This discussion
by Roger Scully about why people in the Welsh Valleys voted Leave is
depressing although not surprising. In essence it is immigration, bolstered
by local stories of Polish people coming into communities and
reducing wages. I doubt if quoting econometric studies about how
little immigration influences wages would make much difference to
these attitudes (although that is no excuse for people in authority
who should know better ignoring these studies). I think it is
attitudes like this, in places unused to immigration partly because
work is not plentiful, that makes some politicians say that arguing
in favour of immigration is ‘politically impossible’.
This is the first
link between immigration and austerity I want to draw. The Labour
party before 2015 had also decided that attacking austerity was
politically impossible: ‘the argument had been lost’. Focus
groups told them that people had become convinced that the government
should tighten its belt because governments were just like
households. The mistake here, as I wrote many times, was to assume
attitudes were fixed rather than contextual. I was right: austerity
is no longer a vote winner. [1]
Why might attitudes
to immigration change? I strongly suspect that anti-immigration
attitudes, along with suspicion about benefit claimants, become
stronger in bad times. When real wages are rising it is difficult to
fire people up with arguments that they would have risen even faster in the absence of immigration. But when real wages are falling, as they have been
in the UK in an unprecedented way over the last decade, it is much
easier to blame outsiders. Equally when public services deteriorate
it is easy to blame newcomers.
It is wrong to think
that this only happens among working class, left behind communities.
Catalonia is a relatively rich part of Spain, and there has always
been resentment about this area ‘subsidising’ the rest of the
country. But it is very noticeable how support for pro-independence
parties increased sharply as Spain turned to austerity, although that
could also be a reaction to corruption scandals.
Here is the second
link between immigration attitudes and austerity. Austerity has
contributed to the slow growth in real wages and is the main cause of
deteriorating public services, but often outsiders are easier to
blame.
This is particularly
true when it is in the interests of the governing political party and
its supporters in the press to deflect criticism of austerity by
pretending immigration is the real cause of people's woes. This is
the third link between austerity and immigration, and it is one
deliberately created and encouraged by right wing political parties.
In this way Brexit has its own self-reinforcing dynamic. People vote
for it because of immigration, its prospect leads to falling real
wages as sterling falls and the economy falters, which adds to bad
times and anti-immigrant attitudes.
If all this seems
very pessimistic, it shouldn’t be. While the right will almost
certainly continue to play the anti-immigration card in the short
term, because they have few other cards to play, they can be opposed
by a left that makes the case for immigration. As just as views on
austerity have clearly changed,
so can views on immigration. particularly once hard times come to an
end.
However it is a
mistake to imagine it is all about economics, or even ‘culture’.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the culture vs economics
debate over populism is the implication that one way or another views
are deterministic, and the only issue is what kind of determinism.
The reason I go on about the media so much is that information
matters a lot too. Although people may be anti-immigration because
they have xenophobic tendencies which are reinforced when times are
bad, they can also be anti-immigration because they have poor
information, or worse still have been fed deliberately misleading
facts.
In my intray of
studies to write about for some time has been this paper
by Alexis Grigorieff, Christopher Roth and Diego Ubfal. (Sam Bowman
reminded me it was there from this piece.)
It is well known that people tend to overestimate the number of
immigrants in their country. This international experiment showed
that when people were given the correct information, a significant
number changed their views. What is more, this change of view was
permanent rather than temporary. Here is a VoxEU post
about an experiment from Japan pointing in the same direction.
As well as
emphasising simple information like this, politicians should expose
the kind of tricks people promoting tougher controls on immigration
play. The public tends to be receptive to the idea that it is
beneficial for the economy to have immigrants with important skills,
so they switch to calling for controls on low paid, low skilled
workers. As Jonathan Portes demonstrates,
that in practice can involve plenty of pretty skilled workers. The
trick for pro-immigration politicians is to ask which occupations do
we want to exclude: nurses, care workers, construction workers,
primary school teachers, chefs? With UK unemployment relatively low,
there are not many jobs where employers are not complaining of
shortages.
Of course most
people want to stop immigrants coming here and claiming unemployment
benefit. This is why newspapers keep playing the trick
of talking about the large number of migrants ‘who are not
employed’, conveniently forgetting to mention that this includes
people like mothers looking after children. In reality unemployment
among EU immigrants is below that among the native population. In
addition, we can already
deport EU immigrants that remain unemployed under EU law if the
government could be bothered to do so.
For politicians who
do want to start making the case for immigration, the place I would
start is public services. Few economists would dispute that
immigrants pay more in tax than they take out in using public
services. Yet most of the public believe the opposite. In this post
entitled ‘Is Austerity to blame for Brexit’ I show a poll where
the biggest reason people give for EU immigration being bad is its
impact on the NHS. Getting the true information out there will have a
big effect. Just as public attitudes to austerity can change, so can
they over immigration, but only if politicians on the left start
getting the facts out there.
[1] To be fair,
whether I would have been right in 2014/15 if Labour had taken a
clear anti-austerity line we do not know.
