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.■
