Culture Clashes Encourage Immigration.

It is good to learn something new and unexpected about a subject which you believed you had thought about it some depth. The economist Paul Collier's book about immigration, Exodus, revealed something counter intuitive but actually very logical about how immigration works:

All things being equal, more immigrants will come from cultures that integrate poorly into the host society than from those that integrate well. 

This is surprising but makes sense when considering it from the point of the migrant. It is known that the presence of a diaspora facilitates the ease with which people can settle in a country, so if a community integrates quickly into society there will be little or no diaspora with extremely close ties to the country of origin, which will slow down migration. This makes sense, there is no functioning Australian diaspora in the UK beyond first generation short term migrants because our cultures are so close that integration is nearly inevitable, on the other hand there is a distinct Bengali diaspora that acts as a magnet for further Bengali immigration.

The implications for immigration policy are profound, without either restrictions on immigration or some method of hastening integration, migrants will, over time, come from cultures that are hardest to integrate into society.

Things To Worry Less About

1. Romanians & Bulgarians coming over here. The migration from those two countries won't be anything like the scale of that which came with the entry of the central European states because they are a lot smaller in total and it isn't just the UK & Ireland to which they can migrate. Roma from Romania may cause problems but I doubt they are waiting until January the 1st so they can work here legally.
2. Food banks. There is no crisis of malnutrition among Britain's poor, food banks should be considered as melodramatic street theatre rather than a symptom of a real problem.

Romanian Immigration & Crime

Romanians and Bulgarians will soon be allowed to travel freely throughout the EU, including to the UK. A few years ago most of the rest of Eastern Europe was allowed to join the EU resulting in large scale immigration to the UK, especially from Poland.

A few years ago I worked out the incarceration rates by nationality in the UK, these are the figures for the number of people in prison in England per 100000 people, for various nationalities of Eastern Europe:

1. Romania- 829
2. Lithuania- 366
3. Czech- 185
4. Hungary- 183
5. Poland- 113
6. Bulgaria- 64
7. Slovakia- 48

Whether it is good or bad, Romanian immigration will be very different from that which we have already experienced.

Update: There is an interesting observation in the comments from Stelucia (who I assume is Romanian):

Romanians have already the right to travel freely without a visa in all EU countries. What they don't have yet are full workings rights within EU, which is something completely different.
This policy of restricting workings rights produced a negative selection: honest, hard working people remained in Romania.

If you imagined a country where they selected British emigrants in such a way as to mostly get criminals you'd end up with a situation where the emigrants were not typical of Britain as a whole. Come to think of it, I think that I have just described Australia.

New Meme- Immigration Reduces Crime.

In an otherwise very interesting article about declining crime rates in the UK and the West more generally the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley discusses possible explanations:

More immigrants. (Immigrants are less likely to commit crime than the indigenous population.). 

This is in fact the opposite of what actually occurs. Foreign nationals make up about one seventh of the UK prison population which is far greater than their percentage in the population. That doesn't even take into account those immigrants who are now UK citizens. In some European countries foreign nationals make up an even higher percentage of the prison population. So unless our justice system is racist on a scale that makes Apartheid South Africa look like paradise his claim cannot be true.

What I suspect Andrew Rawnsley has done is either import a meme from the USA (because in the States immigrants do have a lower crime rate than the population at large.) or he has swallowed misleading propaganda from the likes of ACPO.

Multiculturalism.

Obnoxio hits the nail on the head here:

personally, I don't have a problem with people retaining their culture here, all that irks is when minorities get preferential treatment just because they're minorities

It isn't necessarily problematic when people maintain a cultural distinctiveness* from mainstream society, however all too often the people who are most enthusiastic about supporting the keeping of cultural customs are the same people who view the resulting disparities in outcomes as problems to be tackled- often by imposing costs on the rest of society.

* Obviously there are some customs that I do inherently object to that we should stamp out, but these are things that are already illegal (forced marriages, genital mutilation etc). Also we shouldn't prevent people from abandoning cultural baggage by anointing community leaders with a vested interest in discouraging integration.

The Lesser Crime

I wonder what the Saudi authorities are most annoyed about- the gay sex, the drinking or the murder. This quote says a lot about our immigration laws too:

Jonathan Laidlaw QC, prosecuting, argued that if he was convicted and recommended for deportation after serving his sentence he would be able to claim asylum in Britain by arguing that his life was in danger, whether or not he actually was gay.

Oh great, commit a murder win asylum!

Keeping It In The Family

Inbreeding is not a good idea, no matter how pretty your cousins are. The health risks make it a public issue that should be spoken about regardless of the potential for offence:

The dangers of marriage between first cousins are to be highlighted by a leading professor, with a warning that their children are at risk of genetic defects.

Baroness Deech, a family law professor and crossbencher, will call next week for a “vigorous” public campaign to deter the practice, which is prevalent in Muslim and immigrant communities and on the rise.

The Times notes that they are more common in wider society than is widely believed:

Famous first-cousin marriages include that of Charles Darwin who wed his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, of the china manufacturing family. They had ten children with a poor record of survival and health: three died in childhood or at birth and five were ill or disabled.

He was not exceptional: Albert Einstein married his cousin, Elsa Lowenthal; Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert. Of their nine children, one had haemophilia and died at 31; two more were carriers and passed it on to their children.

However this misses the point, the danger with a one off cousin marriage is not actually that severe, however when they occur repeatedly over many generations all sorts of defects appear, it goes without saying that the communities that practice it in the UK did so long before they came here. Repeated cousin marriages can lead to children being born who are more inbred than the offspring of brothers and sisters, a famous example of this was Charles II of Spain, whose Hapsburg lineage was so entangled that he was born mentally and physically incapable and arguably led to Spain's fall from great power status. His family tree looked like this:



The level of inbreeding rose with each generation and that is where the problem lies.

The Times article also makes basic factual errors, as Mark points out here.

Escaping The Asylum

Making the Glasgow suicide case emblematic of the broader issue of asylum is unwise for a number of reasons:

• People who seek asylum from Canada are probably not escaping persecution, despite Canada's free speech problem.
• People who enter suicide pacts with their son are plainly either nuts or colossally selfish and not potential model citizens.
• As far as I am aware their motive for suicide is not yet known, assuming that every asylum seeker who commits suicide does so because they are seeking asylum is not a safe assumption.

Crime & Immigration US Style

There is an interesting article on immigration and crime here, in a magazine not notably supportive of immigration, which pretty much debunks the notion that Mexican immigrants to the United States have significantly higher rates of crime than white Americans, despite Mexico's high levels of violence at the moment.

It also demonstrates that Hispanics is a bit of a phony category (not as bad as "Asian Pacific Islanders") in that different Hispanic groups Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans & Domincans have very little in common.

In fact "immigrants" as a whole shouldn't really be considered as one amophous group. As my post of last year on the different imprisonment rates for different nationalities in England & Wales demonstrated some immigrant groups have higher rates than the domestic population and some have lower rates. There isn't a generic immigrant crime rate.

Defending The Borders Of The Shire Is A Risky Job.

Immigration minister and hobbit* Phil Woolas has been mocked for claims that UK Borders Agency staff are risking their lives. I think this displays a very callous attitute towards the victims of deep vein thrombosis.

Sitting down is a very risky activity.

* Did anyone see him on Question Time a couple of weeks ago? He's tiny.

Cripple Spectator Blogger Fight!!!!

What's worse Rod Liddle's childish attention seeking or Alex Massie's pompous denunciation of Liddle? I'd say Massie is worse because whereas Liddle presents information in a deliberately provocative manner, Massie seems to actually object to knowledge per se:

the left's inclination to see people as members of a group rather than individuals is tedious and, often, less than productive. Which makes one wonder why you insist on doing likewise, lumping all blacks (and all muslims) together as though skin colour or religion reveal, determine or dictate everything.

The thing is though the prevalence of different behaviours among different groups, in this case crime, is an interesting phenomenon. Massie angriliy denounces Liddle for things Liddle didn't say, "that blackness is somehow the cause of these problems". Cultural differences among different groups doesn't imply that the origins are innate. As the great Thomas Sowell has frequently pointed out:

All explanations of differences between groups can be broken down into heredity and environment. Yet a world view of the history of cultural diversity seems, on the surface at least, to deny both. One reason for this is that we have thought of environment too narrowly-- as the immediate surrounding circumstances or differing institutional policies toward different groups. Environment in that narrow sense may explain some group differences, but the histories of many groups completely contradict that particular version of environment as an explanation. Let us take just two examples out of many which are available.

Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italian immigrants from southern Italy began arriving in the United States in large numbers at about the same time in the late nineteenth century, and their large-scale immigration also ended at the same time, when restrictive immigration laws were passed in the 1920s. The two groups arrived here in virtually the same economic condition-- namely, destitute. They often lived in the same neighborhoods, and their children attended the same schools, sitting side by side in the same classrooms. Their environments-- in the narrow sense in which the term is commonly used-- were virtually identical. Yet their social histories in the United States have been very different.
.....
Jews are not Italians and Italians are not Jews. Anyone familiar with their very different histories over many centuries should not be surprised. Their fate in America was not determined solely by their surrounding social conditions in America or by how they were treated by American society. They were different before they got on the boats to cross the ocean, and those differences crossed the ocean with them.

In other words cultural traits, both positive and negative, don't have to be innate in order to be powerful and able to express themselves over immediate environmental factors.

Massie seems to believe that we should not allow ourselves to be aware of group differences because he prefers "to see people as individuals." Well great but if certain negative behaviours are particularly widespread among particular groups then it is going to be difficult.

As for Liddle, as I say he is being needlessly childish, but he is writing at the Spectator website, and the Speccy hordes aren't going descend en masse to Hackney to start a race riot.

Not Another F***ing BNP Post!

Last week Gary Younge blamed Jack Straw for the rise of the BNP, in this he probably got the right suspect for the wrong reason. Younge blames Jack Straw's statement that he asks Burqa wearing constituents to remove them when they come to see him. This is palpable nonsense as can easily be demonstrated by simply looking up when the BNP started winning council seats on a regular basis. They began to gain councillors in 2002 a good four years before Straw's comments about the Burqa. So unless his comments rippled backwards through time, perhaps with the help of the Large Hadron Collider, his remarks about the Burqa had little to do with the BNP.

In fact 2002 was even before the big surge in immigration following EU enlargement, although immigration had gone up to some extent after 1997, and the BNP's successes at that time occurred in areas not greatly affected by the recent increases in immigration levels.

Where Straw is to blame though is in the kind of attitudes he was propagating as Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001. Not simply his role in producing the infamous MacPherson Report, but his repeatedly reaffirmed belief that there is something inherently shameful about English culture. See for example:

• Referring to the English "propensity to violence" and as being "potentially very aggressive, very violent"
• Blaming football hooliganism on Englishness and claiming that England is particularly xenophobic, "There is a particular problem with some people's view of Englishness. There is a distorted, incomplete idea of what it is to be patriotic for those in England, which is different from that in Wales or Scotland or Ireland. We've had all the global baggage of the empire and a lot of jingoism here."
• And when he bacame Foreign Secretary he immediately started blaming Britain for much of the world's conflicts.

In other words Jack Straw spent much of his time pouring scorn on the country and emphasising self loathing and he wonders why the White Working Class have deserted Labour. Most of them haven't gone to the BNP mind you, they have simply stayed at home on election day. Obviously I'm not saying that large numbers of voters were carefully listening to all of Jack Straw's speeches and finding them objectionable but if a government despises them then sooner or later that message will seep through and they won't like it.


* Most of Straw's expressions of contempt for England are rooted in baseless assertions. For example he blames football hooliganism of English nationalism, but the most violent fixture in the Football League is probably the Cardiff-Swansea match. And football violence is endemic in countries that have never had empires like Uruguay and various Eastern European states. Similarly the idea that the English are unusually xenophobic can be shown to be complete nonsense simply by looking through international comparisons such as the World Values Survey, we are considerably less hostile to foreigners than most countries. Jack Straw's beliefs are not shaped by evidence but are axioms he fitted into his political worldview as a student leader in the 1970s.

A Plan Comes Together.

This is extraordinary if true:

Andrew Neather said the mass influx of migrant workers seen in recent years was not the result of a mistake or miscalculation, but rather a policy the party preferred not to reveal to its core voters.

He said the strategy was intended to fill gaps in the labour market and make the UK more multicultural at the same time as scoring political points against the Opposition.

Filling the gaps in the labour market is a legitimate reason for encouraging immigration, the other two are not. So multiculturalism wasn't simply a means to cope with large numbers of people from diverse background, it was an end in itself and large numbers of people from a diverse background were imported in order to allow multiculturalism to flourish. They weren't denouncing opponents of mass immigration in order to defend the new communities in Britain, they were bringing in new communities in order to be able to denounce their opponents.

So Labour not only deliberately encouraged mass immigration they simultaneous tried to ramp up racial tensions for political gain. I think we've managed to solve the great mystery as to how the BNP have managed to go from being a bunch of unpleasant weirdos who won a council seat every few years and then disappeared to being the most electorally successful racist movement Britain has had since at least the 1930s.

I think we've also discovered why Labour's core vote has been alienated-most studies of immigration show a small net economic benefit however the benefits are diffuse and the costs are concentrated among the poorest in society, in this case the working class voters who make up Labour's heartlands.

Update: I've just read Andrew Neather's original article, it isn't a mea culpa he is proud of all this! It sounds like a parody, but Neather is a real person so when he writes things like:

Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley - fascist au pair, anyone? Immigrants are everywhere and in all sorts of jobs, many of them skilled.

My family's east European former nannies, for example, are model migrants, going on to be a social worker and an accountant. They have integrated into London society.

But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London's attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.

It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it's pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.

He is being deadly serious.

It's Difficult To Make Predictions, Especially About The Future.

Long range predictions are always fraught with the danger of seeming very silly and not simply with the benefit of hindsight*. However in the New Statesman, George Friedman of Stratfor, has a go at predicting the next 100 years. Much of it is interesting, although much of it seems preposterous.

However two comments relating to Mexico strike me as extraordinary, when they are in the same article:

The US has room to grow and it manages immigration well.

Okay, that's a reasonable belief. Honest people can believe that the level of immigration to the USA is either good or bad. However when the same author writes:

Many areas of northern Mexico that the US seized are now being repopulated by Mexicans moving northward - US citizens, or legal aliens, or illegal aliens. The political border and the cultural border are diverging.Until after the middle of the century, the US will not respond. It will have concerns elsewhere and demographic shifts in the US will place a premium on encouraging Mexican migration northward. It will be after the mid-century systemic war that the new reality will emerge. Mexico will be a prosperous, powerful nation with a substantial part of its population living in the American south-west, in territory that Mexicans regard as their own

It seems inconsistent to say the least. If the second prediction were a remotely plausible outcome then the USA's current management of immigration is catastrophic. One of the measures of success when considering immigration is surely "Not likely to lead to secession of large part of country".

* That said some predictions made in the 18th and 19th centuries that power would move from Europe to North America & Russia turned out to be accurate for the 20th century.

It's Completely Unacceptable, Except When It Isn't

As I understand it for a contemporary politician to praise a dead politician who made some controversial remarks about ethnic relations 40 years ago means that he should be ostracised and must lose the whip.

However when a contemporary politician praises a dead politician who made some controversial remarks about ethnic relations 40 years ago then that's fine.

I must be missing something. Labour calls for Daniel Hannan to be disciplined for praising Enoch Powell, even though it was quite clearly not in relation to Powell's record on immigration and even the ludicrous 'dog whistle' argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny given the forum in which he made the remarks.

The predictions made in Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech were incorrect and it is not unreasonable to argue that they inflamed racial tensions in a most unhelpful way. The late W.F. Deedes has argued that Powell's speech made it much harder for later politicians to even address immigration.

However he never argued for mass ethnic cleansing as the recently deceased Ted Kennedy did when in the context of Northern Ireland he said that protestants " should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain". Kennedy's remarks were made in the context of the murderous atmosphere of early 1970s Ulster where the rivers were already "foaming with much blood" even before this crass ignorant intervention. It was a much more dangerous arena for political demagoguery than peaceful mainland Britain.

Yet Gordon Brown's praise of this man is acceptable whereas Hannan's praise of Powell is beyond the pale and Brown specifically praises Kennedy in relation to Northern Ireland whereas Hannan specifically disagrees with Powell comments on immigration! If instead of warning of the dangers of mass immigration (however inaccurately), Enoch Powell had waited for several hundred years before demanding that the descendents of those immigrants be given an opportunity to leave then that would it be okay to praise him?

Britishier Than Thou.

I've just taken the British Citizenship test online. On the plus side I passed with 19/25 which they say is 79% although it clearly isn't.

The downside is that it is a completely idiotic test, for example one of the questions is "How many children under 19 are there in the UK?":

a) 13 Million
b) 14 million
c) 15 million
d) 16 million

To which the only sensible answer is "What the hell does this have to do with being British?".

{via}

Britain's "Least Wanted".

Milton Friedman makes the point in Capitalism & Freedom that if instead of a presumption to free speech, a society chose to prohibit or allow free speech depending on the particular view being advocated, then it is likely that most minority viewpoints could be outlawed. Yet by grouping all minority viewpoints together you ensure that most people sympathise with at least sum of those viewpoints and don't want their free speech to be curtailed, therefore they support free speech in general.

This being the case it really is a very good thing that the government has released it's list of 'Britain's least wanted', a bewilderingly diverse list that includes everyone from Islamists to US talk show hosts. The criteria for banning someone is so arbitary that it could easily be used to simply ban anyone the government of the day disapproves of.

They really couldn't have done more to create opposition to these powers they have acquired.

There is a strong case for banning people who advocate violence but beyond that what someone is likely to say is no reason for barring them from this country.

Department Of Made Up Statistics.

According to the Daily Express each illegal immigrant is to cost £1 million. Now there are an estimated 800000 illegal immigrants in the UK so according to "The World's Greatest Newspaper", they should be costing us £800 000 000 000 . £800 Billion is a lot of money.

I'm going out on a limb here and guessing they haven't entirely thought through the number they made up.

Foreign Soldiers & UK Residence Question.

It seems right that the Gurkhas should be allowed to settle in the UK seeing as they've served the country well.

I'm just wondering though, how does the position of the Gurkha's compare to that of other foreign soldiers who serve in the British Army, although not in different regiments? Commonwealth and Irish citizens are eligible to serve and according to Wikipedia there are 6000 soldiers from outside the UK currently serving in the army including 1900 Fijians, 600 Jamaicans and a similar number of Ghanaians. Are they eligible to reside in the UK once they've completed their service?

Update: In the comments Tim Worstall says that they are allowed to become residents after 4 years of service, which makes the treatment of the Gurkhas seem even stranger.

Incarceration Rates By Nationality In The UK

Following on from the government's spat with the ONS's population figures. I have decided to compare the number of foreign citizens from each country in the UK with the number of foreign citizens in prison in England & Wales.

Figures for for the incarceration and nationality are here, these refer to December 2006 so I'll use the 2006 population figures to compare them to.

Before I start I should note a few limitations of my comparison:

• The population figures are from the UK, whereas the prison figures are limited to England & Wales. This isn't a huge problem- except for the UK figure- because more than 90% of foreigners come to England & Wales
  
• I've made no allowance for the different age structures of the populations, older groups will have lower crime rates than younger ones.
• I've made no allowance for the sex ratio which will be different for each country. The low Filipino ranking is probably partly due to the fact that the most common reason for coming to the UK from there is to work in the, largely female, nursing profession.
  
• It only refers to adult prison, so youth crime isn't accounted for.
• Some countries are part of drug smuggling routes, as smugglers enter the country purely to commit a crime they are unrepresentative of their nation's citizens as a whole.
• Countries with whom we exchange prisoners will be under represented.
  
• The population figures only list the 60 most common nationalities in the UK. Some nationalities outside that top 60 would be at least in the top 10 if they were included, such as DR Congo, Serbia & Netherlands Antilles.
  
• There may be errors in the data. For example according to the prison stats there are no Ukrainian prisoners in England & Wales, which is obviously wrong. Others may also be suspect.

Having said all that it isn't a useless comparison as big differences will reflect something real regardless of all the provisos. So here is the list with the figures representing prisoners per 100,000 citizens of that country resident in the UK:

1. Vietnam-3320
2. Jamaica- 2674
3. Nigeria- 1516
4. Albania- 1064
5. Romania- 829
6. Sierra Leonne- 871
7. Trinidad & Tobago- 777
8. Iraq- 756
9. Iran- 754
10. Colombia- 712
11. Russia- 616
12. Uganda- 607
13. Somalia- 573
14. Turkey- 502
15. Cyprus- 500
16. Pakistan- 414
17. Ghana- 404
18. Lithuania- 366
19. Kenya- 353
20. China- 341
21. Sri Lanka- 322
22. Netherlands- 296
23. Latvia- 261
24. Zimbabwe- 252
25. Libya- 250
    
26. Belgium- 229
27. Bangladesh- 201
28. Portugal- 198
29. Ireland- 195
30. Brazil- 187
31. Czech- 185
32. Hungary- 183
33. South Africa- 165
34. Zambia- 160
35. Germany- 151
36. Spain- 149
37. France- 139
38. UK- 124
    
39. Austria- 120
40. Italy- 115
41. Poland- 113
42. India- 105
43. USA- 83
44. Malaysia- 69
45. Greece- 69
46. Bulgaria- 64
47. Hong Kong- 60
48. Canada- 58
49. Sweden- 55
50. Denmark- 53
51. Norway- 50
52. Slovakia- 48
53. Philippines- 34
54. Korea- 33
55. Switzerland- 33
56. Australia- 28
57. Honduras- 21
58. New Zealand- 17
59. Finland- 14
60. Japan- 0
61. Ukraine- 0

The overall trends are harder to see, citizens from rich countries tend to be locked up less frequently than those from poor countries but there are major exceptions (India, Zambia, Bulgaria). The largest source of immigrants in the last few years- Poland- has a fairly low incarceration rate. Recently war torn countries seem to have fairly high rates.