While passions in the current UK immigration debate are running high, perhaps we all ought to pause and consider the 'Superman Question'. That is to say, what would we do with Superman given his status of an illegal alien? Should he be deported? He has come to Earth illegally after all and no dedication in protecting American core democratic values and wearing funky glasses in an effort to blend in can change this fact - a circumstance that befalls too on the shoulders of quite a few, more average, illegal immigrants. The question was posed by Junot Diaz, a Pulitzar prize winner of Dominican descent and creative writing professor at MIT last Monday on the US TV show "The Colbert Report" but it seems highly relevant and almost universally applicable.
After watching the show, I could not help but think how people will respond to this question in reality. Would it have the desired effect of challenging our prejudices and shaking up value systems? Unlikely. Let us forget for a moment that Superman is not a 'visible' migrant and thus quite unrepresentative of the general pool of illegal migrants in many large immigrant societies; forget even about his painstaking efforts at assimilation and life of 'normality'. There is another reason why he would be accepted - no questions asked - irrespective of the legality of his residence. It is just that he ... is a highly-skilled migrant.
The immigration debate in the UK revolves less around the legality of migrants (although it did feature in David Cameron's most recent speech 2013) but it remains infused with issues of skill and status. There seems to be a wide-spread belief that UK is blighted by hordes of unskilled migrants, who with little transferable human capital (as opposed to the "brightest and the best" that the country needs), have no other recourse but to join the dole and abuse the system. My own research (Demireva 2011, Demireva and Kesler 2011) and that of others* has shown that this is simply not true. Compared to white British workers, all migrant groups but especially migrants from Eastern and Central Europe, Turkish and Middle Eastern migrants experience severe occupational de-skilling once in Britain. Transition models indicate that the picture of labour market participation of migrants is complex, yet, Central and Eastern European migrants make successful transitions from unemployment to employment. If anything, the policies aimed at managing migration put into place by successive UK governments appear to have ensured the acquisition of the desired and high skill-level migrants, and continuous employment spells are the norm rather than unemployment or inactivity.
Report after report show that migrants in the UK contribute substantially to the economy and their take up of welfare is very modest compared to the native population. As mentioned already in quite a few places, in terms of benefits claiming (DWP 2012), only 6.4% of the entire claimant population are estimated to have been non-UK nationals when they first registered for a National Insurance Number. Whereas there is significant variation in this rate by benefit type, still only 8.5% of all Jobseekers are estimated to have been non-UK nationals when they first registered contrasted with 3.5% for working age disabled benefit claimants. Importantly, but only cursorly mentioned in this debate, the initial results from a sample exercise to match non-EEA claimants who were recorded as foreign nationals at the time they first registered for a National Insurance Number suggests that more than half (54%) will have obtained British citizenship subsequently, and the majority of the remainder will have some form of immigration status providing legitimate access to public funds.
In regards to social housing, Rutter and Latorre (2009) present data that new migrants to the UK over the last five years make up less than two per cent of the total of those in social housing. In fact, 90 per cent of those who live in social housing are UK born. Most of the newly-arrived migrant group who occupy social tenancies are refugees who have been granted permission to remain in the UK, however, their number remains very small. Robinson (2007) show that reflecting the relatively high levels of employment within A8** households moving into the social rented sector, only a relatively small proportion of tenants or their partners were recorded as qualifying for or being in receipt of state benefits, and only a very small proportion avail of social housing with no other source of income except for benefits. Moreover, looking across EU member states in general, Harrison et al. (2005) found that severe housing disadvantage persists amongst national indigenous minorities and that law, monitoring and regulation vary widely, and some Member States have only made limited progress towards equality of treatment or recognition of diversity.
There is also no evidence that crime rates, which are now an integral part of the UKIP rhetoric, have been on the rise as a result of the new immigration waves. An LSE report (Bell and Machin 2011) shows that, contrary to wide-spread beliefs, when the effect of flows associated with the A8 accession countries is examined (or with those entering with work permits or Tier 2 visas), significant negative effects on property crime (and no effect on violent crime) are found. In other words, areas with higher shares of these types of immigrants in the population experienced faster falls in property crime rates than other areas. The researchers concluded that A8 migrants are special in the sense that they came to the UK with the express intent of working and have very strong labour market attachment which materializes in a positive rather than a negative effect. Further still, a survey carried out by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 2008 found no evidence that Eastern Europeans were responsible for a crime wave and Peter Fahy, the chief constable who co-authored the report has since remarked that a lot of worry about crime in Britain is encouraged by rumours and misunderstandings.
A speech cannot hold endless factual information and perhaps the reports I just discussed were not included for the sake of brevity and of streamlining the expose. Yet, the main arguments of Cameron's 2013 speech are uncannily similar to the ones that he already propositioned in 2011 - net migration should go down together with the number of foreign nationals abusing the welfare system. Thus, a wealth of research did not see the light of political agendas both in 2011 and 2013.
Again, as before Cameron raised the question of the level of belonging of migrants and their participation in the UK social life; again he just barely touched upon the moral quagmire that is the expectation of migrants on fixed contracts without right to settle to be part of a community. Unsurprisingly, he failed to mention the increasing volume of British retirement migration (more than one million Britons own a home in coastal areas in Spain alone [Hardill et al. 2005]) and the challenges that British retired migrants could bring to the welfare systems of other EU member states. Yet, Cameron was quite frank and unambivalent in 2011 and in 2013 about who he holds responsible for the increased migration challenges (besides the previous Labour government). In his own words, in 2011 the real issue was that "migrants are filling gaps in the labour market left wide open by a welfare system that for years has paid British people not to work". In 2013, he remarked that "even at the end of the so-called 'boom', there were around five million people in our country of working age on out of work benefits". Now, that is a problem that no 'Superman Question' can fix and in my opinion deserves to be discussed in detail and finally made separate from the migration debate. Any politician owes it to the five million voters who so often get stigmatised.
*See Brynin and Guveli (2012) for an overall overview of British minorities' occupational segregation
**A8 countries are:
- Czech Republic
- Estonia
- Hungary
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Poland
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
Reference:
Demireva, N. (2011) “New Migrants in the UK: Employment Patterns and Occupational Attainment”; The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (4): 637-655
Brynin, M and Guveli, A. (2012) "Understanding the ethnic pay gap in Britain", Work, Employment and Society, 26(4): 574-587
Brynin, M and Guveli, A. (2012) "Understanding the ethnic pay gap in Britain", Work, Employment and Society, 26(4): 574-587
Demireva, N. and Kesler, C. (2011) “The Curse of Inopportune Transitions: the Labour Market Behaviour of Immigrants and Natives in the UK”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 52 (4): 306-326
DWP report (2012) "Nationality at point of National Insurance number registration of DWP benefit claimants: February 2011", DWP
Cameron, D. (2011). "Immigration Speech in full", http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13083781
Cameron, D. (2013) "Immigration Speech in full", http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2013/03/25/david-cameron-immigration-speech-in-full
Harrison, M. , Law, I. and Phillips, D. (2005) "MIGRANTS, MINORITIES AND HOUSING: EXCLUSION, DISCRIMINATION AND ANTI-DISCRIMINATION IN 15 MEMBER STATES OF THE EUROPEAN UNION", EUMC Report
Rutter, J. and Lattore, M. (2009) "Social housing allocation and immigrant communities", Equality and Human Rights Commission
Jill Rutter and Maria Latorre
