Links between austerity and immigration, and the power of information

This discussion by Roger Scully about why people in the Welsh Valleys voted Leave is depressing although not surprising. In essence it is immigration, bolstered by local stories of Polish people coming into communities and reducing wages. I doubt if quoting econometric studies about how little immigration influences wages would make much difference to these attitudes (although that is no excuse for people in authority who should know better ignoring these studies). I think it is attitudes like this, in places unused to immigration partly because work is not plentiful, that makes some politicians say that arguing in favour of immigration is ‘politically impossible’.

This is the first link between immigration and austerity I want to draw. The Labour party before 2015 had also decided that attacking austerity was politically impossible: ‘the argument had been lost’. Focus groups told them that people had become convinced that the government should tighten its belt because governments were just like households. The mistake here, as I wrote many times, was to assume attitudes were fixed rather than contextual. I was right: austerity is no longer a vote winner. [1]

Why might attitudes to immigration change? I strongly suspect that anti-immigration attitudes, along with suspicion about benefit claimants, become stronger in bad times. When real wages are rising it is difficult to fire people up with arguments that they would have risen even faster in the absence of immigration. But when real wages are falling, as they have been in the UK in an unprecedented way over the last decade, it is much easier to blame outsiders. Equally when public services deteriorate it is easy to blame newcomers.

It is wrong to think that this only happens among working class, left behind communities. Catalonia is a relatively rich part of Spain, and there has always been resentment about this area ‘subsidising’ the rest of the country. But it is very noticeable how support for pro-independence parties increased sharply as Spain turned to austerity, although that could also be a reaction to corruption scandals.

Here is the second link between immigration attitudes and austerity. Austerity has contributed to the slow growth in real wages and is the main cause of deteriorating public services, but often outsiders are easier to blame.

This is particularly true when it is in the interests of the governing political party and its supporters in the press to deflect criticism of austerity by pretending immigration is the real cause of people's woes. This is the third link between austerity and immigration, and it is one deliberately created and encouraged by right wing political parties. In this way Brexit has its own self-reinforcing dynamic. People vote for it because of immigration, its prospect leads to falling real wages as sterling falls and the economy falters, which adds to bad times and anti-immigrant attitudes.

If all this seems very pessimistic, it shouldn’t be. While the right will almost certainly continue to play the anti-immigration card in the short term, because they have few other cards to play, they can be opposed by a left that makes the case for immigration. As just as views on austerity have clearly changed, so can views on immigration. particularly once hard times come to an end.

However it is a mistake to imagine it is all about economics, or even ‘culture’. One of the unfortunate consequences of the culture vs economics debate over populism is the implication that one way or another views are deterministic, and the only issue is what kind of determinism. The reason I go on about the media so much is that information matters a lot too. Although people may be anti-immigration because they have xenophobic tendencies which are reinforced when times are bad, they can also be anti-immigration because they have poor information, or worse still have been fed deliberately misleading facts.

In my intray of studies to write about for some time has been this paper by Alexis Grigorieff, Christopher Roth and Diego Ubfal. (Sam Bowman reminded me it was there from this piece.) It is well known that people tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their country. This international experiment showed that when people were given the correct information, a significant number changed their views. What is more, this change of view was permanent rather than temporary. Here is a VoxEU post about an experiment from Japan pointing in the same direction.

As well as emphasising simple information like this, politicians should expose the kind of tricks people promoting tougher controls on immigration play. The public tends to be receptive to the idea that it is beneficial for the economy to have immigrants with important skills, so they switch to calling for controls on low paid, low skilled workers. As Jonathan Portes demonstrates, that in practice can involve plenty of pretty skilled workers. The trick for pro-immigration politicians is to ask which occupations do we want to exclude: nurses, care workers, construction workers, primary school teachers, chefs? With UK unemployment relatively low, there are not many jobs where employers are not complaining of shortages.

Of course most people want to stop immigrants coming here and claiming unemployment benefit. This is why newspapers keep playing the trick of talking about the large number of migrants ‘who are not employed’, conveniently forgetting to mention that this includes people like mothers looking after children. In reality unemployment among EU immigrants is below that among the native population. In addition, we can already deport EU immigrants that remain unemployed under EU law if the government could be bothered to do so.

For politicians who do want to start making the case for immigration, the place I would start is public services. Few economists would dispute that immigrants pay more in tax than they take out in using public services. Yet most of the public believe the opposite. In this post entitled ‘Is Austerity to blame for Brexit’ I show a poll where the biggest reason people give for EU immigration being bad is its impact on the NHS. Getting the true information out there will have a big effect. Just as public attitudes to austerity can change, so can they over immigration, but only if politicians on the left start getting the facts out there.

[1] To be fair, whether I would have been right in 2014/15 if Labour had taken a clear anti-austerity line we do not know.   

Brexit and neoliberalism

In a recent post I talked about the “neoliberal fantasists who voted Leave”. Here is Ryan Bourne from the influential Institute of Economic Affairs. He notes that “the mood music from the post-referendum Conservative party — with former Remain backers in No 10 and the Home Office overcompensating with a caricatured view of what voters want — is not a good sign for the short-term”. But he still believes that Brexit can be transformed into some kind of neoliberal wet dream, with a bonfire of regulations and a unilateral abolition of UK tariffs on trade.

The economics of this was always fantasy, as John Van Reenen and colleagues painstakingly demonstrate here, but it also seems politically naive. After all the Leave campaign was a success largely because it promised to control immigration as a result of leaving the EU, controls which are distinctly anti-neoliberal. Controlling immigration is not a caricature of what the majority of Leave voters wanted, but instead what most were voting for. It does seem naive to believe that a government after Brexit would try and quietly forget about this, particularly when led by someone who had spent the previous 6 years trying and failing to control immigration. It also seems naive to imagine that this turn against neoliberalism would not go beyond immigration.

And yet, the ‘southern strategy’ was highly successful for the Republican party in the US. This combined an economic policy that favoured finance and corporates, increased inequality and free markets with an identity politics that appealed to race, religion and cultural identity. (I could perhaps add geographical identity here as well: see this article by David Wong.) Perhaps the UK party of the right could follow a similar course, using immigration as a substitute (and for some a proxy) for race, whilst pursuing an otherwise neoliberal agenda?

Is this what the Conservative party tried to do under Cameron and Osborne? Actually I think that is the wrong question, for reasons I will come to shortly. In terms of what the Coalition government actually did, Jonathan Portes summarises it thus:

“The promise to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands” was generally regarded by immigration policy experts as unachievable, or achievable only at an economic cost no sensible government was willing to pay. In practice, the latter course was never tested: resistance from within government from the Department of Business, supported to a greater or lesser extent by the Treasury, meant that even non-EU migration was only reduced very substantially for non-HE students; for most other routes it has stabilised. Non-EU net migration is currently about 150,000 a year, slightly higher than EU net migration

This does not mean the policy changes had no impact: the increase in the regulatory burden on business and the education sector has been substantial, and has certainly resulted in some reduction in skilled and student migration. The most damaging single decision was probably the closing of the Post-Study Work Route. However, overall, any economic damage was considerably mitigated.”

Of course that resistance from the Department of Business came from a Liberal Democrat, Vince Cable, and not a Conservative. Which leaves open the possibility that the economic damage from attempts to hit the immigration target might have been greater if just the Conservatives had been in power. So it is not clear that the Conservative focus on immigration was just so they could win elections with zero cost to their more neoliberal objectives. It still remains the case that, just as Trump exposed the flaw in the Republican’s southern strategy, so Brexit was the critical flaw in Cameron’s emphasis on the problem of immigration and his failure to meet his own targets.

I said it was the wrong question, because I think in this case it was not a political party that was calling the shots but a section of the print media: the right wing tabloids. As Andy Beckett writes in this comprehensive history of this part of the UK media:

“[Brexit] was an outcome for which the tabloids had campaigned doggedly for decades, but never more intensely – or with less factual scrupulousness – than this spring and summer, when the front pages of the Sun, Mail and Express bellowed for Brexit, talking up Britain’s prospects afterwards, in deafening unison, day after day. Two days before the referendum, the Sun gave over its first 10 pages to pro-Brexit coverage.”

And the principle means the tabloids used to obtain this result was the “endless xenophobic nudges of its immigration coverage.” Of course these newspapers will say they were just expressing their readers fears, but when they are reduced to making up stories to encourage this fear any claim to innocence becomes very hollow. Fueling anti-immigration feeling was their version of a southern strategy, and Brexit saw its culmination.

Having achieved this objective, will the tabloids start ignoring the immigration issue, enabling the greater immigration and zero tariffs that Mr. Bourne desires? Or will the influence of these tabloids, perhaps now greater than it has ever been, start to fade away? To the extent that these seem silly questions reveals the political naivety of the neoliberal Leavers. It is highly unlikely that Theresa May will become squeamish about damaging business through immigration controls to enable her to meet her immigration target. The best hope of those who do not want to go down this path is that, as Jonathan Portes expects, the Brexit vote itself starts to reduce the immigration numbers.

Brexit will also put other pressures on May which are likely to move her away from neoliberal policies, as the assurances given to Nissan indicate. As Bourne writes in a recent blog: “if this is a commitment to permanent or semi-permanent support to almost ‘make up for’ changed trade arrangements then it is hugely misguided.” Misguided it may be, but that is the direction the politics will push a Prime Minister determined to be seen as making a success of Brexit. Just as Republican’s have agonised over how to deal with Donald Trump, so it will become clear to UK neoliberals the damage to their cause that Brexit will generate.

Why we must have a second referendum

I think many people who argue against a second referendum have not taken on board the scale of the difference between the various Brexit options. We could retain access to the single market and free movement of labour (the Norway option). Or we could just cut a trade deal with the EU, do nothing on services, and end free movement (the Canada option). Or other things in between. In economic terms the Norway option is much closer to EU membership than it is to some of the alternative forms of Brexit.

Perhaps an analogy is that you decide one day that it is time to move house, as you are really bored with your current property and aggravated by its various imperfections [1]. That decision is akin to the Brexit vote. But you have no idea where you are going to move to. It could just be a local move to a similar style property, or it could be to somewhere in another part of the country where property is cheaper but where you would have to find new friends and a new job.

The Brexit vote in practice is the green light to explore what possible alternatives are available. Having looked at the various alternatives, you may decide that you do indeed want to move. Or alternatively you may realise that your current house is not so bad after all, and is superior in many ways to the best available alternative, and so you decide to stay. To deny a second referendum is a bit like saying that once you have decided to move you cannot go back on that decision, no matter what the alternatives turn out to be. A slightly closer analogy is that you decide to move house, but then you get someone else to choose the best new house for you, and you have to accept the choice they come up with even if you think it is inferior to your current house..

So the key arguments for a second referendum are that the alternative to EU membership was not specified in the first referendum (they were also unknown at the time, and depend on what can be negotiated from the EU), and that these alternatives are very different from each other. I cannot see the logic in saying people should have a direct say on whether to leave the EU, but no direct say on what to leave it for. [2]

[1] I choose an analogy involving an individual rather than a group or society as a whole to avoid the (well known to economists) problems associated with non-transitive preferences for groups of individuals: see Jonathan Portes here.

[2] Note that I make no reference to voters being lied to in the first referendum. My argument still holds even if Leave had been completely honest.  

Brexit, immigration and £100

With so many heavyweights, from Barack Obama to Mark Carney, saying that we will be worse off with Brexit, why are the polls still neck and neck? There seem to me two reasonable explanations: that the tabloid media have a strong influence, and that immigration is a big issue among voters. But perhaps the two are connected, for reasons that will become clear.

It is a well known result that worries about immigration tend to be greatest in areas where there is little immigration. In areas where there are a high proportion of migrants, like London, UKIP do rather poorly. For most, immigration is not a problem that is facing them directly, but rather an issue they feel is facing the country.

For some this concern about immigration is cultural, but for others it is economic. But if it is economic, on what is this concern based? All too often I come across arguments that make simple economic errors. Like more migrants put greater pressure on public services. Study after study suggest exactly the opposite: because migrants tend to be young adults who work, they pay more in taxes and take less advantage of public services or benefits than the average non-migrant. To his great credit, when Jonathan Portes (from the non-aligned research institute NIESR) was confronted in this Newsnight debate by nonsense from someone from the Centre for Policy Studies (right wing think tank, rated D for funding openness), he did not attempt to win the argument by quoting statistics or academic studies, but by trying to show why what he was saying made common sense once you explain it.

Sometimes it is simply false correlations: austerity has put pressure on public services and the recession and productivity slowdown has held back real wages, but both have happened at a time of high immigration. For a very good and simple explanation of the facts about recent EU immigration, see this LSE analysis. (For those that can access it, here is a similar take from Gemma Tetlow at the FT.) The only area where there might be some negative effect from migration is on the wages of unskilled labour, but even where a negative impact is found it seems to be small as the chart in this post shows. As Portes suggests, this negative impact could be wiped out by positive effects from higher growth and better public finances. 

In some sense what we have is very similar to the austerity problem, with the combination of simplistic ideas and non-causal association. It feels right that governments should tighten their belts when households are doing the same, and the ‘clearing up the mess’ idea is reinforced because the deficit went up when Labour was in power. With both austerity and immigration we have a visual media that normally makes no attempt to ‘educate and inform’, and a tabloid media that actively reinforces these mistakes. (If I open the MailOnline as I write this, here is the top story.) We have a governing party that does the same, and in the past an opposition that was reluctant to say that immigration benefits the economy as a whole. [1]

So the referendum debate amounts to economics versus immigration. But here is a revealing bit of information from the YouGov analysis cited earlier.

“We recently conducted an experiment in which we asked people to imagine how they would vote if they knew Brexit would make them just £100 worse off per year. This instantly changed a neck-and-neck result to a 12 point victory for ‘Remain’. The effect is even stronger among undecided voters, who flip 18 points from veering towards ‘Leave’ to veering strongly towards ‘Remain’ in this scenario.”

It is of course a classic technique economists use to quantify how strongly people feel about an issue, and it suggests the immigration concern is not worth that much to many people. Given that the economic assessments of the costs of Brexit are of the order of at least 10 times £100 a year, the economic argument is key. Which is why it is worrying that the BBC seem to ignore the consensus among academic economists, as expressed in the letter from the 196 (who cannot be accused of being part of the establishment) but instead find time to publish a 'fact check' that is, to put it politely, misleading.

[1] Labour’s line should be (and occasionally is) to note that recent immigration from the EU has benefited the economy, but not every part of the economy, and government needs to be active in spreading the benefits.

Is evidence based policy left wing?

The answer in principle is of course not. In practice, not so clear. This is something I talked about back in October 2013, and there are no signs that things are getting better. Alex Marsh makes the same point in the context of the latest budget. This antagonism to ‘unhelpful’ evidence is out there in plain sight for all to see in the UK government’s current attempt to deny academics in receipt of public funding the ability to talk about the policy implications of their work. I talked about this in terms of the misuse of the term ‘public money’ a few weeks ago, but it is also a pretty direct attempt to suppress unhelpful advice. (Note that ministers have the power under this proposed legislation to revoke this ban in individual cases, presumably when evidence is ‘helpful’ - to them.)

Of course we are not talking about a hostility to evidence based policy by everyone on the right on all occasions. In a THE article by Ben Goldacre, where he also highlights the dangers of the government’s proposed legislation, he details the extent to which he is talking to ministers about evidence based policy. But that interest does not seem to extend to big macro decisions. I was reminded in reading this about what I regard as a triumph of evidence based policy making in my own area: the UK Treasury analysis of Euro entry in 2003. (Disclaimer: my little contribution is the fourth one down in the picture of the reports.) Why didn’t this government do something similar for both the Scottish referendum and the EU referendum?

Everytime I mention the 2003 exercise someone responds that it was just a smokescreen for a power play between Brown and Blair. I think this is an overly cynical view, a view that evidence never changes anyone’s mind. Ramsden’s own view is that the civil service, using the evidence, “ultimately persuaded both the Chancellor and in particular the Prime Minister that it wasn't right to join." It was also the right decision. With both recent referendums we have seen proponents of change putting out documents suggesting that change will not be economically damaging, when most evidence shows pretty clearly that it will be. With the EU referendum in particular, would it not have been better if the government had asked the Treasury to do a similar exercise to 2003, using outside experts where appropriate to provide or validate the technical analysis?

Ben Goldacre’s piece reminded me of my own recent place on John McDonnell’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC). From Ben’s tweets I knew that he was not the greatest fan of this government, and in particular their current treatment of junior doctors, so I asked him whether he had received any negative comments from doctors or others about him giving advice to the government. I was not surprised to hear he had not. Who could object to him taking the opportunity to argue for better use of data and trials in medicine and elsewhere with people who just might do something about it?

It is a shame that some people did not take the same view when I agreed to be on the EAC. I would lose credibility as a macroeconomist, I was told. When McDonnell did his U-turn about supporting the fiscal charter, some suggested this reflected badly on me, even though he had turned in the direction I thought was correct! One charge in particular was levelled at the time. We were being used to make the leadership look respectable, but our advice would in practice be ignored. A couple of weeks ago Labour adopted a fiscal rule which is based on my own work with Jonathan Portes, and in particular by a presentation I made to the group. Mariana Mazzucato’s own work has also featured strongly in Labour party speeches, with good reason.

At the end of the day, policy makers need to look at evidence. If they do not we need strong mechanisms that allow them to be confronted by this evidence. Policy makers that make space for evidence and take decisions based on it need to be congratulated for this, rather than being told their efforts were just a smokescreen. They should be congratulated because letting evidence in often involves a risk: not just to the policy maker’s priors or preferences but also for scrutiny of past actions. Equally we should regard policymakers who knowingly ignore evidence with great suspicion, and those that try to deliberately keep evidence out of the public domain should be condemned.