The Land of Milk and Money

 

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