Quite breathtaking today, really.
He said he wanted to limit immigration to balance "enhancing the
economy of this country commensurate with our social stability". That
is indeed the dilemma – more GDP v social justice for the low paid.
Social justice for the low paid. Yes, and who are the largest group of low paid people, people paid very much at the low end of the scale? Why, all those foreigners wanting to immigrate. So, if social justice is actually your bag you should therefore be in favour of immigration. It is increasing the pay of the low paid and thus aiding that social justice.
The only way that this could not be true is if, unlike I am sure a liberal internationalist like Polly, there is some way in which "not-Britons" are less valuable, less worthy of concern, than "Britons". If you did hold such views of course it is all entirely logical. You might even then go on to say that we owe no duty to those "not-Britons" in such things as foreign aid, climate change, war, famine and pestilence.
Either we are all human beings in this together, in which case purely nationalistic demarkations should play no part, or we are indeed nationalists and we should only consider our own. Which side of that argument you or I are on is not my point. Rather, that you cannot be on both sides at the same time.
Near-full employment should mean pay rises – but cheap imported labour
helps keep it low. Studies purporting to prove immigration has had no
such effect simply don’t capture this invisible power.
The consensus opinion is roughly as Alex Tabarrok puts it here.
Immigrants
do not take American jobs. The American economy can create as many jobs
as there are workers willing to work so long as labor markets remain
free, flexible and open to all workers on an equal basis.
Immigration
in recent decades of low-skilled workers may have lowered the wages of
domestic low-skilled workers, but the effect is likely to be small,
with estimates of wage reductions for high-school dropouts ranging from
eight percent to as little as zero percent.
As above,this is outweighed by the huge positive effect upon those who have immigrated.
Social democracy needs enough social cohesion to persuade people that
everyone benefits when resources are more fairly distributed.
Oh, very much so. Which is why "We must be more like Sweden" is not really an appropriate political policy for the UK. We are hugely more diverse culturally and therefore do not have exactly that social cohesion necessary to make such a project work. We also attempt to make such things work on a national scale, in a centralized manner, which is really not how they do it there. Their version of State supplied health care is, for example, run by the counties, with taxes raised within an area paying for health care in that area.
Now, one thing that might make such a hugely more paternal (or matriarchal if you prefer) State work for us is localism. Devolve all of that welfare state stuff down to the level of the community and we might be willing to pay for more of it as we might indeed have enough social cohesion at that level to provide political support for it.
Or we might not of course, in whch case the people, the bastards, will have spoken. But it might work, for one interesting little fact is that Sweden has a higher ratio of immigrants to population than the UK does.
Really. 5.4 % to 4%.
Just for laughs:
John Salt of University College London measures the pull factor: there
is a precise correlation between the number of people migrating and the
difference between wages at home and wages in their destination country.
That has to be the most obvious research result ever. You mean to say, shock horror, that economic migration is driven by economic factors? Ooooh, say it isn’t so Missus!
Update: Chris Dillow points out that, according to the HOS model, immigration is near irrelevant. Trade has exactly the same efect on wages.
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