By Ed West UK Last updated: July 15th, 2009
There have been at least two features on Radio 4 in the past 36 hours dealing with the shortage of primary school places in London, which they attribute to parents pulling out of the private sector. Only at the very end of the segment this morning did their correspondent mutter about “other factors”, coughing “immigration” right at the end.
How strange, because in fact immigration is overwhelmingly the biggest cause of the increase, as this newspaper reports today. In the last eight years the number of births to foreign mothers has increased by 64 per cent; at the same time birth rates among British-born mothers rose by 6 per cent.
That’s nationwide – you can double that first figure in London, and while in Richmond and Kingston the sudden unaffordability of private education may be a factor, it’s quite clear none of the new arrivals in the schools in my part of town are called Tarquin or Arabella.
Christopher Caldwell, in his earth-shattering book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (yes, I’m still banging on about that), analyses the capitalist argument for mass immigration which, he says, “runs counter to classical economic theory and is being challenged with increasing rigor by economists.”
He quotes Philippe Legrain’s pro-immigration book Your Country Needs Them which states that if rich countries allowed their workforce to swell by a mere 3 per cent by letting in 14 millions workers the rich countries would be $139 billion a year better off.
This, Caldwell says, smacks of either naivete or mystification. “In context, $139 billion is simply not that much money: It is 0.0035, or roughly one three-hundreth, of the advanced countries’ output. It is about a sixth of the US government’s 2009 stimulus plan.”
As Caldwell says: “The social, spiritual, and political effects of immigration are huge and enduring, while the economic effects are puny and transitory. If, like certain Europeans, you are infuriated by polygot markets and street signs written in Polish, Urdu, and Arabic, sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back.
If, like other Europeans, you view immigration as a lifeline of excitement, worldliness, and palatable cuisine thrown to your drab and provincial country, then immigration would be a bargain even if it imposed a significant economic cost.”
So what about the costs? He quotes Oxford demographer David Coleman, who says in tallying up the economics of immigration we must factor in:
“The total costs of the integration process, and of the associated immigration and race relations business, the costs of meeting the special education, health, and housing needs of immigrants, the net effects upon the education of ordinary children in immigrant areas, the permanent needs to ‘regenerate’ urban areas of immigrant settlement instead of demolishing them, issues of crime and public order, [and] the multiplier effect on future immigrantion.”
Which brings us back to the effect on schools. Unlike the Government and the BBC, the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration said the figures suggested that the pressure on primary schools was intimately connected to lack of border controls.
Frank Field, the Labour MP, and Nicholas Soames, a Conservative, who co-chair the group, said that in 25 local authorities the majority of births were now to foreign-born women. This compares with 10 in 2001, they said.
“The need to increase funding for primary schools is a direct result of mass immigration feeding into our population,” they said in a statement.
“The number of births to foreign mothers has risen by 65 per cent since 2001 while the number of births to UK born mothers has only risen by 6.4 per cent. This is a major reason for the pressure on our primary schools but the Government remain in denial about the consequences of their losing control of our borders. Instead they refer to ‘local circumstances’. This is deliberately misleading.”
So why, you might ask, is the BBC parroting the official government line?
Filed under: Media and Press, Uncategorized, Why is Shortwood undersubscribed? Whats your opinion? Tagged: | immigration and school closure
Now, if the “indigenous” population can’t be bothered to breed enough to look after its old age and to ensure there are people to work and to run the country what will happen if we do not have immigration? To pretend that there is uncontrolled mass immigration is either ignorance or lying or both. The issue is not ‘if’ we should have it, but how much? The UK is hardly a stranger to immigration (or at other times, emigration), the idea of some fixed pool of ‘indigenous’ Brits is a nonsense, or even of a fixed culture. As we seek people to run an increasing range of activity, but cannot find the ‘indigenous’ folk to do it, then there is a need for inward migration, some of it permanent, some not. This is a time of flux, of change. We had better stay up with it. Is there an optimum population size for the UK one might ask, and in that what age and gender balance do we need? Can it be planned and engineered? In such long-term questions I doubt whether we can ignore migration in either direction.