Unlike the cartoon image above, immigrants to Britain are doing better than those in most European countries, and much better than the tide of immigrants arriving in the United States. In fact, Britain now has a larger share of foreign-born immigrants in its population than America, or any large European country except Germany: One in six of Britain’s inhabitants began life in another country.
Despite voting for Brexit, which, at the time, was mainly to curb the flow of immigrants, and despite the British Government’s very weird program to ship immigrants to Rwanda without hearing their immigration pleas, the country is very good at assimilating immigrants.
We hear a lot in the news about “boat people” crossing the English Channel, but fewer than 30,000 people floated across last year against other forms of immigrant arrivals which stood at 1.2 million for the first six months of 2023.
British politicians are constantly griping about letting people in from poor countries to do menial jobs, and what they say is the process of granting student visas to those who only want to deliver pizzas. Multiculturism, they claim, has failed and too many immigrants live parallel lives in segregated neighbourhoods.
The Economist article on this topic last week states boldly that this picture of immigrants in Britain is arrant nonsense. It further states that Britain excels at getting foreigners up-to-speed economically, socially and culturally and, in this respect at least, it is a model for the rest of the world.
I must admit that, despite knowing that the Economist is not usually prone to praise Britain without good reason, this statement surprised me, as I imagine it will my readers. That’s why it caught my attention and why I thought it deserved a blog.
The article goes on to say that 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 percentage points, and poorly-educated foreign-born people are 12 percentage 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, surprisingly, more likely to obtain good grades in math and English in national exams than the average. The PISA tests (see my previous blogs about the PISA system) show that immigrants and their children perform badly in much of Europe. In Germany, immigrants’ children scored 436 points in the latest math test compared to 495 for natives. In Britain, the immigrants’ children did slightly better than the natives.
I have to ask, “Why?”
There are obviously many theories that might account for this rather surprising idea that Britain has done a better job with immigrants than most places. Some of the points that caught my eye in the Economist article were the diversity of the immigrant population, its apparent ability to disperse throughout the country on its own and the socioeconomic levels of the arriving groups. Yes, there are pockets of segregated communities but, in general, immigrants have moved on the basis of job opportunities rather than being attracted to their “own” ghettos. In Denmark, the government has had to force the dispersal of ghettos. In Britain, the immigrants have done it themselves.
The article cites Reading as an example. It states that, like many places in the U.K., Reading has experienced three major waves of immigration since World War II. The article says they have transformed the town, BUT THEY HAVE BARELY TROUBLED IT. In other words, they have integrated well into the fabric of the city; Reading has a large hospital, a growing university, and a major cluster of IT companies. Closeness to London’s Heathrow Airport and London itself have also helped.
Probably the most significant reason, however, is the huge diversity of nationalities: Poles are now the second biggest foreign-born group in Britain, Romanians are the fourth largest, and Italians are the sixth largest. In 2023, Filipinos were issued with 27,800 work permits, Zimbabweans with 46,200 and Indians with 163,000. Reading hospital, for example, employs 1,800 non-Britons with Indians, Nigerians, Kenyans and Portuguese being the largest groups.
This is obviously a very complicated social interaction and integration process that has not been studied much at all. However, the statistics show that it has worked, as an immigration strategy, far better than in most other countries. To be continued.
