Out of the blue, into the black

“his thinking is at best muddled and his sense of self-assurance at least over-blown.”

High office looms.

For some reason the more I read about ‘Blue Labour’ it just strikes me as some kind of creepy left-Gaullism. I’m still not sure I get it entirely, but it strikes me as seeking to amplify the two qualities in Labour I’ve always found most repellent – the tendency to centralise state power and aggressively interfere with individual rights, and the tendency to dismiss bigotry and prejudice as natural, or even righteous, when spewed by someone labelled ‘working class.’

And while Glasman’s little outburst is both bizarre and disgusting, post the election and post Gillian Duffy, more than a few Old and Nu Lab figures have been calling for a ‘bash the immigrants’ strategy, so its not like he was swimming against the current.

Wow a Chris Bertram post I thoroughly agree with… Better go lie down.

Blimey, I agree with Darragh there. That’s a first.
Mind you, I’ve always thought that a clever Strasserite party would be guaranteed about 20% of the UK vote. It would then permanently top out, since in order to get that 20% it would have had to adopt positions which would have decisively alienated the other 80%.

http://politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2011/07/19/hacking-barely-registers-in-the-latest-ipsos-mori-issues-index/ suggests that “race relations/immigration” is the third most important issue in the UK today, behind only the perennials of jobs and the economy. I don’t think you can entirely blame the newspapers for that, and I don’t think that entirely ruling out discussion of any opposition to immigration as racist is a good idea.

Sunder Katwala, who is setting up an immigration thinktank post-Fabians, has a good and lengthy response, noting the rhetorical bomb-throwing that seems to be the hallmark of ‘Blue Labour, which in this context is too eager to adopt the posture of debating whether it’s possible to have a debate:

So what to do about an uneven pattern of winners and losers? Glasman’s approach is to reject the moderate economic gains of immigration (too intangible to be worth having?) in order to protect the interests of those who lose out. An alternative would be to promote a political renegotiation of how the gains are distributed, by challenging those who have an economic interest in liberal immigration policy to gain public consent for openness, including by paying more attention to compensating losers, or addressing anxieties. This might, for example, be another reason to campaign for living wages, and to promote other policies to reduce social inequalities of income and wealth. Levels of inequality are a product of collective social and political choices; not simply a function of policies on trade or immigration.

Not living in the UK, I’m not quite clear on what Chris Bertram’s argument is. Is he contending that Glasman’s statements will be politically counterproductive and might prevent a resurgence of Labor? Or does he think Glasman’s views are just morally problematic? (I am completely unconvinced that the latter is true. Many liberals feel uncomfortable with nationalism, but this is why we’ve gotten our asses kicked over the past 30 years.)

America? I was under the impression we were talking about the UK.
I believe that the purpose of government is to protect the interests of its citizens. This means that the UK government should prioritize the interests of UK citizens over foreigners, the US government should prioritize the interests of US citizens over foreigners, and so forth. Foreigners do not have the same stake in a society’s success that citizens do, and they have their own governments which are supposed to be looking out for their interests.

What #17 said – also, without foreigners London (30% foreigner born) would collapse in a week, dragging the rest of the country with it in no time.

I’m ready to be persuaded, so would you explain it to me, please: “…they have been under sustained attack by capital for decades” – right, but doesn’t cheap immigrant labor provide one the most powerful weapons for this attack? “…without foreigners London (30% foreigner born) would collapse in a week” – does this mean “without cheap immigrant labor”? Is that a good thing?

The only thing that can be said in Glasman’s defence is that you can’t believe a word printed in the Daily Express.

Unfortunately it does sound exactly the sort of thing he does say – and quite simply he is a second- or third-rate academic with no political sense whatsoever.

Atlee’s words to Laski ‘I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome’ come to mind and then painfully remind you how far Labour has fallen if today’s Attlee is Ed Miliband (another second rate mind who dropped the philosophy from PPE as being too difficult and thus has a second-class degree in PE) and its Laski is Maurice Glasman.

The pity is that Blue Labour did at least ask several of the right questions and if it could find some way of never letting Glasman talk directly to anyone again could have a real role in pulling Labour back to traditional social democracy.

On the claim that MG ignores “the evidence that economic immigration is actually beneficial to indigenous working people,”

–Whether immigration is beneficial to the least well-off in the receiving country is a function of the type of immigration (professional, skilled, unskilled, age, language abilities etc.), the numbers of the immigrants, the nature of the tax and welfare system in the receiving country, the nature of the training system in the receiving country, and a whole host of other factors. There is no evidence to suggest that immigration is beneficial to the least well-off regardless of these mediating factors.

The whole problem is that both sides of the ‘debate’ talk in absolute terms as if every multivarious transaction can be aggregated together and a net benefit or cost arrived at.

Lenin’s dictum who/whom? always comes in handy here as does Thatcher’s insight that that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (at least not in the sense that centrist liberals imagine).

Generally the biggest beneficiaries are the rich who always crave cheap labour.

But a more diffuse benefit is enjoyed by the consumers of services provided by cheap immigrants as they really don’t like paying higher charges or taxes so the care assistants who clean up after their incontinent aged parents can be paid properly – and this applies at the high skill end of the market as well as more computer programmers or whatever drives the cost of computer programmes down.

And even the most grossly exploited immigrant generally has a good reason for preferring a crappy life here to an even worse one back home in Africa or Latin America.

In comparison the costs to the indigenous population (which in a country like the US and increasingly the UK is a rather elastic term) are fundamentally counterfactual in nature.

While the employer and consumer of cheap immigrant labour and the workers themselves can look at their balance sheets or bank accounts to quantify what they have gained, those who feel they are losing out can only make assumptions that if ‘the immigrants’ magically disappeared, their chance of getting a job and better pay and conditions would improve.

But this itself represents an internalisation of neo-classical economics in even the most unlikely places – that more jobs and better pay and conditions can be the result of united political action by voters and trade unions rather than being the product of the market alone seems to have been utterly expunged from the folk memory.

And this is where Glasman is being truly asinine – he is not a neo-liberal and even if he is a second rate thinker he is a first rate community activist.

He should understand that collective action can change the world of work much more effectively than central government dictats on immigration – indeed he says as much quite regularly.

So why can’t he see that the solution is a rebirth of trade union and community militancy – that if wages and conditions for everyone are improved then the benefits of importing foreign labour decline for capital as that labour ceases to be cheap.

Of course that doesn’t stop the capital from leaving the country altogether but that is another problem.

@jd

“Or am I missing something in my equation?”

Perhaps. You simply assumed your conclusion…

Suppose you gave their job of every citizen in the UK to a better worker from another country. The UK economy would certainly be more productive. Would the citizens of the UK be better off?

As Metatone at 9 points out Paul sagar’s claim that “economic immigration is actually beneficial to indigenous working people” needs to be highly qualified.

Googling “distribution of the economic gains of immigration” yields a substantial number of results, but at least in Australia the first result is a study by Ross Garnaut (famous here for other things). He summarises the evidence for Australia and the USA as follows:

“Amongst established Australians, immigration increases average incomes most
for owners of assets that are used to produce goods and services that are not
internationally tradeable, notably urban land, especially in the large cities, and
shares in companies that produce such services, including through membership
of superannuation funds. It does least to raise the incomes of Australians who
do not own such assets and who need to purchase non-tradeable goods and services in the market.

…When immigrants on average have higher education levels than the established
population, as they have had in recent years [in Australia], immigration is more likely to raise average incomes of relatively unskilled workers relative to better educated
Australians. … immigration with a high skill component tends to raise employment and lower unemployment of lowskill established Australians.

… The Australian experience with gains and distribution of costs and benefits
from immigration contrasts sharply with that of the United States. Immigrants
have less education relative to the average of the established population in the
United States than they do in Australia. Immigration to the United States tends
to depress the relative incomes of poor Americans. However, the more flexible
United States labour markets cause this tendency to be reflected in lower wages
rather than unemployment. High rates of employment assist the accretion of
economically valuable skills, and reduce the depressing effects on incomes of
low-skill workers over time…”

For the UK, Dustmann et al (2008) find that each 1 percent increase in the share of migrants in the UK-born working age population leads to a 0.6 percent decline in the wages of the 5% lowest paid workers and to an increase in the wages of higher paid workers.
http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/labour-market-effects-immigration

I too am in favour of immigration, but I think that it is important to realise that there are potential losers as well as winners from immigration, and as a result what is needed are complementary policies that maximise the benefits for as many people as possible.

This is a great counterpoint to the recent anti-Yglesias posts surrounding this post. What are you going to get if you encourage leftist populist rhetoric regarding jobs. If you aren’t super-careful, anti-immigrant rhetoric!

Hooray?!?!?!?

Peter,

I understand your empirical point. First, let me say that relative to the principle actors in both the US and the UK, every group you’ve described is “low-wage.” For an example of what happens when a powerful domestic interests are challenged by foreign competition, consider the Chinese attempt to purchase the American oil company Unocal. Cheveron, the low bidder for Unocal, framed the issue as one of national security, not free-market efficiency, and the Chinese backed down.

But let’s focus on the unskilled labor, the group at risk in the US. Your solution – promote other policies that help the poor and offset the negative effects identified for the poor – fails for exactly the reasons discussed in the other post (and at greater lengths in the article by Kevin Drum). Your offsetting policies will have costs. Those costs, by definition, will be borne disproportionately by those that are not poor. The immigration policies you advocate will disrupt any potential coalition that might advance these beneficial offsetting policies. Therefore they are unlikely to be implemented.

In such a situation, where there will be no offsetting legislation, the question becomes this: Do you support immigration when that immigrant makes low-wage workers worse off?

I think John b has well answered the question directed at me.

Adam, I think your questions reflect what you see as the nature of US politics. Not living in the US, I am not well placed to make judgements about what is feasible there.

But to add to the example john b gave, in Australia the conservative (Liberal-National) government in 2000 introduced a broad-based indirect tax and provided increases in social welfare benefits and income tax cuts to offset the regressive impact.

Now you can have long and detailed arguments about whether the compensation was adequate, but the broader and more important outcome is that the future financing of the welfare state is now much more secure as a result.

Again, just a couple of weeks ago, the Labor party in Australia proposed the introduction of mildly regressive carbon pricing scheme but with offsetting compensation for low income groups, and no compensation for high income groups. While this is controversial, it is virtually guaranteed to get through the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In 2009, net migration to the UK was approx 198,000, with 567,000 arrivals offset by 368,000 departures. 37% of immigrants were coming to study and 34% were coming to work, the lowest proportion of workers since 2004. 17% of these immigrants were already British citizens, and one-third of the non-British migrants were EU citizens (who have a right to work in Britain).
Source http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=260

It’s not a large amount, given Britain’s population, I’d have thought (proportionally quite a lot less than Australia, for example). Especially as all those overseas students are paying ferociously high fees, money which is a net transfer from their home countries into the British economy.

Thanks Emma – the whole “debate” is nativist claptrap wrapped in bogus economics.

#17 john b 07.19.11 at 3:31 pm
On the one hand, the Express have stitched Glasman up a bit. They didn’t interview him, they just sexed up his Telegraph interview in a way that does misrepresent his position.

Is Johann Hari working for the Express now?!

when the phenomenon is temporary economic mass-migration, that’s a whole different story.

No doubt. But the phenomenon, in Britain, right now, isn’t temporary economic mass migration. As Emma has pointed out, net immigration is pretty low. Even gross immigration isn’t huge; 567k, of which 211,000 are students.

To quote from Emma’s link, “[Gross] Immigration to the UK for work-related reasons dropped to 193,000 (from 220,000 in 2008) and is at the lowest point since before A8 accession [this means the eight central and eastern European nations joining the EU] in 2004.”

The way the UK job market seems to be going, the temporary economic mass migration could be outward. Already, UK citizens are the biggest single group of visa overstayers (ie illegal immigrants) in Australia.

46: I didn’t know that; very interesting and not at all surprising.

The NS piece cited at #45 does indeed seem to bury the Blue Labour project as the Compass people (Cruddas and Rutherford) who are now bailing were its only supporters with real political influence.

Adam,

You write: “Suppose you gave their job of every citizen in the UK to a better worker from another country. The UK economy would certainly be more productive. Would the citizens of the UK be better off?”

You pose a clearly exaggerated hypothetical. But I am trying to think about problems in the real world, in which British school leavers often make worse baristas and fruit pickers than Portuguese and Polish immigrants.

If you offered every British business the opportunity to replace all their British workers with non-Brits, those businesses would probably say a couple of things: 1) sorry, except for EU passport holders, there are laws against that; 2) sorry, for most of our jobs, workers in the UK can do the job better than the available pool of non-UK workers would, which is why we haven’t hired (legally employable) foreigners to replace them.

At the macro-economic level, I don’t think it’s remotely reasonable to assume that replacing all Brits with non-Brits would improve UK productivity.

@JD

You are arguing for the present level of immigration, but your argument isn’t tied to any particular level of immigration. By your logic, whenever an employer can replace a domestic worker with a better quality immigrant worker, they should. If you truly believed that argument you would be advocating an increase in immigration. In fact, you would advocate the government spend money to encourage immigration until the marginal cost to induce the next immigrant matches the marginal benefit acheived by displacing the next “school leaver.”

And why stop with the kind of jobs “school leavers” perform? Since we’re staunch Galtists, everyone should be on the block. After all, we’re not punishing the help for being insufficiently respectful, we’re advocating economic efficiency.

I think we should start with the professions. For example, the economic benefit of replacing all British doctors with their foreign betters would more than pay the importation costs. We could even establish medical colleges for foreign students overseas, to take advantage of the lower prices. Why train British medical students? They are so expensive!

Also, I think your analysis was overly restrictive. You only considered situations where hardworking immigrant employees replace indolent domestic employees at equivalent wages. Certainly you weren’t intending moral judgments to cloud your economic analysis. Perhaps we should consider the benefits of replacing hardworking, but expensive, domestic workers with their cheaper immigrant counterparts?

Certainly there would be economic benefits to replacing domestic employees with equivalent immigrant employees at lower wages. In fact, if the wages were low enough, importing immigrants of even worse character than the typical “British school leaver” might be worth it. What a brave new world awaits!

In any case Glasman has apologised:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/21/lord-glasman-apologises-immigration-remarks

“I overstated the position [on immigration]. I was not talking about what should happen. I want most importantly to reiterate my full and total support for immigrant communities in Britain …

“We all make mistakes. And this is mine. I just hope that it does not detract from the energy and real goodness of the work. I will do all I can too to strengthen frayed relationships.”

But sympathetic though I am to Blue Labour this strikes me as utterly inadequate.

The actual words he’s apologising for were:

On migration, a subject to which the leader is currently giving much thought, Glasman has previously accused New Labour of lying about the extent of immigration.
Now he goes further, arguing – in terms more radical than the Conservative front bench would dare use – that Labour should renegotiate the rules on European workers and freeze inward migration for EU and non-EU citizens, except where
employers or universities make a case for a specific, skilled individual.

Labour, in his view, should not abolish the Tory immigration cap if it wins the next election. “There’s no sense of abolition,” he says, suggesting instead going further and adding that the Labour government promoted “a multiculturalism position that enshrined differences … Both legal and illegal immigration was used as an unofficial wages policy.”

Now he thinks the time has come to turn the tide. “We’ve got to re-interrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc … to the free movement of labour and capital.
It’s legalistic, it’s administrative, and it’s no good. So I think we’ve got to renegotiate with the EU.”

His call is to restrict immigration to a few necessary entrants, such as highly-skilled leaders, especially in vocational skills. “We might, for example, bring in German masters, as we did in the 15th and 16th centuries to renew guilds.” But
exemptions should be made on a case-by-case basis? “Yes. We should absolutely do that … Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first.”

And if that means stopping immigration virtually completely for a period, then so be it? “Yes. I would add that we should be more generous and friendly in receiving those
[few] who are needed. To be more generous, we have to draw the line.”

As an advocate of the toughest curbs yet mooted on immigration, presumably he has some sympathy with Iain Duncan Smith’s controversial call for British jobs for British
workers. “Completely. The people who live here are the highest priority. We’ve got to listen and be with them. They’re in the right place – it’s us who’s not.”

http://www.fabians.org.uk/images/Fabian-Review-Summer-INTERVIEW.pdf

So if he ‘was not talking about what should happen’ WTF was he talking about.

These weren’t vague Rawlsian prognostications – they are all quite specific statements calling for a freeze on immigration and the renegotiation of our relationship with the EU (which in practical terms means withdrawal).

Did the interviewer feed him leading questions? – quite possibly – but this is a man with a peerage and a doctorate who shouldn’t just blurt out whatever is going through his head.

Miliband can’t rescind his peerage but he should certainly find some way of signalling that Glasman is no longer in any way shape or form his ‘guru’.

And I also wonder what the student body of London Met University – which is at least 22% non UK and predominantly non-white according to the 2008/9 HEIDI analysis – think of a professor who evidently believes that only the most ‘exceptional’ of non-UK citizens should be allowed to study there?

The man really is an idiot…