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Work in Progress: Migration, Integration and the European Labour Market

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Work in Progress: Migration, Integration and the European Labour Market Work in Progress: Migration, Integration and the European Labour Market Work in Progress: Migration, Integration and the European Labour Market Mikel Azurmendi David Coleman Tamar Jacoby Robert Rowthorn Juan José Toribio Editor: Helen Disney Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society London First published May 2003 © The Institute for the Study of Civil Society 2003 The Mezzanine, Elizabeth House 39 York Road, London SE1 7NQ email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN 1-903 386-28 4 Typeset by Civitas in New Century Schoolbook Printed in Great Britain by Hartington Fine Arts Lancing, Sussex Contents Page Acknowledgement vi Authors vii Introduction Helen Disney x Is multi-culturalism helping or hindering integration in Spain? Mikel Azurmendi 1 Demographic, economic and social consequences of UK migration David Coleman 9 Immigrant integration— the American experience Tamar Jacoby 41 Immigration and the labour market: a Spanish perspective Juan José Toribio 53 Numbers and national identity Robert Rowthorn 61 Notes 85 v Acknowledgement Work in Progress is based on a seminar organised by the Stockholm Network and the Circulo de Empresarios (Ma- drid’s Business Round Table) in Summer 2002. The Stock- holm Network and Civitas would like to thank the Circulo for all their help in making the seminar and the book possible. The Stockholm Network is a dedicated network of European market-oriented think tanks based at Civitas in London. Its members include Timbro in Stockholm, the Centre for the New Europe in Brussels and the Edmund Burke Founda- tion in The Hague. vi Authors Mikel Azurmendi chairs Spain’s Forum for the Social Integration of Immigrants, which was convened in 2000. He was born in the Basque country. Bilingual in Spanish and Basque, he was forced into exile for his nationalist stance in the late Sixties. A Professor at the Sorbonne during his exile, he returned to Spain to teach as a Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Basque Country. He has written several books in Basque and has been called ‘an anthropologist without a tribe’ because of his opposition to the tribal nature of mainstream Basque nationalism, particularly in its most violent forms. He was the first spokesman of the ‘Foro de Ermua’, and a founding member of ‘Basta Ya’ (That’s Enough), two organisations that have led support for the victims of terrorism and the civilian rebellion against terror. David Coleman is Reader in Demography at Oxford University. He was formerly Lecturer in Physical Anthro- pology at University College London. Between 1985 and 1987 he worked for the British government as a Special Adviser to the Home Secretary and then to the Ministers of Housing and the Environment. He has worked as a consul- tant for the Home Office, the UN and private business. He was joint editor of the European Journal of Population (Paris) from 1992 to 2000 and in 1997 was elected to the Council of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. His research interests include the compara- tive demographic trends of the industrial world, particu- larly the reasons for the persistence of substantial interna- tional differences in birth and death rates and in family structure. He is also interested in immigration trends and the demography of ethnic minorities and has published extensively on these topics. Helen Disney divides her time between running the Stockholm Network, Europe’s only dedicated network for market-oriented think-tanks, based at Civitas in London, vii viii WORK IN PROGRESS and writing articles for a variety of publications including The Times of London, the Daily Express and Sunday Express, Public Finance, Public Service Magazine, and the Centre for the New Europe’s health weblog (www. cnehealth.org). She previously worked as a leader writer for The Times and for four years at the Social Market Founda- tion, an independent pro-market think-tank in Westmin- ster, where she was Deputy Director and Editor of The Review, a quarterly journal. Tamar Jacoby is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute where she writes extensively on race, ethnicity and other subjects. Her 1998 book, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration, tells the story of race relations in New York, Detroit and Atlanta. Her articles and book reviews have been published in a host of period- icals, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New York Review of Books, the Washing- ton Monthly, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, City Journal and the Times Literary Supplement. Before joining the Manhattan Institute, she was a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek, deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page and assistant to the editor of the New York Review of Books. Robert Rowthorn is professor of Economics at Cambridge University and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He has written extensively on inflation, employment and global- isation. He has also frequently worked as a consultant on these topics for the ILO, the IMF and UNCTAD. Juan José Toribio is head of the IESE, a distinguished Spanish post-graduate business school, and writes regularly for Expansion (www.expansion.com). He holds a Doctorate in Economics from Chicago University. From 1970 to 1975 he was an Economist at the Bank of Spain and then Director General for Financial Policy at the Ministry of Economy from 1977-1979. He has been director of several financial institutions, including an Executive Directorship at the IMF. He is also a board member of the investment bank Invercaixa and of Xfera (a telecoms firm) and has been Chairman of AIAF (an organised market for fixed-income instruments) and Vice-Chairman of MEFF (the Spanish Derivatives Market). ix Introduction Helen Disney lobalisation has created a host of benefits, not least the Gfreer movement of goods and services needed to bring greater economic prosperity to the world. But along with the freer movement of goods and services comes a greater demand for other types of freedom, including a desire to share in the benefits of economic prosperity by migrating to countries where jobs and other benefits are more plentiful. Since the relaxation of its national borders, migration into and between the countries of the European Union has become far more common and has begun to raise an urgent series of policy dilemmas. How can immigrants be better integrated into society? Is the labour market flexible enough to accommodate all those who want to come here to work? What will be the impact of greater diversity on our national identity? Should we be limiting the influx of newcomers into our countries and, if so, how can we do this and how strict do we need to be? This collection of essays shows that the process of dealing with increasing migration into Europe and its impact on our welfare states and labour markets is still very much a work in progress. Policy experts are divided on whether we need more immigrants to deal with Europe’s ageing population or whether this is merely an economic myth. They are also divided on how severe the social impact of absorbing so many new cultures will be. Mikel Azurmendi, President of the Spanish Forum for the Social Integration of Immigrants, describes his personal experience of the shortcomings of multiculturalism, espe- cially in the Basque Country and in the Spanish outpost of Melilla in Africa. He argues that multiculturalism does more harm than good by leading to the creation of divided communities or ‘monocultures’ which do not integrate with x HELEN DISNEY xi one another. The solution, he says, is better education and more practical help for immigrants so that they are able to regain their dignity and build a stable home life. Only then does he think that integration stands any chance of success. David Coleman, Reader in Demography at Oxford University, also argues against mass immigration as a means of solving the problems of Europe’s ageing popula- tion. According to his calculations, the numbers needed in order to maintain the current support ratio (i.e. the number of people of working age needed to support elderly non- workers) would make life in Britain unrecognisable and untenable. The consequences of migration are not just economic but political and cultural and so, he concludes, our response to this policy question has profound implications for the British way of life. Fellow academic Bob Rowthorn of Cambridge University concurs that Fortress Europe is perhaps wrongly coined as a negative term. Juan José Toribio, Director of the IESE, a respected Spanish post-graduate business school, proposes a more open, flexible, EU-wide immigration policy. He argues that Spain’s appalling employment record stems far more from its entrenched labour market inflexibility and the size of its welfare state than from any threat theoretically posed by immigration. Giving a view from across the pond, Tamar Jacoby, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an American market-oriented think-tank, argues that almost all the good things about the United States are the result of immigra- tion. She also wonders whether it is time for European nations to face up to the challenges of assimilation and allow for more open channels for legal immigration rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to maintain a Fortress Europe. By publishing these essays, along with a series of others on the immigration question, Civitas and the Stockholm Network hope to stimulate an honest debate about the host of questions raised by the freer movement of human capital that globalisation is bringing about. If we wish to glory in the benefits that immigration may bring we must also xii WORK IN PROGRESS accept that such a radical change in our social structure has the potential to cause problems.
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