What's wrong with UKIP?

What's wrong with UKIP is not that they want less immigration. A large majority of the populace has wanted lower immigration for a long time. This government promised and failed to reduce immigration, so at present immigration levels can fairly be called uncontrolled.

This is not even a question of the majority view versus good policy. The cost-benefit analysis of immigration looks like this:

B = E + X

where B is the total benefit or cost, E is the economic effects and X is the political and social effects. To my mind, Jonathan Portes and others have persuasively shown that E is positive. But nobody has even tried to measure X. One example of X is that there are now about 600,000 people resident in Britain who "have some sympathy" for the Charlie Hebdo murderers. So these are not airy-fairy intangibles.

What's wrong with UKIP is that they want to leave the EU, and this would cripple the EU in its hour of need. But the point of view is defensible. Nation-states are ultimately incompatible with the EU, because free migration ultimately breaks the link between state and nation, and reduces government to administrators of the local populace. So, there is an existential choice between Europe and the nation-state. I favour Europe, since I want to be able to stand up to other bigger nations. But I cannot blame people for a different point of view - especially when Europe seems on the point of imploding because of economic stupidity, and unable to protect itself against a clear and present military danger.

Social science and the migration debate

Large majorities in the UK want less immigration.

What are the possible responses to such views? We could:

1. Treat them as preferences. Preferences are legitimate inputs into the democratic political process, so we should reduce immigration accordingly.
2. Treat them as preferences, but ones based on xenophobia. Preferences like that are ugly; they deserve no weight in our democracy. The political process should launder them out.
3. Treat them as coming from rational beliefs. Perhaps people are concerned about the impact of immigration on wages of native workers, for example.
4. Treat them as coming from irrational beliefs, due to psychological quirks such as overvaluation of the ingroup, misestimates of the number of immigrants in the country and so forth. These beliefs can safely be ignored or dealt with by public education.

None of these really seems satisfactory. Politicians who have to get reelected, tend to favour 1. But politicians ought to lead, not just follow, public opinion.

2 is appealingly resolute and uncompromising. But the future membership of any group, including a nation, is of fundamental importance for its current members. No democracy can put this issue out of the reach of public control.

3 is also appealing, since it treats the public as sensible rather than racist. The problem here is simple: there is really not much evidence that immigration harms even unskilled workers economically.

4 draws strength from a large psychological literature on ingroup bias, and from empirical evidence that people state mistaken beliefs in answering pollster's questions. It is less good at explaining why immigration has currently risen up the political agenda. Option 4 must be partly true, but it feels patronizing to dismiss people's concerns.

I have no neat solution, but a few comments.

First, with regard to the economic effects of migration, technical research is necessary but not  enough. The stream of history and politics has been flowing against the poor in rich countries for many years in many ways - both ideologically, and through globalization in many forms, from mobility of skilled workers and capital, to offshoring. Exactly which forces have contributed how much to wage stagnation is very hard to disentangle. But the overall outcome is not much in doubt. Immigration is not so much a policy that can be neatly exogenously varied, and more part of a package which people in wealthy democracies may quite reasonably fear. (One may wonder whether poor immigrants should bear quite so much of the brunt of these feelings, compared to, say, financial geniuses or clever-clever right-wing academics.) And migration itself doesn't just have short-term economic impacts. It changes communities and transforms politics; it has reshaped Britain profoundly and will keep doing so. You can welcome that or not, but you cannot limit it. Of course, this is not a call to ignore the evidence, but for humility about the limitations of our research. How would greater or less migration change Britain? We don't know.

Second, we need to understood more about the social and psychological effects of diversity. We still know startlingly little. Socially, diverse communities seem to find it harder to provide public goods. But we don't know when or how they happen - though there are some great starts at finding out.  Social networks, norms, habits and political coalitions are all likely to change with the makeup of society; and there are probably many mechanisms which could come into play.

Psychologically, existing work is good at explaining how prejudice works: "symbolic racism", "implicit attitudes" and so forth. I think we are less good at understanding how individuals experience ethnic outgroups in the context of their daily lives. Paul Celan, himself an immigrant to Paris and a victim of racial persecution, writes of an elderly relative in London in the 1960s:

Die dir zugewinkte
Stille von hinterm
Schritt einer Schwarzen....

The stillness that waved at you 
from behind the gait of a black woman... 

Understanding how people actually experience ethnic strangers might help us understand preferences. Perhaps it might also help us live together better - since that is certainly our fate. Celan's poem finishes with a humanistic flourish: Vertag dich nicht, du. "Don't adjourn yourself."

I called it right

Time for some credit-claiming. In 2011 I predicted that immigration would become a live issue in relation to the EU: "there will be increasing pressure to pull up the drawbridges". Yup.

In the interests of balance I should report a couple of verbal predictions that didn't go so well; earlier this year, "don't buy bitcoin until it falls to $20". At the time bitcoin was $100. Sorry, bruv. And, some time in 1996, "this internet thing isn't going to be that important".

"Net migration"

Inside the migration statistics sausage machine.

If you are concerned about pressure on housing and public services, then it is sensible to focus on net migration. On the other hand, if you care about "integration" -- whatever that means -- then a reduction in net migration may imply a greater overall churn rate; you might want to reduce immigration plus, not minus, emigration. You might also care about who enters and who leaves.

All the immigration anecdotes I have heard suggest that in the attempt to reduce net migration, pressure is being put on the softest targets -- e.g. students. Typically, these are also the most desirable migrants. That is what you would expect if you think that migration policy follows a pattern where the rhetoric aims at the median voter, but policy is really driven by employer demands.