally Nigel Farage’s comment that he was uncomfortable hearing foreigners speaking their own language on a train was a stupid thing to say, and does rather fuel the flames of racist accusations against him. Farage strikes me as a mess of contradictions, half-truths and unreasonable prejudices - but him and his UKIP members have clearly got the other parties worried, which is why they are targeting him with anything they can find. They've got it wrong, though, with Romania-Gate, because to target him with that involves indirectly targeting just about everyone else in the country too.  

* It seems, though, that Farage felt the outside pressure to the extent that he later disassociated himself from his original terminology - "Do you know what, in life sometimes people get things wrong. I regret the fact that I was completely tired out and I didn't use the form of words in response that I would have liked to have used."

** Photo courtesy of the BBC