If people were beating a path to your company’s door it would be a cause for celebration. More sales, more profit, and a higher share price. What’s not to like?
When people beat a path to our country’s door, a growing number of Britons turn to those who promise to stem the inflow. They fear that immigrants will steal their jobs and, by adding to the burden of welfare, increase taxation.
But all academic studies of the economic impact of immigrants show we are much better off with immigrants, than without them. A 2010 Brookings Institution survey of the academic literature found that ‘immigrants raise the overall standard of living ..... by boosting wages and lowering prices.’
They enlarge the economy and by making some businesses viable that would probably have failed without them, they create new jobs, and increase employment opportunities for everyone.
It is generally accepted that high-skilled immigrants increase the rate of company formation and innovation. Studies have shown that immigrants are more likely than native-borns to obtain patents for product and process inventions. High-skilled immigrants also bring to their host economies valuable knowledge of foreign markets, and cultures.
Although it is not so widely accepted, low-skilled immigrants also strengthen the economy.
Because they are younger, and more mobile than native-born workers they improve the efficiency of the labour market, and the problems caused by labour immobility, such as lower economic growth and the UK’s serious regional economic imbalances.
And, far from adding to it, immigrants actually ease the so-called ‘welfare burden’ in two ways.
First, because they are relatively young they impose no additional age-related welfare costs, and so help to defuse the ‘demographic time-bomb’ associated with the withdrawal of the baby-boomers from the workforce. Without tax-paying immigrants, the British pensions burden would soon become economically intolerable.
Second, because the marginal, per capita cost of welfare falls, as the population expands.
In other words, relatively young immigrants are likely to increase tax revenues more than they increase welfare costs. They have been shown by study, after study to deliver substantial net benefits to our economy.
It is, therefore, to be deeply regretted that demands for controls and ‘caps’ on immigration are likely to play a key role in shaping Britain’s political landscape over the next few years. All parties are committed, in one way or another, to respond positively to the apparent compulsion of a minority of members of native-born ethnic groups to harm themselves economically.
I’m not so naïve as to suppose there’s anything rational about the anti-immigration political groundswell. But it is one of the great tragedies of our age that the emotional responses of many native-born Britons to immigration do not include pride in the fact that people from other countries are attracted by the British qualities of stability, tolerance and liberalism, and the British principles of fair play and equality before the law.
The problems caused by tensions between ethnic groups are commonly attributed to immigration, but have little directly to do with the new immigration that ‘caps’ are designed to control. Instead of pandering to, and seeking votes from, irrational fears about rates of immigration, politicians would serve their constituents better if they lauded the economic benefits of immigration, and suggested that new immigrants enrich and add ‘hybrid vigour’ to our culture.
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[The views and opinions expressed in this blogs by guests or members of the CCEG are those of the author, and not of the CCEG or the University of Northampton Business School]
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That's half the story. If there was an emigration policy for those who are no longer or not currently employed and receiving any kind of state benefit then real benefits would accrue.
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