Скачать или смотреть Will Immigration Build Or Destroy Our Economy?

There’s no doubt that economic growth and its reflection in higher living standards has been hard to come by, at least since the financial crisis in 2008 and arguably since the 1970s. Back then real wage growth averaged 2.9%, falling to 1.5% in the 1990s, 1.2% in the 2000s and falling to minus 2.2% in the 2010s. (use downward chart as backdrop)
When Slade were singing Merry Christmas Everybody in 1973 UK GDP grew by a staggering 6.5%, a level of growth today’s politicians can only dream of. The decades since then have seen a massive decline in manufacturing as we outsourced that to China and a big move into services as the driver of the UK economy. It may be a driver but its not firing on all cylinders because we’ve had a negative balance of trade in goods and services since 1998. According to data from the World Bank, in the last ten years Britain has averaged just 1.58% GDP growth per annum.
What that decade has also seen is immigration on an unprecedented historic scale, starting with Tony Blair and his open borders policy followed by successive coalition and Conservative governments who’ve done nothing to stem the flow of new arrivals. The rationale for letting millions of people into the country is that the native population is ageing so we are running out of the labour component of capitalism.
That’s not a view that’s accepted by Professor Hein De Haas at the University of Amsterdam. He argues that the demographic trend of ageing in developed Western societies runs so deep that the number of immigrants required to counteract it would be off the scale. Think tens of millions. It may be a band-aid solution in areas like the care sector but it’s too structural a challenge for immigration to be a long term fix.
The research by De Haas and other academics points to a very simple correlation between the business cycle and immigration. If a country’s economy is growing and economic prospects are on the up, more people will be attracted to move there to take advantage of those opportunities. His practical advice to politicians who want to reduce immigration is to trash the economy so nobody will want to come any more! He may have his tongue in his cheek, but what he says is true of Britain. Unti the late 1980s more people were leaving than arriving. It was only when things picked up in the 1990s that the flow reversed and more people started arriving than leaving.
There's another long term trend that plays into the immigration discussion – fertility and birth rates. Only 591,072 babies were born in the UK in 2023, the lowest number since 1977. We now average just 1.44 births per woman of child bearing age, well below the 2.1 level needed just to maintain the existing population. This is not unique to the UK – across the world the birth rate has more than halved since 1963.

I can’t end this discussion without swerving rapidly towards politics by mentioning the outrageous number of people in Britain who are of working age yet are choosing to stay at home and be what the academics call ‘economically inactive’. Some estimates put the number as high as 9.5 million, of whom perhaps 20% are on the long term sick and the rest somehow getting by on a mix of benefits, savings and working in the black economy. Are we asking immigrants to do jobs that native residents simply can’t be arsed to get out of bed for?
British companies have relied on cheap and plentiful labour for decades.

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