What do we know about migration?

Britain needs to get better at monitoring data based on nationality of origin

In The Times, Neil O’Brien says we need much more transparent data to reveal the impact of migration.

Many EU countries, among them Denmark, Germany and Austria, produce sophisticated analysis of the fiscal contribution of migrants who come on different types of visa, from different places. They use this to ensure they are getting the most beneficial types of migration. We should do the same.

When David Cameron became prime minister in 2010 he launched a big push for open data. Whitehall has drifted back to a secretive mindset. For example, under Cameron we set up the HMRC Datalab, which allows carefully screened academics to use a room in London to access tax data for research. It was a boon for researchers across many fields: regional policy, migration, skills policy, you name it. But in the past four years few new projects have been allowed to start there.

The decay of open data isn’t unique to migration data. The Department for Education used to publish data that allowed researchers to analyse the earnings of graduates by which university and course they graduated from. The data was shifted to a platform where that’s no longer allowed. But migration is the place where officials fight hardest against open data. Officials think the public can’t be trusted. The Home Office won’t answer parliamentary questions on the immigration status of prisoners — questions such as: “Were they here legally?” Government has the data but doesn’t publish it.

For UnHerd, Professor Eric Kaufmann explains why women are increasingly more left-wing than men.

What Matthew Yglesias and Zach Goldberg term the “Great Awokening” emerged during the same period, with the share of white liberal Americans describing racism as a major problem rising from 35% in 2011 to over 80% by 2020, while remaining flat among white conservatives. As radicalisation took place on the Left, the Right remained broadly stable. Goldberg shows that increased public concern tracked growing media attention to “Critical Social Justice” themes, first on trendsetting sites such as Buzzfeed, then in mainstream outlets such as the New York Times. All this took place simultaneously in Britain and other Western societies.

This “Awokening” is central to the gender gap now widely observed. To show why, I have examined two datasets. The first is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) 2024 campus free speech survey (conducted in 2023), which polls a massive 55,000 students, mainly in top-200 US universities…the 31,000 female students in the survey (nearly all aged 18-22) lean 55% liberal to just 15% conservative, whereas the 22,000 male students lean liberal by 40% to 25%. A possible reason for the gap is that 32% of female students are lesbian, bisexual or queer, while just 20% of males are. If we focus only on heterosexual students, women go from 55-15 to 46-20, narrowing the gender gap somewhat.

Yet what eliminates the gap entirely is factoring in attitudes to no-platforming speakers who offend disadvantaged groups. A belief system which demands the sacralisation of historically marginalised identity groups inclines people to prioritise group protection from offensive words over a person’s right to free speech. Nevertheless…there are over twice as many male students who would tolerate such speech as female (6600 vs 2900). Narrowing only to free speech supporters who are heterosexual, there is no longer a statistically significant gender gap (women lean Right 45-22 vs. men at 46-20).

In The Telegraph, Madeleine Grant reflects on Professor Richard Dawkins’s recent embrace of “cultural Christianity”, arguing that Christian principles underly many of our assumed values.

The SNP’s draconian hate crime legislation is a totemic example. Merely stating facts of biology might earn you a visit from the Scottish police. But perhaps Christianity has shaped even this. It cannot be a coincidence that Scotland, home of John Knox, is now at the forefront of the denigration of women. The SNP’s new blasphemy laws are just the latest blast of that trumpet. Not that things are much better south of the border, where we have de facto blasphemy laws under which a teacher can be forced into hiding for showing his class a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Certainly not the neutral secular space we were promised with the erosion of Christianity’s central role in society. 

Yet increasingly, the thesis of Tom Holland’s book Dominion seems to be winning out, via a growing recognition that the ethics we hold as natural and universal are, in fact, anything but. Much of what atheists ascribed to vague concepts of “reason” emerged out of the faith which informed the West’s intellectual, moral, and, yes, scientific life – a cultural oxygen we breathe but never see. 

I am reminded of Levin’s epiphany at the end of Anna Karenina. Throughout the novel, Levin, a dissatisfied religious sceptic, is plagued with doubt over the purpose of existence. Yet he finally comes to a stark realisation about the real roots of his belief, and the limits of a “rational” life: “He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother’s milk. But he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.” The world isn’t morally neutral, and never has been. 

On his Substack, John Oxley says the cost of starting a family is one of the main challenges facing millennials, and that fathers must not be left out of the family policy discussion.

Asking around in one’s late twenties and early thirties it becomes abundantly clear about who is anxious about this. Female friends worry about settling down, their reproductive lifespan, and even things like egg freezing – often reinforced by female-focused fiction and lifestyle magazines. Men, on the other hand, are often nonchalant, driven by the conceit that whenever they might want kids there will be some nubile partner waiting, and the idea, instilled from early adolescence, that fecundity is on a hair-trigger, so easy that even the merest fumble might result in an accidental pregnancy. I’d wager most men never think about infertility until it is thrust into their personal circumstances, while for most women it is a constant nibbling worry.

We should perhaps also be asking about the things that men do that make child-having and child-rearing harder rather than easier. Studies show that the burden of childcare still largely falls on women – partly out of biological necessity, but as children grow older this is also informed by our personal and policy choices. In the workplace, for example, things like parental leave, flexible working and childcare funding still primarily feel like women’s issues. Men largely reap the overspill of concessions made by women campaigners. There should be more of a push to see these as the sorts of benefits men should push for when engaging with their employers, and which companies are incentivised to offer. In doing so we might end up with a system more mutually conducive to having more children.

The same is possibly true around family breakdowns. The causes and consequences of families breaking down is another topic for another day, but it is broadly clear that women bear the greater costs. They are more likely to be the ones left with the care of children, often without adequate financial contributions. Since child maintenance was moved from the courts to a bureaucratic process in the 1990s, the system has become rife with non-payment and evasion – arrears are now measured in the billions. Around forty percent of non-resident parents (predominantly fathers) in the maintenance system make no financial contribution to their children at all, while many more fail to pay what is fully due. It is easy to suspect that a proliferation of non-durable relationships, and women and families being left in the lurch after them, disincentivises having children and again this is at least as much of a problem driven by male behaviour as female.  

In The Telegraph, Nick Timothy says the Thames Water fiasco illustrates the UK’s problem with rentier capitalism.

A Whitehall insider has reportedly suggested that a compromise might be found in which the company is allowed drastic increases in bills. But this would be a disaster, destroying the credibility of the regulator, sending a terrible signal to the rest of the industry, and – after years of Thames investors profiting from fixed prices in a monopoly with 15 million customers and reckless debt-financing – asking the public to clean up the mess.

We need the Government to show it shares public anger and face down the investors. If those investors do not want to put in the funds necessary for Thames Water to function and meet the conditions set by the regulator, so be it. But ministers should make clear that they will not cave on pricing, and instead allow the company to fail. If Thames does go down, the water will carry on running, and much of the debt will disappear with Kemble. New investors would be found quickly – other companies are raising funds successfully enough – but the Government should say it is prepared to accept nationalisation on a temporary basis. 

For crony capitalism and rent-seeking, especially in the utilities, has gone on long enough. True capitalism is unrivalled at allocating capital, driving innovation, delivering growth, and spreading opportunity. But it is supposed to leave risk as well as reward with the investor. 

Wonky thinking

In the Washington Post, Senator Marco Rubio makes the case for industrial policy done right to revive America’s industrial base.

When I first came to Washington in 2011, “industrial policy” were dirty words. Democrats and Republicans alike viewed pro-manufacturing laws and regulations with almost religious suspicion. Today, that has started to change — although what replaces unfettered free trade remains hotly debated in Congress.

I believe our country needs industrial policy to rebuild our manufacturing sector, which has suffered decades of neglect and unfair competition. I also believe the Biden administration has done industrial policy wrong, throwing vast sums of money at questionable projects and arguably empowering Communist China in the process.

Some will eagerly use the administration’s failures to tarnish those of us who believe in a smart, common-sense approach to industrial policy. But let me set the record straight about what industrial policy is, what it isn’t (or shouldn’t be), and how it has been used successfully in the past.

The fact is, the United States has supported domestic manufacturers from our earliest days. Consider the national arsenal in Springfield, Mass. President George Washington selected the site for this defense industrial project to make the United States less dependent on imported arms. Over the following decades, it turned the Connecticut River Valley into the country’s first hub of commercial manufacturing and innovation.

Or look at NASA. The pinnacle of Cold War research and development, this government initiative harnessed American business knowhow to put a man on the moon. It also produced more than 2,000 commercial spinoff technologies, including baby formula and the integrated circuit.

In short, the America we know from the history books — the colonial backwater that grew into a world power in less than two centuries and bested Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in existential struggle — was a country built by innovative private companies and judicious government policies alike.

But around the time the Berlin Wall fell, elites in Washington and on Wall Street created a one-sided narrative that free enterprise had done it all. And they subsequently neglected the policy levers that supported our great manufacturers in the private sector. Thirty years later, the evidence is clear that they went wrong.

The number of U.S. aerospace and defense general contractors has fallen from 51 to five. The situation among smaller defense manufacturers and machine shops is even worse. Our submarine fleet is shrinking at a rate manufacturers can’t make up for. And we’re dependent on China for many key components of our munitions and military semiconductors.

Meanwhile, deindustrialization has wreaked havoc on American society. The working class has exchanged relative prosperity and social stability for downward mobility and political volatility. Marriage, childbearing and labor-force participation are declining. Loneliness, drug addiction and suicide are on the rise.

…There is a temptation, especially in the Republican Party, to respond by reverting to the old consensus — to resume a pre-2017 economic mind-set because the Biden administration has botched its economic efforts. But that mind-set is why our industrial communities are dying and our military is in danger of being swamped.

In any event, we simply don’t have the option of doing nothing. Decisions about how we run our economy are always being made — the only question is by whom. In the past, Republicans outsourced such decisions to “the free market,” which meant some combination of nationless corporations and Communist China. Democrats have been more open to federal intervention, but often at the behest of special interests.

Biden has pushed industrial policy more aggressively than his Democratic predecessors. The evidence suggests, though, that he’s still beholden to Wall Street, Beijing and the environmental lobby. The task for conservatives is to chart a new course. But, to do so without merely ceding the lead to China, we can’t abandon industrial policy. Rather, we must strengthen it with genuine conservative insights.

This means focusing on the domestic industrial base and the working class, not fantasies such as the “green transition.” It means supporting critical industries such as mining, oil and gas, and metallurgy — all of which are vital to our security. It means tying generous subsidies to performance requirements such as export quotas. Finally, it means getting serious about deregulation and permitting reform to create a competitive business environment where industrial policy can actually work.

This won’t be easy, especially as long as Biden and his allies in Congress put the interests of lobbyists and activists above those of the nation. But if we’re ever going to compete with China and revitalize our society — if we’re ever going to bring back the America we know from the history books — we’ll need to get industrial policy right.

Book of the week

We recommend Three Days at Camp David by Jeffrey E. Garten, which tells the story of how the Bretton Woods compromise fundamentally shaped the global economy, looking also at relevant comparisons to global trends today.

But there are also big differences between the early 1970s and now. It might appear that the Nixon administration was taking the initial steps of the America-first policy that has returned in acute form in the years of President Trump. But as we shall see, what began in 1971 as a harsh, unilateral set of actions to sever the gold-dollar relationship actually had the effect of increasing America’s involvement in the global economy, expanding its investment in international organisations, and deepening international co-ordination between the United States and its allies. Even though Washington had delivered a severe shock to Western Europe and Japan, Nixon never contemplated abandoning working closely with America’s partners to deal with problems through consultation on nuclear arms treaties, global poverty, global food security, and explosive oil prices, to cite just a few examples. In 1971, Washington never eschewed the idea that more rather than less trade was good. It continued to search for a better system for managing currencies. It never lost sight of the fact that, over time, economic and political ties became intertwined, and when they moved in the right direction, they strengthened democratic societies…

Quick links

Scotland introduced new “hate speech” legislation, receiving 4,000 complaints under the new laws in the first 48 hours.

China accounts for half the global sales of “robot stock”.

The S&P 500 UK manufacturing PMI rose above 50 in March, above the Euro area.

The Government published new salary thresholds for work visas.

Judges are to consider lighter sentences for criminals from deprived backgrounds.

Estonia is expected to remove voting rights from non-citizens in local elections.

In the USA atheists and agnostics have the lowest birth rates.

Canadian premier Justin Trudeau said immigration to Canada has risen above the level it can “absorb”.

The Northern Ireland Office’s most senior civil servant said Sinn Fein “undoubtedly” stole votes when it first overtook the SDLP in 2001.

The Government’s plan to expand childcare will only work with 40,000 more staff, the Education Secretary admitted.

A new Government publication showed that second staircase rules have resulted in thousands of new homes not being built.

The Government does not have a plan for general mobilisation in the event of a war, Sky News learned.

The minimum wage celebrated its 25th anniversary, having had a major impact on real wages for the lowest paid.