Britain and migration

 

Britain is the best place in Europe to be an immigrant

What other countries can learn from its example

The Economist, Mar 21st 2024

The idea of Britain as a nation of immigration might seem counterintuitive. Its citizens voted to leave the European Union in 2016 after they were promised a tighter chokehold on inflows of people from Europe. This week politicians in Parliament tussled over a bill that will make it easier to ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda without hearing their pleas—the latest in a string of illiberal laws designed to “stop the boats”.

Neither does the country crow about the migrants it has. Other places have grand immigration museums; the one in New York harbour draws millions of tourists each year. Britain’s small Migration Museum, which was founded not by the state but by some worthies, sits in Lewisham Shopping Centre in south London, between a discount store and a shoe shop.

Yet Britain now has a larger share of foreign-born residents than America. One in six of its inhabitants began life in another country. The share is rising because, even as it strains to stop the boats, the Conservative government has opened the door to workers, students and selected victims of authoritarianism such as Hong Kongers and Ukrainians. Asylum is a sideshow in terms of the numbers. Fewer than 30,000 people floated across the English Channel last year. Long-term immigration in the year to June 2023 stood at 1.2m.

More surprising still is the fact that the country is so good at assimilating immigrants. Angsty politicians gripe that Britain is letting in people from poor countries to do menial jobs, and weak students who want visas only so they can deliver pizzas. Multiculturalism has failed, they say: too many immigrants live parallel lives in segregated neighbourhoods. Nonsense: Britain excels at getting foreigners up to speed economically, socially and culturally. It is (in this respect, at least) a model for the rest of the world.

In many countries even skilled immigrants struggle to find jobs. In the eu foreign-born adults with degrees who are not still in education have an employment rate ten percentage points lower than natives with degrees. In Britain the gap is a trivial two points, and scantily educated foreign-born people are 12 points more likely to work than their British-born peers.

Even immigrants stuck in dull jobs know that their children tend to fare well in school. In England teenagers who do not speak English as their first language are more likely to obtain good grades in maths and English in national gcse exams than native English-speakers. The pisa tests run by the oecd, a rich-country club, show that immigrants and their children perform badly in much of Europe. In Germany immigrants’ children scored 436 points in the latest maths test, against 495 for natives. In Britain they did slightly better than natives.

The idea that Britain is dividing into ghettos is a myth. Every ethnic group has consistently become less segregated since the census started keeping track in 1991. The foreign-born population is growing fastest not in traditional melting-pots such as Birmingham and inner London but in staid suburbs and smallish towns. Even within those towns, foreigners do not cluster together.

It is true that immigration remains the subject of furious political debate. But that is probably because the people who really dislike it are prepared to base their voting decisions on this issue alone. Britons as a whole have become more relaxed, especially since the Brexit vote. They seem unfussed by one remarkable recent development. The top political jobs in Britain, Scotland and London are all held by the children of immigrants, all of South Asian descent. The first ministers of Northern Ireland and Wales were born abroad (although Michelle O’Neill only moved north from Ireland).

Britain cannot turn every migrant and every migrant’s child into well-educated, productive members of society. It struggles with imported prejudices and aggressive Islamism, although that problem is sadly often home-grown. Asylum-seekers do not adjust as well as others, possibly because the government crams them into hotels and prevents them from working while it sluggishly gets round to hearing their cases. Nor is the state good at bureaucracy. The Home Office is famously incompetent. It actually retards assimilation by charging so much for naturalisation—in real terms the cost has increased by six times since 2000.

Moreover, Britain has a couple of advantages that other countries cannot replicate. It is a long way from a war zone, so it gets relatively few uninvited refugees, and it happens to use a language that lots of people speak a little. But two other explanations for its success are easier for others to copy.

The first is Britain’s flexible labour market. Compared with the rest of Europe, hiring and firing is straightforward, even for people who are employed under regular contracts. That helps immigrants find an economic foothold, which makes everything else easier. Xenophobic credentialism is weaker. One unusual thing about Britain is that immigrants with foreign qualifications have almost exactly the same employment rate as those with domestic qualifications. In most European countries the gap is large; in Greece it is an amazing 25 percentage points.

Ghetto fabulists

The country’s other advantage is the attitude of its people. Britons are open-minded. Just 5% told the World Values Survey that they would object to living next to an immigrant (and migrants’ children report being bullied at school less often than natives’ children). Britons combine an intolerance for discrimination with high expectations. Compared with other Europeans, they are keen for migrants to learn the language, obtain qualifications, adopt the culture and become citizens. It probably helps that Britain never had guest workers. But politicians elsewhere would be wise not to predict that newcomers it has accepted will one day go home, as Angela Merkel, then Germany’s chancellor, said of refugees in 2016.

Britain has not been an obvious country to copy recently. Its major service to the rest of Europe has been to show the costs of leaving the eu. But on integration it is the place to beat.■

 

America vs. Europe

 

Working from home and the US-Europe divide

Americans are no longer the rich world’s great office drones

The Economist. May 1st 2024

When it comes to economic growth, America comfortably beats Europe. Many factors have fed America’s outperformance, from tech innovation to vast oil reserves. But there is one explanation that seems almost too simplistic: that “Americans just work harder”, as the head of Norway’s oil fund put it in an interview with the Financial Times on April 24th.

The numbers do in fact bear out this assertion—a rare case of national stereotypes being empirically provable. On average Americans work 1,811 hours per year, according to data from the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. That is 15% more than in the eu, where the average is 1,571 hours. And it is not just that Europeans spend a few extra weeks on the beach. The typical working day in Britain, France and Germany is half an hour shorter than in America, according to the International Labour Organisation.

Observing these differences, it is natural to ask which is the better way of living—with more money or more free time? The reality is that it is difficult for people to choose. Those in America work according to American schedules; those in Europe conform to European norms. Analytically, the more fruitful question is why Americans put in longer hours. The answer leads to a curious new observation: that remote work is making America’s office drones a little more European, albeit with a puritanical twist.

A first guess suggests that culture might account for the variation in work hours. Maybe Europeans enjoy their leisure more. They are spoilt for choice about how to spend time off, with beautiful cities, culinary delights, rugged mountains and much else besides just a short train ride or discount flight away. America might simply have less to offer travellers, and what it does have is spread over a much bigger area, which goes some way to explain why Europe draws about 150m tourists from abroad a year, twice as many as America. As for Americans, surveys indicate that they view hard work as intrinsically worthwhile. “Rugged individualism” is, after all, what built the country.

But the difficulty with chalking up the difference to culture is that until the early 1970s many Europeans worked more. American working hours are basically the same now as back then. The big change is that Europeans now toil less. Hours are down a whopping 30% in Germany over the past half-century. Something beyond culture—a slow-moving, ill-defined variable—is at play.

Edward Prescott, an American economist, came to a provocative conclusion, arguing that the key was taxation. Until the early 1970s tax levels were similar in America and Europe, and so were hours worked. By the early 1990s Europe’s taxes had become more burdensome and, in Prescott’s view, its employees less motivated. A substantial gap persists today: American tax revenue is 28% of gdp, compared with 40% or so in Europe.

But the effect of taxation on work is far from straightforward. Some workers may respond to lower taxes by putting in longer hours, knowing that they can take more money home. Others, by contrast, may decide that the additional post-tax earnings allow them to work less and still enjoy their desired lifestyles. A recent study by Jósef Sigurdsson of Stockholm University examined how Icelandic workers responded to a one-year income-tax holiday in 1987, when the country overhauled its tax system. Although people with more flexibility—especially younger ones in part-time jobs—did indeed put in more hours, the overall increase in work was modest relative to that implied by Prescott’s model.

Regulation seems to matter more. European rules give workers power, from generous parental-leave policies to stricter laws on firing staff. Many European countries try to put caps on working time, such as France’s famous 35-hour work-week. These caps have been somewhat misguided, failing to boost employment as their proponents wished. They also have plenty of loopholes. Yet most research agrees that they have reduced work hours.

Another important relationship is that, as people get richer, they typically want to work less. A recent paper by the imf shows a remarkably strong link between gdp per person and hours worked in Europe. People in richer countries, such as the Netherlands, generally work less than those in poorer countries, such as Bulgaria. That, however, only reframes the question. Americans are wealthier than most Europeans, so why do they still work more?

Perhaps leisure is a collective-action problem. Americans may want to ask their bosses for longer holidays but are worried about being seen as slackers. A paper in 2005 by Alberto Alesina of Harvard University and colleagues argued that Europe’s stronger unions had in effect solved this collective-action problem by fighting for paid vacations, which ended up enshrined in law. America, with weaker unions, is one of the few countries with no mandatory paid vacations. Europe’s well-regulated leisure time may then beget more leisure because it is more socially acceptable, and the market responds by supplying more good ways not to work. It is a virtuous cycle of lovely cafés.

Just another day out the office

One fascinating new development is a discrepancy in the rise of remote work. In 2023 the Global Survey of Working Arrangements found that full-time employees in America work from home 1.4 days a week, while those in Europe do so for 0.8 days. Applying this home-office split to the working-hours data compiled by the oecd yields a striking result: Europeans and Americans now spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, with 1,320 hours a year for the former and 1,304 for the latter.

In other words, the extra 15% of work done by Americans annually is now from the comfort of their own homes—or occasionally on the beach, perhaps even one in Europe. Americans do still work harder, but rather more enjoyably than in the past. ■