Austerity and the End of Multiculturalism in Britain

Toby Helm, Matthew Taylor and Rowena Davis report in the Guardian that

David Cameron was accused of playing into the hands of rightwing extremists today as he delivered a controversial speech on the failings of multiculturalism within hours of one of the biggest anti-Islam rallies ever staged in Britain.

A coordinated attack or just a slip up? Salma Yaqoob seems to think the latter. She writes also in the Guardian

I like to think Cameron was genuine in his words when he visited my ward. And that somehow his mind was hijacked by the right wing of his party. I hope for all our sakes he wins it back. Because while areas like Sparkbrook are not perfect, they are succeeding...

 Cameron once had a vision. It was a positive and genuinely uniting and inclusive one that gained him admirers across the political spectrum. He should return to it.

 The "Big Society" the name coined by PM Cameron to couch his vision for Britain to counter the idea of "Big Government" attached to Labor which has resulted in huge fiscal deficits was coincidentally his way of re-branding the Conservative Party in Britain and make them electable. Margaret Thatcher had previously declared, "there is no such thing as society." This was a complete reversal of that way of thinking. Just as Tony Blair had reinvented the Labor brand, so was Cameron.

It now appears that the "Big Society" that the PM had in mind is not so big after all having some strict preconditions for entry. As Yaqoob notes, this is a total reversal of the "face" he put on when he was aspiring to become Britain's next PM. Does the PM's statement unmask the fact that the new Tory brand is just a repackaging of the mean old Thatcherite ideology?

While all this was taking place, a fourth quarter contraction in GDP was hitting the headlines. Dean Baker commenting on the Great British Austerity Experiment notes that

(t)he fourth-quarter GDP report showing that the economy went into reverse and shrank at a 2.0% annual rate is exactly the sort of warning that many of us here were expecting. Weather-related factors may have slowed growth some, but you would have to do some serious violence to the data to paint a positive picture. Of course, the austerity in the UK is just beginning. There will likely be much worse pain to come, with a real possibility that the country will experience a double-dip recession, or at least a prolonged period of stagnation.

 With the pain of economic stagnation possibly setting in, is this the end of multiculturalism in Britain?

Myths Debunked

Which of the two groups of countries would you expect to have higher emigration rates? Would it be the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Germany or Vietnam, India and China? The first group represents wealthy countries which have a high level of human development. The second group represents countries with a low level of development.

When we think of migration, we often associate it with refugees, asylum seekers, boat people, and economic migrants who are fleeing conflict, poverty and a lack of opportunity back home. So, common sense would lead us to believe it would be the second group of countries, the ones with low levels of development where we would find high emigration rates.

Well, presented below are these countries ranked according to their emigration rates from highest to lowest:

1. United Kingdom 6.6
2. Switzerland 5.6
3. Germany 4.7
4. Vietnam 2.4
5. India 0.8
6. China 0.5

Surprised? In fact, data from the latest UN Human Development Report covering the period 2000-02 show that the median emigration rate for countries with very high human development was 8 per cent. With the exception of the United States and Japan which had emigration rates of 0.8 and 0.7 per cent, the rest of these developed nations (38 in all) had healthy emigration rates.

In contrast, nations with low levels of human development had a median emigration rate of under 4 per cent (less than half of the former) which makes sense since these countries face stiffer travel restrictions. That is not all that is surprising though.

Out of the 200 million individuals on the move from one country to the next, only 70 million flow from developing to developed nations. The rest are flows between countries of similar economic standing. A lesser known fact is that international migration that occurs between countries is only a fraction of internal migration or movement that occurs within countries estimated at 740 million.

I mentioned travel restrictions earlier. Many nations with advanced economies try to prevent low-skilled migration from occurring. This is due to the perception that these immigrants would depress the wages of low-skilled workers in their economy. The UN report states that based on the body of evidence these negative effects are in fact "generally small and may in some contexts be entirely absent."

Instead such workers boost economic output at little or no cost to locals. There are, however, other difficulties that limit the movement of labour. This includes the lack of absorption capacity or ability to fit-in with receiving communities and the break-down of social cohesion that might occur.

To address these problems, public policy must respond in order to allow the benefits of migration to flow to both receiving and sending countries. Mainstreaming migration policy into an overall economic developtment strategy is an approach whose time has come.

The Rising Tide

If the global recession was the gift that kept giving, then the asylum seekers represent the problem that just won't go away for PM Kevin Rudd and his government. Having staunchly defended Australia's reputation as a tolerant society in India against the perception there that violent assualts on overseas students from that country were race related, he had to defend his government's policy with respect to asylum seekers back home in Parliament.

The heated debate over asylum seekers is an ongoing saga that has played out this year and one where the hapless Opposition has been able to gain some traction in the opinion polls. The policy being the removal of the temporary protection visas being issued to asylum seekers which was the Howard governments solution to the so-called "boatpeople" phenomenon. The allegation is that the reversal of this policy has resulted in a rising tide of asylum seekers being channelled into Australia by "people smugglers".

We can see from the chart below produced using data compiled by the OECD what the flow of asylum seekers into Australia has been through the years. It clearly shows that the flow during the past few years is no where near the highs that were recorded in 1990-91 and 2000-01 both in absolute terms or as a proportion of the overall intake of OECD countries.

Clair Harvey wrote in the Sunday Telegraph back in October:

A total of 4768 "plane people" - more than 96 per cent of applicants for refugee status - arrived by aircraft in 2008 on legitimate tourist, business and other visas compared with 161 who arrived by boat during the same period [...] And plane people are much less likely than boat people to be genuine refugees, with only about 40-60 per cent granted protection visas, compared with 85-90 per cent of boat people who are found to be genuine refugees. In 2007-08, 3987 claims were received and 1930 of these were approved. But whereas boat people are detained on Christmas Island while their claims are processed, plane people live in the community and they are allowed to work under policy changes introduced by the Rudd government.

When taken together with the numbers of foreign-born workers moving to Australia which have doubled in the last five years as shown in the chart below, one gets a sense of how overblown the issue has become. One also gets a sense of the exploitation for political mileage and media ratings the asylum seeker issue has been subjected to.