Snapshot of _Robert Colvile: This is REALLY important long-term for the migration debate. @OBR_UK is no longer assuming (as it long has) that migration is a cost-free boost to the economy - actually trying to model impacts on public services. (p.127)_ :
A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1765375616914727187)
A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://twiiit.com/rcolvile/status/1765375616914727187/)
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1765375616914727187) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1765375616914727187)
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What's scaring me here (having not RTA) is the implication, whether correct or not, that we just *assumed* immigration was a net benefit and didn't actually have anything to base that assumption on.
It wasn't just assumed. People were berated, called xenophobic and racist for even questioning it.
Economic impact isn't even the only issue surrounding mass immigration.
I believe it's been well known for years that EEA immigrants were always a net positive, while non EEA immigrants were the opposite. The reason being that non EEA immigrants had a lot of dependents while also working lower paid jobs, so they were more dependent on the state.
There has been research about this going back long before the brexit vote. It was one of the major things people were arguing about at the time too as I remember. People were saying that EU migrants were contributing and that leaving would mean increasing immigration from non EU countries who didn't contribute as much. Which is exactly what happened.
If we had stayed in and just reduced non EU migration (as we always had the power to do) the country would be in a much better position today.
Then again, there were Leave advocates who made the argument that the preferential treatment of EU immigrants (via freedom of movement) was "racist" and that leaving was necessary to allow easier immigration for people from non-EU countries.
Of course, we could have done this also whilst remaining an EU member state - the only consequence would have been that any such non-EU immigrants to the UK wouldn't have freedom of movement within the EU until and unless they became British citizens.
>I believe it's been well known for years that EEA immigrants were always a net positive
That was during the referendum and a bit before. Go back to the 2000's and early 2010's.
For starters, there is no article to read. This is a quote, taken out of context, from the 168-parge OBR Economic and fiscal outlook.
It's also worth noting that when OBR talks about assumptions, those are statistical/modelling assumptions, not just "I'm making this up" assumptions. They *do* have things to base those assumptions on, they do have reasons to believe those assumptions are reasonable. But they are "assumptions" because they do not have the data to prove it conclusively.
> They do have things to base those assumptions on
Doesn't mean those assumptions are remotely valid when facts change.
Migration has changed beyond all recognition since 2015. Not only have we had a drop in ethnic Europeans, we have had a significant rise in _non-worker_ migration.
The primary issue here is that their model for the last **7 years** has been wrong. There's no excuse for not correcting it 6 years ago.
> Doesn't mean those assumptions are remotely valid when facts change.
The references for justifying their modelling assumptions include recent ONS data. So they have been adapting it as the facts change.
You see it also with the idea that a diverse team is strictly better than a non diverse team until it becomes something related to a specific minority demographic in which case having a team with "shared experiences with the community" is what's most importat.
Like what are you even basing this on?
It's a great example of the worst kind of diversity too - just people with different skin colors but all went to private schools and all have the same ideology. Diversity of appearance but no diversity of ideas.
If you read the OBR report, they estimate that higher migration leads to higher GDP, higher GDP per capita, lower borrowing and lower net debt to GDP....
I said this further down, but the ‘costs’ are virtually non-existent because the government doesn’t do departmental budget allocation based on the number of people.
The NHS gets the same £xbn whether it is looking after 60 people or 60 million people. If you have 1m net migration or 10 net migration the cost of the NHS doesn’t change, it just provides a poorer service if it has to look after more people.
The government is far happier doing it this way because it can say that it has given £xbn more for the police without saying why it needs more police (more people, more crime or whatever reason). The same is true of the health service - if we said it needs a 10% annual uplift because over 65s cost 8x as much as a working age population and the number of them has gone up dramatically because of the post war increase in the age people live to then it would become political and governments don’t want that. Similarly with housing immigrants or road repairs and cars or education and our desperate birth rates.
>I said this further down, but the ‘costs’ are virtually non-existent because the government doesn’t do departmental budget allocation based on the number of people.
>The NHS gets the same £xbn whether it is looking after 60 people or 60 million people
So the NHS budget per capita shrinks.
Sounds like a cost to me.
The quote (in context) doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Tweet.
The document itself has a few pages setting out how they model the impact on public finances of migration. Their conclusion is a net reduction in borrowing of around £7.4bn by 2028-29.
There is nothing in that quote suggesting they're not making modelling assumptions about immigration...
But that doesn't seem to be true. Looking [at the November version](https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/E03004355_November-Economic-and-Fiscal-Outlook_Web-Accessible.pdf), page 29, there is a whole box setting out some of their modelling assumptions around migration. There's a similar chunk around page 27 of the March 2023 report.
They've set out some of their modelling assumptions in more detail in this new one, but that doesn't mean they weren't there in the earlier ones.
It's politics and nothing more. Various New Labour figures have openly admitted that they encouraged mass migration to bulk out their support base and to help with public services/pension payments. The Tories while spinning a much different public rhetoric have never been willing to make any tough decisions to reduce it back down to mid 90s levels. Meanwhile it all feeds into the growing housing crisis, depressing wages in certain industries and to a large extent Brexit.
This decision is quite important and it's one of the first institutional shifts that is actually moving to a critical view of immigration, which will fuel the ongoing desire for change, even amongst swathes of the public you would not consider to be right wing.
> Various New Labour figures have openly admitted that they encouraged mass migration to bulk out their support base and to help with public services/pension payments.
I'm not doubting you, but can you cite any examples?
That's not the same thing at all, unless I'm misreading the article or your comment a lot.
Your comment makes the claim that they encouraged mass migration so as to "bulk out their support base" and "help with public services/pension payments". The second part, as I understand it, has never really been in question: the principle neoliberal argument in favour of migration is that it increases the number of people in work, which are a benefit to the economy and to the tax coffers.
But the first part is very questionable, and it does not seem to be supported anywhere in the article you posted. The money quote is really this:
> "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
>
> "I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."
That is, they wanted to make the UK more multicultural, and by doing so demonstrate to the Right that diversity is a good thing.
This is not the same thing as changing voting demographics. Indeed, when they talk about changing public perception on issues of diversity, they talk very explicitly about making right-wing arguments seem out of date - where they imply a change in how people vote, it is more about the success of immigration changing people's minds.
You can disagree with them on how successful this plan was (it does not seem to have been very successful to me), but you can't draw out the conclusion that this was a deliberate attempt to import Labour voters, at least not from this particular article.
Do you have any other examples that actually match what you're claiming?
This doesn't really square with the fact that net migration didn't rise appreciably under New Labour though. Non EU migration just went through the roof in '19 - which is what's really driving the figures now. Net EU migration is negative! E.g. This is an entirely Tory driven project, however much you want to link it to Labour.
Check out fig 5 below:
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/
It rose from basically zero in the 90s to over 200,000 most years in the noughties and 2010s Seems small now but it was well discussed at the time. The Tories utterly failed pledge to reduce it to 10k was as a result of concern at the time.
The "raw" net figure can be a little misleading as it includes British people (who used to make up a significant chunk of the migrant population) and emigrants (who aren't generally covered by Government policy).
Non-British immigration was consistently around 100k through the 70s until the late 80s where it started to pick up (due to globalism etc.). It levelled off around 500k by 2005ish (after new controls by New Labour), and for the 2010s it was mostly in the 600k-800k range. 2020 saw the numbers drop a bit buy it was really in 2022 when the numbers started spiking, hitting 860k in YE March 2022 (first time the number had been over 800k), 970k in YE June 2022, and then 1,100k in YE September 2022.
Fair. Those numbers make sense. I was mostly correcting the idea that immigration was a tory thing. It was high under Blair, but he did it alongside incredible productivity growth (or GDP per capita as it's this subs new favourite thing)
What gets me is that the Tories know that to actually reduce migration they needed to invest heavily in education, training, child care etc for the citizens we have right now. They knew that when they promised it, when they campaigned to leave the EU and they know it now. We have control of our borders since leaving the EU but they haven't even begun to implement the changes required to make this country more self sufficient. 500,000 immigrants make those GDP figures look a little better than they actually are. They economy is growing but so is the population. Its smoke and mirrors.
This isn't going to change with a Labour government because the roots of the problem are in our declining population. Labour is complicit in destroying the nuclear family and replacing it with state childcare. We pass polices that make divorce skyrocket, we plunge both parents into the workforce so that one of their entire wages can go to the state to raise their children for them. Labour aren't going to subsidies stay at home mothers or fathers. They aren't going to implement polices that make having a child actually viable for millions of couples.
>Labour is complicit in destroying the nuclear family and replacing it with state childcare.
Yeah we are always discussing this in CLP meetings. Lol.
>We pass polices that make divorce skyrocket
Divorce has been falling for ages. What the fuck are you talking about?
> Divorce has been falling for ages. What the fuck are you talking about?
These problems have been building for decades, half a century really. I'm actually referencing no fault divorce.
>Yeah we are always discussing this in CLP meetings. Lol.
You couldn't give a shit about stay at home mothers, fatherless families or life long marriage so you don't need the sarcasm to make the point that it's never a topic for discussion. Lol.
It's not just unbelievable, it's a crime against the nation to have so radically altered it for reasons that are completely disjointed from the actual effect.
People seem to just be arguing about whether immigration is good or bad, and the the OBR should have said this before.
But isn't it possible that it was a net benefit economically, up to a certain number and once jobs had been filled, but then becomes a net negative? We've been receiving much greater numbers of migrants in the last few years, I'm not surprised if the same calculations we used previously now show a different result.
I think the issue is that whether or not it was a positive or negative historically, it was not checked as the costs were not modelled.
It could be though that the current drain is because the UK has turned from a high-wage to low-wage country. Companies today use the UK like they did India decades ago--just look at the number of call centres being set up in the UK these days.
> I think the issue is that whether or not it was a positive or negative historically, it was not checked as the costs were not modelled.
Right, OK I didn't know that. I've seen some data here over the years that seemed to suggest a net benefit, but if the OBR wasn't even modeling it then that does seem like quite the omission.
It is and isn’t harsh, it works well, home remittances are in the billions and people don5,10,25 years then retire having funded the entire family though school, bought farms and shops etc.
There’s just almost no route to citizenship and visas are easily issued, monitored and overstays and illegal visits are punished harshly and fined.
We just lack the political will to set up a system at all
> Temporary visas for unskilled migrants are a great idea
Given that a Conservative government with a large majority and which is frequently criticised for being "far right" is more or less completely unable to deport people who have had their asylum claims rejected and in some cases have committed significant crimes here, the idea that any visa could be truly "temporary" is quite unworkable in practice. A very high percentage of migrants with temporary visas would never actually leave.
I was thinking of something similar that could be a win win for all involved. Offer young people from Commonwealth nations the chance to move here for 5 years, with the offer that we’ll pay for their flight here at the start and end plus one trip home to be taken at their choice during their stay. Guarantee them a job in a sector we have shortages in (say, care), and a cash bonus at the end of their stay when they return home.
We receive some hard working people that alleviate our labour shortages. They get training, experience living in another country, and money. Their home country gets a direct cash boost to their economy when those people use their bonus and savings to attend further education, start a business, pay off debts, etc etc etc, plus a more educated and skilled population.
I know it’s a bit reductive, but it feels like something that could work.
Effectively, what we do with the Gurkhas? They join up to the UK military, and then after their term of service they go home to Nepal with a high level of training in a variety of areas, plus a load of cash.
Which is why Nepal doesn't mind too much, and hasn't blocked them from serving in a foreign military.
Gulf states do that, the employer pays a bonus of one months salary for every year you stay to be paid when you leave.
For some it’s a hefty lump sum in the home country to take back after years of saving up, educating kids and so on. And it’s not just manual labour.
Filipino mid level management staff will fund multiple homes and families, university for their kids and in a generation change their entire families futures.
The Filipino nurses here do exactly the same thing !
The model works very well because you can mistreat those workers and they're not going to do anything about it for fear of losing their visa.
We could do the same in the UK actually. London is already crowded so if anyone from the north wants to come and work here, they're granted a temporary visa but no rights to vote or public services and must return to whence they came when their visa expires.
Totally. It makes much more sense to reimplement the 0.7%gdp baseline foreign aid budget and for it to rise in relation to growth, so the UK can invest in other people's futures across borders. That way you open a route to citizenship through altruism, and it stops us dipping into developing countries labour markets for care workers and pot hole fillers, which should be entry level work for young UK citizens who wish to commit to the healthcare and infrastructure jobs of the future.
The current situation is pleasing no one at the moment and not fully benefitting people who want to better their lives. It's also bleeding money from the national economy and local communities because most of the paycheques is sent back to home nation states and not staying in the UK, whereas helping developing countries become more stable can ensure every pound earned stays in the UK and is spent multiple times in the same community.
The 100,000 care workers are typically going to be young people who will be paying tax for the next forty years, covering the pensions of old Brits and doing the work that needs to be done.
this is really interesting, can you please point me in the right direction for where i can read more about the figure needed to break even on public services used. i’ve tried googling but can’t find any thing substantive
I assume that £38k figure is for the average person though? If you're talking about migrants who work here for 5 years and then return home then I'd imagine it'd be a lot lower, you haven't had to pay for their education, I believe they need to pay a surcharge to use the NHS and you won't need to pay their pension.
Presumably care workers will never actually "break even" anyway because their entire wage comes from the public coffer which illustrates why thinking in terms of taxes paid is not always helpful.
Obviously the modelling should be based on expected outcomes by country of origin if it weren't too politically incorrect to state the obvious truth that Hong Kongers and Kashmiris are not equal contributors.
Most migrants also pay tax and consume fewer services as they tend to be younger. Any study I’ve seen has said they are a net good in terms of tax paid to service utilised.
Maybe this one will find something else. Quite likely it’ll find the same.
Seems like the document is only confirming that migrants are not cost free but they are still a net benefit. Though that must depend on who they are. I don't think refugees are on average a net benefit, for example.
Still think the main issue is culture.
EDIT the economic question needs lot of caveats
It's widely known that migrants from Western nations, much of the other EU and far East Asia tend to be net benefits in the short term.
The issue are migrants from Africa and parts of South Asia in particular.
In 2021 for example, less than 35% of Somalis in the UK were employed.
That's not down to the migrants, is due to migrant selection and driver for why they came here and how and what visas. Pakistanis are amongst the highest earning ethnic groups in the USA, usually third highest or so and earning more than Chinese, Japanese, Korean, European and even British expats but are right at the bottom here.
Have you never wondered why?
Costs a lot to move to the US, so you are already selecting for the higher educated and wealthier individuals who can afford to do that in the first place I assume.
That they don't ever consider
the forward costs of pensions
the forward costs of healthcare
the increased costs of the justice system (crime is a young male thing)
increased military spending costs (GDP linked)
increased housing demand and hence socialised costs
makes all these reports rather dodgy.
It's good for taxpayers. More taxpayers, proportionally fewer of them benefiting from certain kinds of public spending. Reduces net public sector borrowing.
If it's good for the employer then for public sector roles like care workers it would follow that it'd be good for the tax payer since we are the employers in effect.
It's interesting that post Brexit when a lot of the retail and restaurant workers went home, places were increasing wages to get British nationals to work there
The wage suppression is real and always has been.
I just *love* tweets that pull out choice quotes from a report, and then don’t link to the report.
[Here’s the actual report](https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/E03057758_OBR_EFO-March-2024_Web-AccessibleFinal.pdf). Page 127 as he says.
Punchline is: Even once you factor in public service costs, migration is a huge financial net benefit for the country. There’s a cool graph on p127 showing that the more net migration we have, the better the public finances get.
It also states the following:.
The fiscal impacts of migration are likely to become less beneficial over time, reflecting that after a minimum of 5-years, migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain andtherefore become eligible for welfare benefits. If migrants stay in the UK into older age, there would also be greater pressures on pensions and health spending and lower tax revenues as they retire.
Which is less rosy
And of course, migration covers all people, from both developed countries and developing countries. Most concern is over immigration from developing countries and the impact of that, not people from Ireland or Sweden coming to work in high paid jobs.
No.
>The fiscal impacts of migration are likely to become less beneficial over time, reflecting that after a minimum of 5-years, migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and
therefore become eligible for welfare benefits. If migrants stay in the UK into older age, there would also be greater pressures on pensions and health spending and lower tax revenues as they retire.
They are making a case for having temporary work visas clear imo
And where's the modelling for the financial impact of the social and political impact? It's hard to have a functioning, productive economy when your workforce has divided itself into a dozen essentially separate societies based on ethnoreligious identities.
> What is the modelling for the social and political impact of having high immigration?
That's not really something we should expect the OBR to look into.
The Centre for Policy Studies (the Thatcherite, right-wing think tank behind this tweet) might have some ideas, though.
> That's not really something we should expect the OBR to look into.
True. I think that is a short coming of economic only analysis.
> The Centre for Policy Studies (the Thatcherite, right-wing think tank behind this tweet) might have some ideas, though.
You want to leave it to them?
This whole thread is based on one-sentence analysis of an out-of-context quote from OBR by a right-wing lobby group.
I'm not saying it is a good thing that our political conversations are dictated this way... my original line was an attempt to suggest snarkily that it was a problem, and that maybe we shouldn't listen to tweets from lobbyists.
I dunno, my daughter’s nursery is full of different languages and cultures and everyone seems pretty chill with that. What social and political implications are you talking about?
I think mass immigration moves populations to the Right.
Native populations get defensive. Migrant populations can get more conservative as well. It creates a spiral.
Liberal democracy was built on nationalism. Having high diversity results in segregation and cultural conflicts.
That would be my impression.
It definitely moves the political needle to the right. The majority of migrants coming in are what we consider to be on the right. Especially when it comes to social issues like homophobia etc. You've seen the survey of Muslims (in the UK) attitudes to homosexuality, with the majority thinking it should still be outlawed
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-muslims-strong-sense-of-belonging-poll-homosexuality-sharia-law
One such potential problem with this is as follows. More and more Muslim MP's get elected as migration increases, altering the view of homosexuality in Parliament leading to it being banned again. It is very possible for regression to happen, look at our worker rights being stripped and the right to abortion going in America. It is concerning for sure ( this is just one example too, most migrants from other religions will similarly be at massive contrast to UK social values)
I guess it depends where you are. We’re in the city centre so it’s a very multicultural setting. I love it because I grew up in a small town that had like 1% non-white people. Didn’t stop one of my pals going down the right wing path, though.
Personally I think it’s media more than anything which shapes views. That guy watched a lot of YouTube and found a niche.
> Personally I think it’s media more than anything which shapes views.
You mean you are only not Right wing because of the media you consume?
Does this mean you want to police all media?
For instance removing all Right Wing Islamic content?
What an insane take to a hardly extensive comment at all. Are you a Twitter user by any chance?
Nah, I’m not right wing because I don’t like being told what to think. When I was young I read a lot of right wing newspapers since that’s all we had. Some react negatively to obvious plays on their emotions and some go with it. My buddy ended up getting into gamer spaces which became a hotbed of racism and a tunnel into alt right ideas. I meanwhile went on a different path. A persons ideology is created by their environment and their reaction to that environment. That’s why opinions change over time even if the con date similar.
I have no idea how a person would police all media because it’s so extensive. Even if it were possible I’d be against any sort of ideological policing because I don’t fancy which ideology they’d probably pick as the “correct” one.
As for right wing Islamic content I have no idea. I’ve never watched it.
> Are you a Twitter user by any chance?
No I think you might be making a lot of assumptions from someone disagreeing with you.
> Nah, I’m not right wing because I don’t like being told what to think.
Everyone on the Right can't think for themselves? Do you really mean that?
> Some react negatively to obvious plays on their emotions and some go with it
I mean all politics is ultimately emotions and passions. Logic has no desire.
> A persons ideology is created by their environment and their reaction to that environment. That’s why opinions change over time even if the con date similar.
Right but there is an interplay.
> I have no idea how a person would police all media because it’s so extensive.
I agree.
> Even if it were possible I’d be against any sort of ideological policing because I don’t fancy which ideology they’d probably pick as the “correct” one.
But you did just say people were being overly influenced by it. What are you suggesting be done?
This means you are for the market place of ideas?
> As for right wing Islamic content I have no idea. I’ve never watched it.
But you don't have any thoughts on it?
Perhaps, but look long term.
The British National Party used to be a thing, now it’s dead. The National Front used to be a thing earlier on, that’s dead.
Tory posters of “If you desire a coloured for your neighbour, vote Labour” are long gone. Race riots a la Oldham, Brixton, Toxteth all seem alien to us now.
The UK has had immigration for centuries. Comparing to previous decades, I’d say the British people are much *more* comfortable with immigration now than ever before.
> The UK has had immigration for centuries. Comparing to previous decades, I’d say the British people are much more comfortable with immigration now than ever before.
That's just not true though
I guess I don't entirely believe this version.
I think humans remain cultural animals and culture is a primary political drive. FPTP suppresses that forcing a lot of those votes into a question of economic equality or freedom.
We had Brexit and I think a lot of that was driven by a rejection of immigration and globalisation.
Even if people accept migration they still end up voting along ethnic lines.
I'm not saying it's everything I'm not advocating for the BNP. But the argument that the mass population is somehow post nationalist or post cultural is unrealistic to me.
We just had the Rochdale by election. I think that was heavily driven by an ethnic identity. That's voting along ethnic lines.
Something can be a net benefit and still have downsides though, so the Tweet doesn't actually contradict that conclusion.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the OBR modelling "here are the benefits of migration, and here are the drawbacks". Especially if it means that we can mitigate some of those costs.
I linked to the report, and encourage people to read it.
Summarising isn’t cherry picking. Positive net migration reduces net borrowing, even when additional spending is factored in.
Also I make no apologies for highlighting the graph. It’s cool.
That's based on an assumption of no need to increase public spending to account for the new arrivals. If you assume you'll spend nothing extra then almost by definition migration will always be a net benefit.
They do model this, it’s literally on page 127.
(Assuming higher migration, and so more public spending): “On this basis, in this scenario a portion of the higher receipts generated by the additional migrants is offset by higher spending, so that while migration still improves the public finances it does so by less than in the unadjusted DEL scenario, with borrowing £13.1 billion lower and debt 2.5 per cent of GDP lower by 2028-29
Of course the debt ratio is better as more heads increases GDP as a total (although per head it's declined so people aren't better off), but that only works if migrants don't need money spent on them. You've misunderstood what the figure means.
I think it’s worth pointing out that the government doesn’t do departmental budgets based on the number of people it needs to service, in the main and the report makes that clear. Eg the Home Office doesn’t increase the number of police officers in line with population changes, so if you add more people it just decreases the cost per person of the current police force.
It’s also part of the reason that Scotland’s budget seems to be going up quicker than the rest of the UK - their population growth has been much smaller than England’s, but because budgets aren’t based on the number of people they serve, that budget isn’t adjusted.
The government could do that, but it chooses not to for obvious political reasons.
It looks like they already assume a cost per person in the central forecast. Including migrants. They are therefore seeing what extra you have to spend under higher migration. £8.1bn all things being equal.
But they more per capita spending is likely lower as less likely to be older / younger. And that immigration improves the national finances.
At least on the short term.
How would you model this just on number of immigrants? Surely the type of immigrant is as important?
If importing 500k carers and their dependents on minimum wage, this is a huge cost to the country - they are net recipients from the state.
If important 500k bankers/software engineers earning 500k pa, they are net contributors and unlikely to use much in the way of public services.
And yet politicians on all sides have been happy to repeat the "migration is good for the economy" line for decades on the back of these flawed statistics. Unbelievable really and OBR proving they are not fit for purpose.
It’s too late. If 14 years of conservative government doesn’t lower immigration in a way that makes sense (ie not dumb shit like Rwanda) despite frothing at the mouth about it every election cycle, nothing will. All mainstream parties are complicit, and the only others talking about it are total chancers, headbangers and racists that you don’t want anywhere near power.
By breaking the argument down to a binary good/bad enriching/racist any sense of pragmatism is lost to ideology. Like most things, Immigration can be good if managed correctly and sustainably. Absolutely none of that has happened in the past few decades. I just wish the government was blamed for this and not people that LEGALLY (in most cases) arrived here. It’s not immigrants fault the system is a mess.
Better late than never that they realise that the engineers and brain surgeons they had been hoping to import have a tendency to go elsewhere. Can’t think how long I’ve been putting the case that immigrants are costing us more than they contribute
Indeed, and unless I'm missing something, that modelling says that (as it stands) migration is a net benefit to the economy.
It's right that it should be modelled to help inform the debate.
That doesn't seem to be what the quote is saying (from page 127 of [this document](https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/E03057758_OBR_EFO-March-2024_Web-AccessibleFinal.pdf) - worth reading in context).
> To explore the fiscal implications of the uncertainty around future migration levels we draw on the higher and lower migration scenarios, described in Box 2.3, in which net migration is 200,000 a year higher or lower than in our central forecast. These scenarios assume that extra migrants have the same levels of participation and hourly productivity as assumed in our central forecast. We then make different assumptions about how spending on public services reacts to levels of net migration.
They're not saying "we assume migration is a cost-free boost to the economy but might look at it now", they're saying that they have a bunch of modelling assumptions about how migration affects public finances (that they spend a page and a half going into), and that when doing their analysis for different levels of immigration they use the same modelling assumptions for immigration.
i.e. in their central forecast (assuming 350,000 people over the Autumn forecast) each immigrant has X impact on public finances, for a cumulative total of £7.4bn reduction in borrowing. In their high-immigration scenario they assume a 200,000 higher net figure, but they assume that each immigrant will still have the same X impact on public finances.
There's also a hefty paragraph talking about the limitations of this modelling.
There are similar sections in the Autumn and Spring 2023 reports, looking at how to model the impact of migration on public finances.
Immigration is a resource that with effective management can be a net positive for this country. We need to focus the debate on how we maximise value from our immigration policy so that we're getting the most out of this resource.
There are costs and benefits to immigration. Policy should focus on minimising the prior and maximising the latter. The headline total matters far less to me than having a coherent policy in place. Hopefully the OBR can produce numbers that feed into a much better informed cost/benefit analysis.
I find so much of the pearl-clutching over immigration from the Tories infuriating because they clearly understand that immigration has advantages behind closed doors given their permissive immigration policy but don't have the courage to defend this in public and choose instead to engage in cheap dogwhistle politics.
They realise it has benefits mostly for their paymasters, but also that many of their voters that pushed them to a big majority are the ones negatively impacted by it
Snapshot of _Robert Colvile: This is REALLY important long-term for the migration debate. @OBR_UK is no longer assuming (as it long has) that migration is a cost-free boost to the economy - actually trying to model impacts on public services. (p.127)_ : A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1765375616914727187) A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://twiiit.com/rcolvile/status/1765375616914727187/) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1765375616914727187) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1765375616914727187) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's actually unbelievable that it's taken this long for them to start doing something so fucking obvious
What's scaring me here (having not RTA) is the implication, whether correct or not, that we just *assumed* immigration was a net benefit and didn't actually have anything to base that assumption on.
It wasn't just assumed. People were berated, called xenophobic and racist for even questioning it. Economic impact isn't even the only issue surrounding mass immigration.
I believe it's been well known for years that EEA immigrants were always a net positive, while non EEA immigrants were the opposite. The reason being that non EEA immigrants had a lot of dependents while also working lower paid jobs, so they were more dependent on the state. There has been research about this going back long before the brexit vote. It was one of the major things people were arguing about at the time too as I remember. People were saying that EU migrants were contributing and that leaving would mean increasing immigration from non EU countries who didn't contribute as much. Which is exactly what happened. If we had stayed in and just reduced non EU migration (as we always had the power to do) the country would be in a much better position today.
Then again, there were Leave advocates who made the argument that the preferential treatment of EU immigrants (via freedom of movement) was "racist" and that leaving was necessary to allow easier immigration for people from non-EU countries. Of course, we could have done this also whilst remaining an EU member state - the only consequence would have been that any such non-EU immigrants to the UK wouldn't have freedom of movement within the EU until and unless they became British citizens.
>I believe it's been well known for years that EEA immigrants were always a net positive That was during the referendum and a bit before. Go back to the 2000's and early 2010's.
For starters, there is no article to read. This is a quote, taken out of context, from the 168-parge OBR Economic and fiscal outlook. It's also worth noting that when OBR talks about assumptions, those are statistical/modelling assumptions, not just "I'm making this up" assumptions. They *do* have things to base those assumptions on, they do have reasons to believe those assumptions are reasonable. But they are "assumptions" because they do not have the data to prove it conclusively.
> They do have things to base those assumptions on Doesn't mean those assumptions are remotely valid when facts change. Migration has changed beyond all recognition since 2015. Not only have we had a drop in ethnic Europeans, we have had a significant rise in _non-worker_ migration. The primary issue here is that their model for the last **7 years** has been wrong. There's no excuse for not correcting it 6 years ago.
> Doesn't mean those assumptions are remotely valid when facts change. The references for justifying their modelling assumptions include recent ONS data. So they have been adapting it as the facts change.
Yup. Sociology is a meme subject for a reason. Activism masked as a field of expertise
You see it also with the idea that a diverse team is strictly better than a non diverse team until it becomes something related to a specific minority demographic in which case having a team with "shared experiences with the community" is what's most importat. Like what are you even basing this on?
Look at our current government and cabinet. If ever you needed evidence that diversity is no guarantee of anything good there it is.
It's a great example of the worst kind of diversity too - just people with different skin colors but all went to private schools and all have the same ideology. Diversity of appearance but no diversity of ideas.
I suppose you would be the expert on conclusions not found in evidence.
If you read the OBR report, they estimate that higher migration leads to higher GDP, higher GDP per capita, lower borrowing and lower net debt to GDP....
I said this further down, but the ‘costs’ are virtually non-existent because the government doesn’t do departmental budget allocation based on the number of people. The NHS gets the same £xbn whether it is looking after 60 people or 60 million people. If you have 1m net migration or 10 net migration the cost of the NHS doesn’t change, it just provides a poorer service if it has to look after more people. The government is far happier doing it this way because it can say that it has given £xbn more for the police without saying why it needs more police (more people, more crime or whatever reason). The same is true of the health service - if we said it needs a 10% annual uplift because over 65s cost 8x as much as a working age population and the number of them has gone up dramatically because of the post war increase in the age people live to then it would become political and governments don’t want that. Similarly with housing immigrants or road repairs and cars or education and our desperate birth rates.
>I said this further down, but the ‘costs’ are virtually non-existent because the government doesn’t do departmental budget allocation based on the number of people. >The NHS gets the same £xbn whether it is looking after 60 people or 60 million people So the NHS budget per capita shrinks. Sounds like a cost to me.
It’s a cost to you and I, it’s not a cost to the government (it doesn’t increase their spending).
The OBR is looking at costs to the economy, not the government budget.
In the section highlighted in the tweet it is looking entirely at the costs to the overall government budget and that is what it is referring to.
But it does say net economic benefit.
Based on a whole load of assumptions mind you.
Yes but all economic forecasting is based on assumptions.
Yeah, cos it's astrology for men
The quote (in context) doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Tweet. The document itself has a few pages setting out how they model the impact on public finances of migration. Their conclusion is a net reduction in borrowing of around £7.4bn by 2028-29. There is nothing in that quote suggesting they're not making modelling assumptions about immigration...
Because they've just started to...
But that doesn't seem to be true. Looking [at the November version](https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/E03004355_November-Economic-and-Fiscal-Outlook_Web-Accessible.pdf), page 29, there is a whole box setting out some of their modelling assumptions around migration. There's a similar chunk around page 27 of the March 2023 report. They've set out some of their modelling assumptions in more detail in this new one, but that doesn't mean they weren't there in the earlier ones.
It's politics and nothing more. Various New Labour figures have openly admitted that they encouraged mass migration to bulk out their support base and to help with public services/pension payments. The Tories while spinning a much different public rhetoric have never been willing to make any tough decisions to reduce it back down to mid 90s levels. Meanwhile it all feeds into the growing housing crisis, depressing wages in certain industries and to a large extent Brexit. This decision is quite important and it's one of the first institutional shifts that is actually moving to a critical view of immigration, which will fuel the ongoing desire for change, even amongst swathes of the public you would not consider to be right wing.
> Various New Labour figures have openly admitted that they encouraged mass migration to bulk out their support base and to help with public services/pension payments. I'm not doubting you, but can you cite any examples?
[https://archive.ph/y4lZx](https://archive.ph/y4lZx)
That's not the same thing at all, unless I'm misreading the article or your comment a lot. Your comment makes the claim that they encouraged mass migration so as to "bulk out their support base" and "help with public services/pension payments". The second part, as I understand it, has never really been in question: the principle neoliberal argument in favour of migration is that it increases the number of people in work, which are a benefit to the economy and to the tax coffers. But the first part is very questionable, and it does not seem to be supported anywhere in the article you posted. The money quote is really this: > "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. > > "I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date." That is, they wanted to make the UK more multicultural, and by doing so demonstrate to the Right that diversity is a good thing. This is not the same thing as changing voting demographics. Indeed, when they talk about changing public perception on issues of diversity, they talk very explicitly about making right-wing arguments seem out of date - where they imply a change in how people vote, it is more about the success of immigration changing people's minds. You can disagree with them on how successful this plan was (it does not seem to have been very successful to me), but you can't draw out the conclusion that this was a deliberate attempt to import Labour voters, at least not from this particular article. Do you have any other examples that actually match what you're claiming?
This doesn't really square with the fact that net migration didn't rise appreciably under New Labour though. Non EU migration just went through the roof in '19 - which is what's really driving the figures now. Net EU migration is negative! E.g. This is an entirely Tory driven project, however much you want to link it to Labour. Check out fig 5 below: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/
It rose from basically zero in the 90s to over 200,000 most years in the noughties and 2010s Seems small now but it was well discussed at the time. The Tories utterly failed pledge to reduce it to 10k was as a result of concern at the time.
The "raw" net figure can be a little misleading as it includes British people (who used to make up a significant chunk of the migrant population) and emigrants (who aren't generally covered by Government policy). Non-British immigration was consistently around 100k through the 70s until the late 80s where it started to pick up (due to globalism etc.). It levelled off around 500k by 2005ish (after new controls by New Labour), and for the 2010s it was mostly in the 600k-800k range. 2020 saw the numbers drop a bit buy it was really in 2022 when the numbers started spiking, hitting 860k in YE March 2022 (first time the number had been over 800k), 970k in YE June 2022, and then 1,100k in YE September 2022.
Fair. Those numbers make sense. I was mostly correcting the idea that immigration was a tory thing. It was high under Blair, but he did it alongside incredible productivity growth (or GDP per capita as it's this subs new favourite thing)
What gets me is that the Tories know that to actually reduce migration they needed to invest heavily in education, training, child care etc for the citizens we have right now. They knew that when they promised it, when they campaigned to leave the EU and they know it now. We have control of our borders since leaving the EU but they haven't even begun to implement the changes required to make this country more self sufficient. 500,000 immigrants make those GDP figures look a little better than they actually are. They economy is growing but so is the population. Its smoke and mirrors. This isn't going to change with a Labour government because the roots of the problem are in our declining population. Labour is complicit in destroying the nuclear family and replacing it with state childcare. We pass polices that make divorce skyrocket, we plunge both parents into the workforce so that one of their entire wages can go to the state to raise their children for them. Labour aren't going to subsidies stay at home mothers or fathers. They aren't going to implement polices that make having a child actually viable for millions of couples.
>Labour is complicit in destroying the nuclear family and replacing it with state childcare. Yeah we are always discussing this in CLP meetings. Lol. >We pass polices that make divorce skyrocket Divorce has been falling for ages. What the fuck are you talking about?
> Divorce has been falling for ages. What the fuck are you talking about? These problems have been building for decades, half a century really. I'm actually referencing no fault divorce. >Yeah we are always discussing this in CLP meetings. Lol. You couldn't give a shit about stay at home mothers, fatherless families or life long marriage so you don't need the sarcasm to make the point that it's never a topic for discussion. Lol.
It's not just unbelievable, it's a crime against the nation to have so radically altered it for reasons that are completely disjointed from the actual effect.
People seem to just be arguing about whether immigration is good or bad, and the the OBR should have said this before. But isn't it possible that it was a net benefit economically, up to a certain number and once jobs had been filled, but then becomes a net negative? We've been receiving much greater numbers of migrants in the last few years, I'm not surprised if the same calculations we used previously now show a different result.
I think the issue is that whether or not it was a positive or negative historically, it was not checked as the costs were not modelled. It could be though that the current drain is because the UK has turned from a high-wage to low-wage country. Companies today use the UK like they did India decades ago--just look at the number of call centres being set up in the UK these days.
> I think the issue is that whether or not it was a positive or negative historically, it was not checked as the costs were not modelled. Right, OK I didn't know that. I've seen some data here over the years that seemed to suggest a net benefit, but if the OBR wasn't even modeling it then that does seem like quite the omission.
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It is and isn’t harsh, it works well, home remittances are in the billions and people don5,10,25 years then retire having funded the entire family though school, bought farms and shops etc. There’s just almost no route to citizenship and visas are easily issued, monitored and overstays and illegal visits are punished harshly and fined. We just lack the political will to set up a system at all
> Temporary visas for unskilled migrants are a great idea Given that a Conservative government with a large majority and which is frequently criticised for being "far right" is more or less completely unable to deport people who have had their asylum claims rejected and in some cases have committed significant crimes here, the idea that any visa could be truly "temporary" is quite unworkable in practice. A very high percentage of migrants with temporary visas would never actually leave.
I was thinking of something similar that could be a win win for all involved. Offer young people from Commonwealth nations the chance to move here for 5 years, with the offer that we’ll pay for their flight here at the start and end plus one trip home to be taken at their choice during their stay. Guarantee them a job in a sector we have shortages in (say, care), and a cash bonus at the end of their stay when they return home. We receive some hard working people that alleviate our labour shortages. They get training, experience living in another country, and money. Their home country gets a direct cash boost to their economy when those people use their bonus and savings to attend further education, start a business, pay off debts, etc etc etc, plus a more educated and skilled population. I know it’s a bit reductive, but it feels like something that could work.
Effectively, what we do with the Gurkhas? They join up to the UK military, and then after their term of service they go home to Nepal with a high level of training in a variety of areas, plus a load of cash. Which is why Nepal doesn't mind too much, and hasn't blocked them from serving in a foreign military.
Gulf states do that, the employer pays a bonus of one months salary for every year you stay to be paid when you leave. For some it’s a hefty lump sum in the home country to take back after years of saving up, educating kids and so on. And it’s not just manual labour. Filipino mid level management staff will fund multiple homes and families, university for their kids and in a generation change their entire families futures. The Filipino nurses here do exactly the same thing !
The model works very well because you can mistreat those workers and they're not going to do anything about it for fear of losing their visa. We could do the same in the UK actually. London is already crowded so if anyone from the north wants to come and work here, they're granted a temporary visa but no rights to vote or public services and must return to whence they came when their visa expires.
Totally. It makes much more sense to reimplement the 0.7%gdp baseline foreign aid budget and for it to rise in relation to growth, so the UK can invest in other people's futures across borders. That way you open a route to citizenship through altruism, and it stops us dipping into developing countries labour markets for care workers and pot hole fillers, which should be entry level work for young UK citizens who wish to commit to the healthcare and infrastructure jobs of the future. The current situation is pleasing no one at the moment and not fully benefitting people who want to better their lives. It's also bleeding money from the national economy and local communities because most of the paycheques is sent back to home nation states and not staying in the UK, whereas helping developing countries become more stable can ensure every pound earned stays in the UK and is spent multiple times in the same community.
The 100,000 care workers are typically going to be young people who will be paying tax for the next forty years, covering the pensions of old Brits and doing the work that needs to be done.
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this is really interesting, can you please point me in the right direction for where i can read more about the figure needed to break even on public services used. i’ve tried googling but can’t find any thing substantive
I assume that £38k figure is for the average person though? If you're talking about migrants who work here for 5 years and then return home then I'd imagine it'd be a lot lower, you haven't had to pay for their education, I believe they need to pay a surcharge to use the NHS and you won't need to pay their pension. Presumably care workers will never actually "break even" anyway because their entire wage comes from the public coffer which illustrates why thinking in terms of taxes paid is not always helpful.
I guess if depends if 100,000 care workers bring 100,000 dependents though.
Expect of course these tend to be minimum wage jobs, and so cost us far more than they pay in.
Obviously the modelling should be based on expected outcomes by country of origin if it weren't too politically incorrect to state the obvious truth that Hong Kongers and Kashmiris are not equal contributors.
Kashmiris have made quite an influence in British culture, be it in terms of food, politics or local businesses.
I don't dispute that.
Surely it's still good for employers and the migrants? Just not good for tax payers or natives. EDIT not as good as previously presented?
Simple solution to this is to just do away with the concept of 'natives'
How does that work though? What term should people use?
They say things like "we've always been a nation of immigrants"
So in other words, lie. Go to hell.
Pretty messed up to divorce people’s ethnic groups/identity and cultures from their land by not recognising their status as NE group…
Most migrants also pay tax and consume fewer services as they tend to be younger. Any study I’ve seen has said they are a net good in terms of tax paid to service utilised. Maybe this one will find something else. Quite likely it’ll find the same.
Seems like the document is only confirming that migrants are not cost free but they are still a net benefit. Though that must depend on who they are. I don't think refugees are on average a net benefit, for example. Still think the main issue is culture. EDIT the economic question needs lot of caveats
It's widely known that migrants from Western nations, much of the other EU and far East Asia tend to be net benefits in the short term. The issue are migrants from Africa and parts of South Asia in particular. In 2021 for example, less than 35% of Somalis in the UK were employed.
Yes it needs a lot of caveats.
That's not down to the migrants, is due to migrant selection and driver for why they came here and how and what visas. Pakistanis are amongst the highest earning ethnic groups in the USA, usually third highest or so and earning more than Chinese, Japanese, Korean, European and even British expats but are right at the bottom here. Have you never wondered why?
Costs a lot to move to the US, so you are already selecting for the higher educated and wealthier individuals who can afford to do that in the first place I assume.
That they don't ever consider the forward costs of pensions the forward costs of healthcare the increased costs of the justice system (crime is a young male thing) increased military spending costs (GDP linked) increased housing demand and hence socialised costs makes all these reports rather dodgy.
They do seem questionable.
It's good for taxpayers. More taxpayers, proportionally fewer of them benefiting from certain kinds of public spending. Reduces net public sector borrowing.
How are you so sure they're paying tax.
This is entirely true, and also - because of the topic and the readers it attracts - you'll get downvoted for pointing it out.
If it's good for the employer then for public sector roles like care workers it would follow that it'd be good for the tax payer since we are the employers in effect.
So like what else weren't they taking into account? People hold up the OBR forecasts as some indisputable gospel when its anything but.
It's interesting that post Brexit when a lot of the retail and restaurant workers went home, places were increasing wages to get British nationals to work there The wage suppression is real and always has been.
I just *love* tweets that pull out choice quotes from a report, and then don’t link to the report. [Here’s the actual report](https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/E03057758_OBR_EFO-March-2024_Web-AccessibleFinal.pdf). Page 127 as he says. Punchline is: Even once you factor in public service costs, migration is a huge financial net benefit for the country. There’s a cool graph on p127 showing that the more net migration we have, the better the public finances get.
It also states the following:. The fiscal impacts of migration are likely to become less beneficial over time, reflecting that after a minimum of 5-years, migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain andtherefore become eligible for welfare benefits. If migrants stay in the UK into older age, there would also be greater pressures on pensions and health spending and lower tax revenues as they retire. Which is less rosy And of course, migration covers all people, from both developed countries and developing countries. Most concern is over immigration from developing countries and the impact of that, not people from Ireland or Sweden coming to work in high paid jobs.
The absence of forward costs for pensions and health is such a con.
"less beneficial" i.e. not as good, but not bad either
No. >The fiscal impacts of migration are likely to become less beneficial over time, reflecting that after a minimum of 5-years, migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain and therefore become eligible for welfare benefits. If migrants stay in the UK into older age, there would also be greater pressures on pensions and health spending and lower tax revenues as they retire. They are making a case for having temporary work visas clear imo
It does indeed say that. What is the modelling for the social and political impact of having high immigration?
And where's the modelling for the financial impact of the social and political impact? It's hard to have a functioning, productive economy when your workforce has divided itself into a dozen essentially separate societies based on ethnoreligious identities.
> What is the modelling for the social and political impact of having high immigration? That's not really something we should expect the OBR to look into. The Centre for Policy Studies (the Thatcherite, right-wing think tank behind this tweet) might have some ideas, though.
> That's not really something we should expect the OBR to look into. True. I think that is a short coming of economic only analysis. > The Centre for Policy Studies (the Thatcherite, right-wing think tank behind this tweet) might have some ideas, though. You want to leave it to them?
> You want to leave it to them? The whole basis of this thread is that we're leaving analysis to them...
I thought we were leaving economic analysis to the OBR? Who are we leaving the rest of analysis to?
Quangos and thinktanks. The same people we leave our policymaking to.
This whole thread is based on one-sentence analysis of an out-of-context quote from OBR by a right-wing lobby group. I'm not saying it is a good thing that our political conversations are dictated this way... my original line was an attempt to suggest snarkily that it was a problem, and that maybe we shouldn't listen to tweets from lobbyists.
I dunno, my daughter’s nursery is full of different languages and cultures and everyone seems pretty chill with that. What social and political implications are you talking about?
I think mass immigration moves populations to the Right. Native populations get defensive. Migrant populations can get more conservative as well. It creates a spiral. Liberal democracy was built on nationalism. Having high diversity results in segregation and cultural conflicts. That would be my impression.
It definitely moves the political needle to the right. The majority of migrants coming in are what we consider to be on the right. Especially when it comes to social issues like homophobia etc. You've seen the survey of Muslims (in the UK) attitudes to homosexuality, with the majority thinking it should still be outlawed https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-muslims-strong-sense-of-belonging-poll-homosexuality-sharia-law One such potential problem with this is as follows. More and more Muslim MP's get elected as migration increases, altering the view of homosexuality in Parliament leading to it being banned again. It is very possible for regression to happen, look at our worker rights being stripped and the right to abortion going in America. It is concerning for sure ( this is just one example too, most migrants from other religions will similarly be at massive contrast to UK social values)
I guess it depends where you are. We’re in the city centre so it’s a very multicultural setting. I love it because I grew up in a small town that had like 1% non-white people. Didn’t stop one of my pals going down the right wing path, though. Personally I think it’s media more than anything which shapes views. That guy watched a lot of YouTube and found a niche.
> Personally I think it’s media more than anything which shapes views. You mean you are only not Right wing because of the media you consume? Does this mean you want to police all media? For instance removing all Right Wing Islamic content?
What an insane take to a hardly extensive comment at all. Are you a Twitter user by any chance? Nah, I’m not right wing because I don’t like being told what to think. When I was young I read a lot of right wing newspapers since that’s all we had. Some react negatively to obvious plays on their emotions and some go with it. My buddy ended up getting into gamer spaces which became a hotbed of racism and a tunnel into alt right ideas. I meanwhile went on a different path. A persons ideology is created by their environment and their reaction to that environment. That’s why opinions change over time even if the con date similar. I have no idea how a person would police all media because it’s so extensive. Even if it were possible I’d be against any sort of ideological policing because I don’t fancy which ideology they’d probably pick as the “correct” one. As for right wing Islamic content I have no idea. I’ve never watched it.
> Are you a Twitter user by any chance? No I think you might be making a lot of assumptions from someone disagreeing with you. > Nah, I’m not right wing because I don’t like being told what to think. Everyone on the Right can't think for themselves? Do you really mean that? > Some react negatively to obvious plays on their emotions and some go with it I mean all politics is ultimately emotions and passions. Logic has no desire. > A persons ideology is created by their environment and their reaction to that environment. That’s why opinions change over time even if the con date similar. Right but there is an interplay. > I have no idea how a person would police all media because it’s so extensive. I agree. > Even if it were possible I’d be against any sort of ideological policing because I don’t fancy which ideology they’d probably pick as the “correct” one. But you did just say people were being overly influenced by it. What are you suggesting be done? This means you are for the market place of ideas? > As for right wing Islamic content I have no idea. I’ve never watched it. But you don't have any thoughts on it?
You ask a lot of questions and it’s not very charismatic. I have no interest in a Socratic dialogue right now
ok then but don't say I wasn't trying to engage
Perhaps, but look long term. The British National Party used to be a thing, now it’s dead. The National Front used to be a thing earlier on, that’s dead. Tory posters of “If you desire a coloured for your neighbour, vote Labour” are long gone. Race riots a la Oldham, Brixton, Toxteth all seem alien to us now. The UK has had immigration for centuries. Comparing to previous decades, I’d say the British people are much *more* comfortable with immigration now than ever before.
> The UK has had immigration for centuries. Comparing to previous decades, I’d say the British people are much more comfortable with immigration now than ever before. That's just not true though
I guess I don't entirely believe this version. I think humans remain cultural animals and culture is a primary political drive. FPTP suppresses that forcing a lot of those votes into a question of economic equality or freedom. We had Brexit and I think a lot of that was driven by a rejection of immigration and globalisation. Even if people accept migration they still end up voting along ethnic lines. I'm not saying it's everything I'm not advocating for the BNP. But the argument that the mass population is somehow post nationalist or post cultural is unrealistic to me. We just had the Rochdale by election. I think that was heavily driven by an ethnic identity. That's voting along ethnic lines.
Something can be a net benefit and still have downsides though, so the Tweet doesn't actually contradict that conclusion. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the OBR modelling "here are the benefits of migration, and here are the drawbacks". Especially if it means that we can mitigate some of those costs.
Imagine calling out choice quotes, then going ahead and cherry picking the parts you like yourself.
I linked to the report, and encourage people to read it. Summarising isn’t cherry picking. Positive net migration reduces net borrowing, even when additional spending is factored in. Also I make no apologies for highlighting the graph. It’s cool.
Cool graph in question: [https://imgur.com/a/gyEAFdi](https://imgur.com/a/gyEAFdi)
That's based on an assumption of no need to increase public spending to account for the new arrivals. If you assume you'll spend nothing extra then almost by definition migration will always be a net benefit.
They do model this, it’s literally on page 127. (Assuming higher migration, and so more public spending): “On this basis, in this scenario a portion of the higher receipts generated by the additional migrants is offset by higher spending, so that while migration still improves the public finances it does so by less than in the unadjusted DEL scenario, with borrowing £13.1 billion lower and debt 2.5 per cent of GDP lower by 2028-29
Of course the debt ratio is better as more heads increases GDP as a total (although per head it's declined so people aren't better off), but that only works if migrants don't need money spent on them. You've misunderstood what the figure means.
I think it’s worth pointing out that the government doesn’t do departmental budgets based on the number of people it needs to service, in the main and the report makes that clear. Eg the Home Office doesn’t increase the number of police officers in line with population changes, so if you add more people it just decreases the cost per person of the current police force. It’s also part of the reason that Scotland’s budget seems to be going up quicker than the rest of the UK - their population growth has been much smaller than England’s, but because budgets aren’t based on the number of people they serve, that budget isn’t adjusted. The government could do that, but it chooses not to for obvious political reasons.
Lol. Nooooo not those conclusions!
Having visited most years for the last 20, the cultural deterioration has been shocking to watch.
Are they also factoring in increased housing demand causing prices to go up and taking away people's spending power?
It looks like they already assume a cost per person in the central forecast. Including migrants. They are therefore seeing what extra you have to spend under higher migration. £8.1bn all things being equal. But they more per capita spending is likely lower as less likely to be older / younger. And that immigration improves the national finances. At least on the short term.
How would you model this just on number of immigrants? Surely the type of immigrant is as important? If importing 500k carers and their dependents on minimum wage, this is a huge cost to the country - they are net recipients from the state. If important 500k bankers/software engineers earning 500k pa, they are net contributors and unlikely to use much in the way of public services.
Interesting as Im sure the IFS has models based on skill level / age etc and its usually a net positive (including impact to public services).
They do, and it does: https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1765393152691642853
And yet politicians on all sides have been happy to repeat the "migration is good for the economy" line for decades on the back of these flawed statistics. Unbelievable really and OBR proving they are not fit for purpose.
It’s too late. If 14 years of conservative government doesn’t lower immigration in a way that makes sense (ie not dumb shit like Rwanda) despite frothing at the mouth about it every election cycle, nothing will. All mainstream parties are complicit, and the only others talking about it are total chancers, headbangers and racists that you don’t want anywhere near power. By breaking the argument down to a binary good/bad enriching/racist any sense of pragmatism is lost to ideology. Like most things, Immigration can be good if managed correctly and sustainably. Absolutely none of that has happened in the past few decades. I just wish the government was blamed for this and not people that LEGALLY (in most cases) arrived here. It’s not immigrants fault the system is a mess.
How many people in here are blaming the migrants? This is a deflection I see regularly.
Better late than never that they realise that the engineers and brain surgeons they had been hoping to import have a tendency to go elsewhere. Can’t think how long I’ve been putting the case that immigrants are costing us more than they contribute
Indeed, and unless I'm missing something, that modelling says that (as it stands) migration is a net benefit to the economy. It's right that it should be modelled to help inform the debate.
That doesn't seem to be what the quote is saying (from page 127 of [this document](https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/E03057758_OBR_EFO-March-2024_Web-AccessibleFinal.pdf) - worth reading in context). > To explore the fiscal implications of the uncertainty around future migration levels we draw on the higher and lower migration scenarios, described in Box 2.3, in which net migration is 200,000 a year higher or lower than in our central forecast. These scenarios assume that extra migrants have the same levels of participation and hourly productivity as assumed in our central forecast. We then make different assumptions about how spending on public services reacts to levels of net migration. They're not saying "we assume migration is a cost-free boost to the economy but might look at it now", they're saying that they have a bunch of modelling assumptions about how migration affects public finances (that they spend a page and a half going into), and that when doing their analysis for different levels of immigration they use the same modelling assumptions for immigration. i.e. in their central forecast (assuming 350,000 people over the Autumn forecast) each immigrant has X impact on public finances, for a cumulative total of £7.4bn reduction in borrowing. In their high-immigration scenario they assume a 200,000 higher net figure, but they assume that each immigrant will still have the same X impact on public finances. There's also a hefty paragraph talking about the limitations of this modelling. There are similar sections in the Autumn and Spring 2023 reports, looking at how to model the impact of migration on public finances.
Immigration is a resource that with effective management can be a net positive for this country. We need to focus the debate on how we maximise value from our immigration policy so that we're getting the most out of this resource. There are costs and benefits to immigration. Policy should focus on minimising the prior and maximising the latter. The headline total matters far less to me than having a coherent policy in place. Hopefully the OBR can produce numbers that feed into a much better informed cost/benefit analysis. I find so much of the pearl-clutching over immigration from the Tories infuriating because they clearly understand that immigration has advantages behind closed doors given their permissive immigration policy but don't have the courage to defend this in public and choose instead to engage in cheap dogwhistle politics.
They realise it has benefits mostly for their paymasters, but also that many of their voters that pushed them to a big majority are the ones negatively impacted by it
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Yes, and what it shows is that migration is good for public finances even after the additional cost to public services is factored in.