Post by Hickman on Nov 23, 2005 2:42:45 GMT -5
[shadow=red,left,300]Left-wingers lining up against mass immigration? Is this 2005 or 1905?[/shadow]
THESE ARE THE strangest of times.
Opinion - David Aaronovitch
THESE ARE THE strangest of times. Liberal interventionists lie down with neoconservatives, hardline Marxists make awkward love to religious fundamentalists, the Tory best hope is a Blairite and Ariel Sharon founds his own centre party. It reminds me of those TV home video shows, full of cheeky mice playing with tolerant cats. This is what globalisation really does, it changes the arguments.
As on immigration, for example. Most of us are familiar with the traditional anti-immigration case, which for or against has dominated discussion of migration for the last 40 years. Today that argument is made most coherently by the anti-immigration pressure group, Migration Watch. The numbers are too high, Britain is too crowded, our services are swamped, social cohesion is threatened and we need as a matter of urgency to reduce the numbers of people coming here to settle or work long term. Not only that, but the claimed economic benefits of large-scale immigration are largely illusory. As the demographer and Migration-Watcher Professor David Coleman puts it, any small fiscal or other economic benefits are unlikely to bear comparison with immigration s substantial and permanent demographic and environmental impact . All of which we must imagine to be bad.
In general it has been possible to associate such analyses with the political Right, since they have sat rather well with political conservatism, nationalism and a tendency to believe that one s own prejudices constitute a kind of natural law as in people tend to prefer their own kind .
Just recently though I have begun to hear more often what one might call the left-wing case against large-scale immigration. There was some of it on view during the speech of trade union bosses during the Labour Party conference. Who suffered from all this outsourcing and the importation of cheap labour? The poor and the low paid, that s who. And who benefited?
Polly Toynbee answered this question in The Guardian in October. The rich benefited because they had cheaper labour in the restaurants they frequented and cheaper cleaners to scrub the loo-seats where they did their plutocratic business. It is shocking, she wrote, that 30,000 of the 70,000 workers being employed to start work on transport infrastructure for the Olympics are to be east Europeans, not impoverished Londoners. The conclusion that Polly drew was that the new skills advisory body under consideration by the Government should, at least, forbid importation of semi-skilled workers unless employers have done everything imaginable to recruit and train locally . . . . She imagined that if the employment of nurses from abroad was banned, then the NHS would find ways to recruit from those unemployed, from single mothers, and others who for whatever reason aren t working.
Here we have someone who is a columnar soul-sister to me, and for once I couldn t agree with a single word of it. I wasn t shocked at East Europeans building the Olympic Village and not just because most of them are citizens of the EU. I didn t think that someone from, say, Catford who was a single mum would make a better nurse than someone from Bulgaria who was, say, a nurse. My instinct was that the world was opening up, and that open economies (and open societies) would do better with a greater freedom of movement. And this is the next weird alliance that of neoliberals of the market kind, and social progressives, which is what I hope I am.
Today sees the release of a report by the Migration Commission of the Royal Society of the Arts. Migration: A Welcome Opportunity, is a document that constructs the intellectual and economic case for the liberalisation of migration, albeit alongside measures to protect immigrants from exploitation. It notices that the Government has, since 1997, been attempting to assuage the fears about immigration by talking tough, while actually permitting more and more people to come and work here. It s done this, says the report, because it has had to. The economy has required the labour, people have wanted to come, and to try to stop them would have restricted growth and created impossible demands on the policing of migration. In fact the Government was saved by the bell, or by the accession to the EU of the Eastern European states, because, at a stroke, it implicitly granted an amnesty to the citizens of the eight already working irregularly in the UK .
But the understanding that Britain now operates an open economy has not reached the political level. The results are either brutal and unnecessary policies aimed at illegal migrants , or expensive policing and tracking procedures to check on visitors and students and which are bound to fail. We pay a high price for keeping Daily Mail readers (un)happy.
The commission studied four sectors of the British economy in detail and concluded that it wasn t true that the British economy needed skilled workers rather than unskilled ones, or that the importation of unskilled labour necessarily drove down wages. There is, it said, a paradox: a country that wants to phase out unskilled jobs to concentrate on high value-added work seems to require a growth in low-skilled labour to service this new economy. Yet, the continued educational upgrading of the native-born workforce means this demand cannot be met from domestic sources .
People have tried. In Singapore there was an attempt in the late 70s to restrict immigration and to keep jobs for native Singaporeans. The result was a recession and the laying off of workers. Nor is it true that emigration is damaging the mother countries of the emigrants. The commission cites Moldova, with 20-30 per cent of the working population now employed abroad, and whose remittances have fuelled investment and growth of more than 7 per cent per annum in what was considered to be the basket-case of Eastern Europe.
Looking ahead the RSA commission foresees that even the supply of labour from Eastern Europe will soon dry up, and mentions the accession of Turkey to the EU as being the answer, if the Union can overcome its diverse fears .
And then the report says something that had also suddenly occurred to me with the force of a revelation during an Any Questions-type session in a local cinema a few weeks ago. The debate, as it was being framed, seemed irrelevant. I realised, mid-answer, that we are going to have to rethink this whole discussion about who s in, who s out, how many, what controls and all that. Because it all belongs not to 2005 but to 1905, when the Tories of the day bellowed for controls to save the nation from aliens, and the TUC called for restrictions on cheap Jewish labour entering the country.
Some commissioners, the report reveals, argued that ultimately governments won t be able to control migration flows and labour mobility, without incurring huge costs. On this view, the commission concludes, efficiency and equity as well as the economic and political survival of governments will require them to introduce externally the same migratory system that prevails internally: unhampered movement.
Impossible? The last word to the commission: In present circumstances, this appears hopelessly utopian, as incapable of realisation as present levels of trade or capital liberalisation appeared in, say, 1950.
www.magentanews.com/magenta/xml/xmlarticles.xml?articleid=1506&xmlfeedid=5527
THESE ARE THE strangest of times.
Opinion - David Aaronovitch
THESE ARE THE strangest of times. Liberal interventionists lie down with neoconservatives, hardline Marxists make awkward love to religious fundamentalists, the Tory best hope is a Blairite and Ariel Sharon founds his own centre party. It reminds me of those TV home video shows, full of cheeky mice playing with tolerant cats. This is what globalisation really does, it changes the arguments.
As on immigration, for example. Most of us are familiar with the traditional anti-immigration case, which for or against has dominated discussion of migration for the last 40 years. Today that argument is made most coherently by the anti-immigration pressure group, Migration Watch. The numbers are too high, Britain is too crowded, our services are swamped, social cohesion is threatened and we need as a matter of urgency to reduce the numbers of people coming here to settle or work long term. Not only that, but the claimed economic benefits of large-scale immigration are largely illusory. As the demographer and Migration-Watcher Professor David Coleman puts it, any small fiscal or other economic benefits are unlikely to bear comparison with immigration s substantial and permanent demographic and environmental impact . All of which we must imagine to be bad.
In general it has been possible to associate such analyses with the political Right, since they have sat rather well with political conservatism, nationalism and a tendency to believe that one s own prejudices constitute a kind of natural law as in people tend to prefer their own kind .
Just recently though I have begun to hear more often what one might call the left-wing case against large-scale immigration. There was some of it on view during the speech of trade union bosses during the Labour Party conference. Who suffered from all this outsourcing and the importation of cheap labour? The poor and the low paid, that s who. And who benefited?
Polly Toynbee answered this question in The Guardian in October. The rich benefited because they had cheaper labour in the restaurants they frequented and cheaper cleaners to scrub the loo-seats where they did their plutocratic business. It is shocking, she wrote, that 30,000 of the 70,000 workers being employed to start work on transport infrastructure for the Olympics are to be east Europeans, not impoverished Londoners. The conclusion that Polly drew was that the new skills advisory body under consideration by the Government should, at least, forbid importation of semi-skilled workers unless employers have done everything imaginable to recruit and train locally . . . . She imagined that if the employment of nurses from abroad was banned, then the NHS would find ways to recruit from those unemployed, from single mothers, and others who for whatever reason aren t working.
Here we have someone who is a columnar soul-sister to me, and for once I couldn t agree with a single word of it. I wasn t shocked at East Europeans building the Olympic Village and not just because most of them are citizens of the EU. I didn t think that someone from, say, Catford who was a single mum would make a better nurse than someone from Bulgaria who was, say, a nurse. My instinct was that the world was opening up, and that open economies (and open societies) would do better with a greater freedom of movement. And this is the next weird alliance that of neoliberals of the market kind, and social progressives, which is what I hope I am.
Today sees the release of a report by the Migration Commission of the Royal Society of the Arts. Migration: A Welcome Opportunity, is a document that constructs the intellectual and economic case for the liberalisation of migration, albeit alongside measures to protect immigrants from exploitation. It notices that the Government has, since 1997, been attempting to assuage the fears about immigration by talking tough, while actually permitting more and more people to come and work here. It s done this, says the report, because it has had to. The economy has required the labour, people have wanted to come, and to try to stop them would have restricted growth and created impossible demands on the policing of migration. In fact the Government was saved by the bell, or by the accession to the EU of the Eastern European states, because, at a stroke, it implicitly granted an amnesty to the citizens of the eight already working irregularly in the UK .
But the understanding that Britain now operates an open economy has not reached the political level. The results are either brutal and unnecessary policies aimed at illegal migrants , or expensive policing and tracking procedures to check on visitors and students and which are bound to fail. We pay a high price for keeping Daily Mail readers (un)happy.
The commission studied four sectors of the British economy in detail and concluded that it wasn t true that the British economy needed skilled workers rather than unskilled ones, or that the importation of unskilled labour necessarily drove down wages. There is, it said, a paradox: a country that wants to phase out unskilled jobs to concentrate on high value-added work seems to require a growth in low-skilled labour to service this new economy. Yet, the continued educational upgrading of the native-born workforce means this demand cannot be met from domestic sources .
People have tried. In Singapore there was an attempt in the late 70s to restrict immigration and to keep jobs for native Singaporeans. The result was a recession and the laying off of workers. Nor is it true that emigration is damaging the mother countries of the emigrants. The commission cites Moldova, with 20-30 per cent of the working population now employed abroad, and whose remittances have fuelled investment and growth of more than 7 per cent per annum in what was considered to be the basket-case of Eastern Europe.
Looking ahead the RSA commission foresees that even the supply of labour from Eastern Europe will soon dry up, and mentions the accession of Turkey to the EU as being the answer, if the Union can overcome its diverse fears .
And then the report says something that had also suddenly occurred to me with the force of a revelation during an Any Questions-type session in a local cinema a few weeks ago. The debate, as it was being framed, seemed irrelevant. I realised, mid-answer, that we are going to have to rethink this whole discussion about who s in, who s out, how many, what controls and all that. Because it all belongs not to 2005 but to 1905, when the Tories of the day bellowed for controls to save the nation from aliens, and the TUC called for restrictions on cheap Jewish labour entering the country.
Some commissioners, the report reveals, argued that ultimately governments won t be able to control migration flows and labour mobility, without incurring huge costs. On this view, the commission concludes, efficiency and equity as well as the economic and political survival of governments will require them to introduce externally the same migratory system that prevails internally: unhampered movement.
Impossible? The last word to the commission: In present circumstances, this appears hopelessly utopian, as incapable of realisation as present levels of trade or capital liberalisation appeared in, say, 1950.
www.magentanews.com/magenta/xml/xmlarticles.xml?articleid=1506&xmlfeedid=5527