Many of the things that voters fear about migrants are not true, and some of their objections can be answered with smarter policies
people oppose immigration, it is worth visiting Tilbury, a port town outside London. Thurrock, the local parliamentary constituency, is 81% white British. Many residents moved here from London as the capital filled with migrants and house prices soared. London’s white-British population fell from 60% to 45% in a single decade, between 2001 and 2011. Some whites moved out because they sold their flats for tidy sums and bought nicer homes with gardens farther from the centre.
In all rich democracies, locals grumble that immigrants drain the welfare state. “If I go to the doctor, I have to pay for it. Foreigners come and they get childbirth and operations all paid for. They should be made to pay, too. If they can’t, send them packing,” says Joan Smith, a 73-year-old in Tilbury. Again, this is not an accurate picture. Migrants pay taxes.
Another fear, that migrants will steal jobs from locals, is as widespread as it seems logical. “Migrants in construction are much better workers than the English, who show up late and leave early,” says Danny Proctor, who manages building projects in Tilbury. “Foreigners aren’t lazy like that. I have a lot of plasterers from Lithuania and Poland. For 20 years they’ve been the best workers.” An English plasterer listening to Mr Proctor might despair. But the supply of jobs is not fixed.
The notion that Australia is overcrowded seems absurd. The empty plains of North Dakota are three times more densely populated. But migration in the rich world is highly concentrated. Newcomers head for the most dynamic cities, where everyone else wants to live, too. Congestion and high house prices are big problems in places like Sydney and London, but they can be eased by better policies. Restrictive zoning rules do more to inflate house prices than immigration does.
Some opponents of immigration fret that it will increase inequality. Some think it unjust that people from poor places might come to rich ones to work as servants. But if the migrants thought that, they would not come. Workers from a poor country who start at the bottom in a rich one will, statistically, make their new home more unequal. But their moving will reduce global inequality.
But step back and a more hopeful picture emerges. America’s population has risen 60-fold since 1800. It has absorbed migrants from Tsarist Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and nearly every other dictatorship of the past 200 years, without losing its democratic soul. On the contrary, migrants head to America because they prefer its institutions to the ones back home.
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