A while back, I wrote a piece about the British
elections and someone asked me how I would propose to solve the UK’s immigration
problems.
I am not a very intelligent person and generally go
out of my way to avoid claiming to be able to solve hot button topics like
immigration.
However, whilst I may not be the brightest spark
around, I am very much alive and kicking and I thought it was worth having a
crack at making a few points that I’ve noticed from several experiences like
being an “expat kid” in Europe (Stepdad was an ad man for a multinational
agency that transferred him around the world), married to someone who thought
my nation was the paradise I didn’t see it as and there’s the fact that the
work I’ve done involves people from elsewhere.
I believe that the most important place to start is to
ask “why do people leave one place and move to another?” Generally speaking,
most people like being at home or at least a place where there’s some sort of
familiarity. Sure, its fun to go on holiday to a place where people speak a
different language, don’t look like you and the culture resembles outer space,
is fun for a few weeks as a tourist. It’s a different story when involves
uprooting your life and everything you’ve ever know and moving to somewhere
totally alien.
Why do people do it? Generally speaking, most people who
uproot themselves want a better life for themselves. At the mildest, its about
going to where the “career opportunities” are. Hence, you get “expats” moving
to wherever their employer sends them to. At worst, you get people fleeing war
and persecution. Donald Trump is not wrong when he talks about “s***hole”
countries. As a rule of thumb, people don’t uproot from “nice” places or places
that are “nice” to them. They flee from places where they are treated like “s***”
and the place has become a “s***hole” for them. People don’t want to “harm”
their host country – they want to get out of a “s***hole.”
So, the first place for any nation to start, is to
ensure that your neighbourhood is relatively peaceful and less of a “s****hole,”
which is especially true if you happen to be a superpower or a country with
clout on the international stage. If you do things like support ruthless
dictators who crush their people or you disrupt existing power structures, you
are going to create a mess, which will drive people out and towards you.
So, create peace and prosperity around the
neighbourhood and people are less likely to flee. If I take Singapore as an
example, we do invest in Malaysia and Indonesia. Our investment creates a
certain amount of prosperity and both places have improved. Sure, Malaysians
and Indonesians still want to come and work in Singapore thanks to the stronger
currency. However, its not a case of needing the navy to keep Malaysians and
Indonesians from overwhelming us.
Now, this doesn’t guarantee that people won’t want to migrate
over. However, it does mean that less people will want to leave wherever they
came from and the ones that do come over happen to be the type that will be
more “useful” to the host.
Then, the question becomes one of, what do you do with
the ones that come? The answer should, inevitably be to find a way of making
them as useful as you can. To an extent, Singapore has gotten “lucky” in the
sense that the people from elsewhere generally do jobs that we either don’t
have the skills to do or won’t do. I
It’s a different story in most of the developed world,
where plenty of migrants, be they asylum seekers or economic migrants end up
living off the state, while the bureaucratic system takes years to process
their application or they end up working for the criminals. My stepdad, who
worked in a hospital that treated the “social cases” in Hamburg. His observation
was that many of the migrants couldn’t speak a word of German except for the
social welfare office.
Think about it for a moment. Integrating people who
don’t look like the rest of society is tough enough. However, it becomes a hot
political issue when the local population sees people from elsewhere plonked into
the middle of their communities living off their taxes.
As an ethnic Chinese growing up in the West, I
actually faced very little discrimination on the scale of things. The fact that
I am native English speaker helped a lot. However, I believe that I was
fortunate because a lot of English people had a good image of Chinese people. The
stereotype of the Chinese was the fact that they set up take away restaurants (exotic
tasty dishes) and laundromats. Chinese migrants as a generalization were not
known for living of welfare and demanding Chinese holidays – yes, I did
celebrate Chinese New Year in the UK but only my private space.
Chinese migrants were perceived as “useful” to society
and kept themselves to themselves. Hence, nobody really bothered them. This
wasn’t limited to the Chinese. A lot of Indian people became prominent members
of the UK – think Rishi Sunak as the classic example of a migrant success story.
So, part of the problem would be solved by cutting red
tape. Getting people off the state’s payroll and working should be the priority.
Integration becomes a lot of easier when people don’t see your community as “sponging”
off the rest of society.
The second part would be to get people from elsewhere
working or setting up businesses which contributes to the overall economy.
People are less likely to have it in for you once they think you’re adding
value.
Bashing immigrants makes impotent politicians look
good. However, every economy needs a sense dynamism, which people driven out of
one place and into another tend to have in spades. As the Financial Times
notes, bashing migrants may be good politics but bad economics. Policy planners
should take note:
https://www.ft.com/content/c975fc2c-e6b9-402d-baa6-d87f036fc1d3
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