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How benefits can be a divisive force in a pluralist society
Sunday Times
April 26
On Tuesday French riot police rounded up 200 migrants near an encampment called “the Jungle” outside Calais. To listen to Eric Besson, the French immigration minister, the immigrants themselves were a side issue. The raid’s real goal was to rid France of “traffickers”. Natacha Bouchart, the mayor of Calais, saw it differently. For her, the problem was “nos amis britanniques”. Once migrants set foot in Britain, she said, “their situation is too comfortable and we [in Calais] can no longer tolerate being taken hostage by that”. Britain’s overgenerous asylum and welfare policies were drawing the world’s poor to the ports of France.
Probably more Britons agree with the mayor than with the minister: welfare policies do lure immigrants. Immigration and welfare are a bad mix in other ways, too. Comprehensive welfare systems (transfers, pensions, healthcare) tend not to arise in societies of mass immigration, such as the United States. In the present downturn, many assume that one path to recovery is to give up some economic dynamism and return to the welfare model that existed from Attlee to Thatcher. But Britain is not the place it was until the 1970s. Welfare states require consensus and society may now be too multicultural to provide it.
Immigrants can be good for an economy, but their contributions tend to go to the private sector through cheap labour. As for the public sector, almost everywhere, immigrants and their dependants take more out than they put in. Native Germans between the ages of 20 and 65 pay out more in taxes than they collect in services, but Turks in Germany do that only between the ages of 28 and 57. These figures worsen over time. The number of foreign residents in Germany rose steadily between 1971 and 2000 – from 3m to about 7.5m – but the number of employed foreigners in work held steady at roughly 2m people.
Until recently politicians suggested that immigrants might actually save European welfare states, replenishing the ratio of workers per retiree which has declined rapidly because of low European birth rates. It won’t work. Immigrants, too, age and retire and the system must take care of them and their large families when they do. But the amount of wishful thinking invested in this idea is impressive. “In the long term, migrants themselves will age and contribute to the increasing dependency ratio,” a Home Office report admitted in late 2007, “but only assuming that they remain in the UK during retirement.” What other assumption can be made? Are we to imagine that migrants will work to fund cushy retirements for Europeans, then slink obligingly back to the Third World to pass their own retirements in poverty?
Immigration also weakens welfare states by making native taxpayers less willing to fund them. Five years ago David Goodhart of Prospect magazine warned that social programmes arise out of a sense of obligation to fellow citizens, which gets harder to maintain when fellow citizens have a different culture.
This seems to be true empirically: Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economists, have shown that roughly half of Americans’ antipathy towards European-style socialism can be accounted for by the ethnic diversity of the United States. This view is given support by the recent work of Robert Putnam, the sociologist, who finds that people living under conditions of diversity “hunker down”. They trust their neighbours less – even neighbours of their own kind. They are less philanthropic, less social and less inclined to pay taxes.
It makes sense. Citizens authorise the state to make welfare payments not just to keep the less fortunate in a living, but also to keep them in a way of life. Once immigrants learn their way around they may have a different idea of the purpose of government benefits. Instead of using them to pay for, say, a British working-class lifestyle, they may use them to pay for, say, Islam. Two-thirds of French imams are on welfare. So are many British ones: Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, head of Britain’s “Muslim parliament”, said in 2005: “Our mosques are largely tribal and controlled by old men on the dole with no understanding of the changing world around them.”
If immigrant welfare recipients do not share the broader society’s values, then the broader society will turn against welfare or turn against immigrants. Immigrants are innovators. They have fresh ways of doing things. That is what makes them valuable in a competitive market society. But competitive market societies are in bad odour just now and, anyway, welfare programmes are supposed to be a refuge from them. It should not surprise us that scepticism about immigration should rise at a time when people are running in panic towards any such refuge they can find.
Christopher Caldwell is a columnist for the Financial Times. His book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West will be published on May 7 by Allen Lane
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