On the aggregate effects of immigration

Can Britain be the same with different people in it?

In 2009, the American conservative journalist wrote Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, whose subtitle asked an important question; can Europe be the same with different people in it?¹

It is a question that we, and Europe, are still contending with, as mass migration as only ramped up in the 15 years since Caldwell wrote the book.

One things that is making the conversation so difficult to resolve is that so few people are contending with the realities of immigration in terms of the scale of it’s impact. As Lomez tweeted recently;

Many otherwise smart people can’t seem to grasp (or won’t) that certain policies operate at the individual level and therefore demand individual judgment, while others (immigration eg) operate at the population level and must be evaluated at the level of group averages.

The personalization of immigration narratives suits the left because it humanizes the problem. Earlier this year I wrote about the BBC’s “immigration week,” which was composed entirely of human‑interest stories that appeared to recycle decades‑old pro‑immigration arguments. The logic driving this editorial choice is that human stories are designed to displace political framing, encouraging audiences to see immigration less as a contested policy issue and more as a matter of empathy, thereby fostering pro‑immigration sentiment:

By framing migration through people rather than facts, and moving the narrative from policy debates to personal experiences, you engage the reader on an emotional rather than intellectual level. This makes sense in a world where information moves as fast as ours; as Robert Cialdini writes, ’people don’t counter-argue stories... if you want to be successful in a post-fact world, you do it by presenting accounts, narratives, stories and images and metaphors.’

Compelling personal stories like these – stories of hardworking refugee overcoming hardships or a skilled workers contributing to society – are designed to elicit empathy through a phenomenon known as the identifiable victim effect. Simply put, as you scale a problem, our altruistic impulses diminish; people feel more inclined to provide more assistance when faced with a specific, identifiable person in distress, than they do when faced with a large, indistinct group facing the same hardship. Adding a human face can also help shift the debate from one of practical concerns over the economic of security effects of mass immigration to one of moral legitimacy by tapping into the often-abused sense of British fair play, and sense of duty to help those in need.

Cherry-picking these stories also allows immigrants to be more easily framed as ‘deserving’ by highlighting individual arrivals making contributions; countering, as pro-migration activists would put it, the narrative that immigration is a drain on the economy and adds pressure to public services. Pumping out a huge amount of these stories of individual contribution is also intended to change what people see as the norm; if the predominant style of immigration reporting becomes one of individual struggle and success - rather than about the effects of immigration as a whole - it’s reasonable to assume public sentiment will trend more favourably.

As for the right, highlighting individual stories about migration allows for a similarly selective approach to dealing with migration. Whereas the left tends to centre the stories of the migrants themselves, however, the right tends to centre individual stories about the costs of migration to the host population, often elevating individual cases of crime, welfare dependency, or cultural friction.

For both sides, the anecdotal approach serve the same function: to humanize the costs of migration, and make abstract concerns about migrant relatable through a single face or incident.

The problem is that as immigration has increased, so have its aggregate effects. The right is catching up to this much quicker, and has put much effort in in recent years to discovering the costs of the migration system, the additional costs migrants place on the taxpayer, crime statistics etc. But even these only tend to be initial costs; they are accounting for what migration is costing society, rather than how it is changing society.

As the long-term problems caused by migration shows (there are reports of rape gangs going back to the 1960s), this wasn’t even a tenable situation when migration was running in the tens of thousands. Immigration is now running closer to the millions; the issue is no longer what migration costs, but what kind of society it produces. A nation cannot absorb such a number of people without it materially altering its makeup beyond simple demographics. To treat this only as a matter of budget lines or crime statistics is to miss the deeper reality: mass migration changes the character of nations.

Thanks to the sad increase in sectarianism, increasing public knowledge of the rape gangs, increasing migrant crime and increasingly unsustainable economic and unsuitable cultural profiles of the average migrant, people are beginning to wake up to the fact that migration must be evaluated via group averages.

Many core Western systems - democracy, the justice system, policing, welfare - are not going to survive the presence of large numbers of non-natives. It is already altering the platforms political parties take, the functioning of core state services, and our foreign policy. What does justice look like when members of a jury don’t understand the concept of consent?

Yet still, few are considering second order effects of immigration at a population level. Until the right does this, however, we will be stuck in the trap Lomez sets out;

“What are the likely outcomes of importing hundreds of thousands of randomly selected people from Country X?” Impossible to say, since we cannot evaluate each one of them individually, and also it’s morally bad to ask that question, so I guess we just have to let them come here and find out, and even having let them come here and realizing that the predictions based on group averages were entirely accurate, there’s nothing we can do about it and also don’t even point it out because that’s also morally bad, so I guess we’ll just keep doing this forever.

The only way to resolve Caldwell’s question if can Europe be the same with different people in it, is to shift the conversation away from the individual to the structural. Stories are good for telling us where we are, but they can’t capture the scale of transformation inherent in mass migration.

That is what I have been trying to do in my ‘can X survive migration?’ pieces,² which I have more of planned. Unfortunately these take a lot of research, which takes a lot of time, which takes a lot of money. If you’d like to read more, please do consider signing up below.

If we are to understand how migration is changing the country, and how to mitigate against those changes, we need to look at the second-order consequences of migration. Hamit Coksun’s story, for instance, isn’t about one man, but about the pressure for Islamic blasphemy law naturally generated by a large population of Muslims. There are so many practical questions that need asking; what happens when language barriers isolate children in schools? How will immigration affect what is said to your daughter on the street? What will justice looks like when a jury doesn’t understand the idea of consent?

In predicting population-level outcomes, group averages work. If we want Britain to survive mass migration, we need to deal in aggregates, not anecdotes.

1. For a dive into the book itself, I highly recommend Ed West’s remarks on the book from last year, on it’s 15^th anniversary.

2.