A Secret Success

Farhad Motazedian likes pizza, which is good because his shop makes as many as 80 pies a day. He arrived in Britain four years ago from Iran — claiming political asylum after getting caught up in antigovernment demonstrations — and ended up in Leicester, an industrial city 150 km north of London. For 15 months he shared a small room with two chain smokers in a run-down hotel that housed some 400 other asylum seekers. An experienced and energetic materials engineer, he wasn’t permitted to have a job while the authorities considered his case, so he volunteered to work for free food and pocket money at a suburban pizzeria called Roberto’s.

“I had to do something. I just wanted to learn,” says Motazedian, 35, who also took courses in computer-aided design. After two years the authorities rejected his asylum bid; he appealed, and when he finally won refugee status he received a government check for $6,700 in retroactive income support. He and a partner then stumped up $8,000 each and borrowed another $8,000 to buy Roberto’s and a small apartment upstairs; Motazedian moved into it and kept making those pies. He also enrolled in a doctoral metallurgy program at Leicester University — and won a full scholarship. “This is a miracle for me,” says Motazedian. He’s so busy in the lab that he recently had to sell his share of the pizza joint to his partner, but still lends a hand.

Ask most British voters what they think of immigrants, and you won’t hear about the kind of drive and ambition Motazedian displays. Anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in Britain, as it is elsewhere in Europe. In the U.K., the backlash is directed mainly at asylum seekers such as Motazedian — fueled by frequent tabloid headlines like a door we can’t close (Daily Mail) and stop the asylum invasion (Express). In 1995, 65% of British citizens surveyed wanted to reduce the number of immigrants; by 2003 that number had increased to 74%. Some 39% of those surveyed link immigration to increased crime, and 64% think the government spends too much money helping immigrants. The popularity of the avowedly racist British National Party is stalled, but the U.K. Independence Party — which wants to cap immigration, pay existing immigrants to leave, and get Britain out of the E.U. — won 16.8% of the vote in the European parliamentary elections last June, and has more than 30 local council seats around the country.

And no wonder: a quarter of British voters think controlling immigration is the U.K.’s most pressing problem, and the Labour and Conservative parties are competing to out-tough each other on the issue. Two weeks ago Labour announced its new five-year plan to control immigration, including a points system, modeled on Australia’s, to favor the highly skilled; on-the-spot penalties for employers who hire illegals; and swifter deportation for asylum seekers whose appeals have failed. The Tories would go further, setting an annual cap on immigrants of all sorts and withdrawing from the 1951 refugee treaty that obliges countries to take in anyone who is genuinely fleeing persecution. Two-thirds of voters say they like the approach. Last week the Tories made headlines again with a plan to require long-term non-European visitors to pay for health exams at home in order to cut the number arriving with tuberculosis and aids. Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the Tories of using immigration to “seize power by the back door.”

But all that macho posturing doesn’t square with the realities. Britain is becoming a nation of immigrants — 8% of its total population, and 26% of London’s, was born outside the U.K. — but a much more successful one than the British people realize. That’s a well-kept secret, partly because this politically explosive debate is being carried on in a knowledge vacuum. Research into why migrants come, what motivates and deters them, and what their effects are once they arrive has only recently become a serious field.

No one really knows how many immigrants are in the country. New entrants from outside the E.U. are noted upon arrival, but there is no system to record who leaves, so rejected asylum seekers who go to ground and people who overstay their visas are lost to official figures. Illegals who sneak in are invisible, too. Even the academics who produce the figures agree that the best estimates of immigrants’ costs and contributions to the economy are crude. In the absence of hard numbers, the political debate rests on perceptions — and the crucial one is that people feel immigrants are flooding in. A 2003 survey showed that British citizens pegged the foreign-born population at 24%, three times the actual figure — a misperception common throughout Europe (see chart).

Other popular ideas about immigration are also false: for example, that asylum seekers get priority over citizens for government housing, or that most migrants are dark-skinned people from poor countries. In fact, about half of foreign workers in the U.K. come from Western Europe, with Ireland providing by far the most. While there are some communities where immigrants remain unsuccessful, resentful and resented, the more striking phenomenon is how well immigration has worked for Britain. The U.K.’s National Health Service would screech to a halt without foreign staff (in 2000, 27% of health professionals were foreign); the humming economy is sucking in migrants from all over the world, many of them highly skilled, with the government’s active encouragement. Nearly two-thirds of immigrants arriving between 1994 and 2003 who were employed before coming to the U.K. had worked in professional and managerial jobs. In the late 1990s, non-British nationals made up 12.5% of the country’s academic and research staff.

This is not to say that Britain’s immigration policies are perfect, or that all anti-immigration arguments are baseless myths. But cool-eyed analysis suggests that on balance, immigration is good for the U.K. — and, by extension, Europe. Here’s a look at how some of the key arguments against immigration stack up.

ASYLUM SEEKERS AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS DON’T WANT TO ASSIMILATE — and they’re destabilizing Britain. First a bit of history. Since the 1960s, postcolonial Britain has tried to embrace multiculturalism with a sense of duty unmatched elsewhere in Europe. “Positive discrimination” laws were adopted to combat racism, contributing to some success in integrating immigrants from the Caribbean, and later Asia. But overall, the reality never matched the tolerant ideal, and from time to time the situation has exploded. In 2001, the northern textile manufacturing town of Bradford was convulsed by riots that pitted mostly British-born young Muslims against local police; a government commission put most of the blame on highly segregated neighborhoods and schools, plus poor job opportunities for young minorities. It’s a common pattern across Europe: barriers of culture, education, wealth and prejudice prevent newcomers and their offspring from integrating — and young people in particular feel they will never be allowed to assimilate.

Increasingly worried about an archipelago of immigrant communities that feel disconnected from Britain, the government is moving away from multiculturalism toward a new approach stressing “community cohesion.” Even Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, which has been multiculturalism’s epicenter, declared last year that the word now “means the wrong things” and promotes “separateness.” “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness,” he said, based on values of tolerance and equality that people of any background can support. The government seems to agree; its new immigration plan will require anyone who wants to stay in Britain permanently to pass tests in English and knowledge of British life.

Of course, embedding a major cultural shift will take time. But one sign that barriers to mixing are falling is the growing number of interracial marriages and long-term partnerships in Britain. Interviews in 1996 with more than 8,000 British-born black people of Caribbean origin revealed that half of the men and one-third of the women with partners had a white partner. This was about four times higher than the rate for those who had been born in the Caribbean and later immigrated to Britain.

BRITAIN CAN’T ABSORB MORE IMMIGRANTS WITHOUT DESTROYING ITS NATIONAL IDENTITY — AND MAKING ITSELF POORER. Andrew Green, a former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia who heads Migration Watch U.K., an advocacy group that’s skeptical about current policy, points out that official immigration projections have underestimated actual flows for a decade. Now the government’s high-end projection predicts a net inflow to Britain of 190,000 people per year. At that rate, Green says, “our population will grow by 7.6 million by 2031, equivalent to seven times the population of Birmingham, of which nearly 90% will be due to immigration.” In areas of concentrated immigration like London, Green argues, that will increase pressure on an already creaky public transport system and make affordable housing even harder to find. “London and the southeast are already almost twice as crowded as Holland,” he says. While Green endorses controlled migration of skilled workers, “every major study shows the increase in wealth for the host community from mass immigration is very small indeed,” he says. And the cost, he points out, is “more traffic jams, more runways, more infrastructure that must be built.”

The Home Office does not really disagree with Green’s demographic projections, but no one is sure what it means for Britain. London may be crowded, but its population is less than it was 30 years ago. Houses for immigrants cost money, but constructing them means jobs and growth. The government in Scotland is actively seeking new migrants to counteract a long-term population sag and is dubious about the cuts that Tories and Labour in London want to implement. Steve Vertovec, director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University, says that Green’s analysis is flawed because “it’s based on a zero-sum game: that all resources are finite, and immigrants use them up.” But “jobs are created because there are new people here. Social services get restructured as demand changes. National identity isn’t stagnant either.” Yes, there’s still 4.7% unemployment in Britain, but in November there were also 640,000 vacant jobs. “What are you going to do?” Vertovec asks. “Frog-march British people to make them take the jobs?”

Supporting asylum seekers, according to the Home Office, cost the government an estimated $3.5 billion in 2003, and some communities face particular burdens, like London, where 21% of secondary school students are not fluent in English. Recently, some towns that used to accept asylum seekers have stopped because the financial benefits were outweighed by local tensions, including some racially motivated attacks. A study for the Home Office in 2003 estimated that in 1999-2000, migrants contributed about 10% more to the Treasury in taxes than they removed in benefits and services — about $4 billion.

Mounting criticism and a desire to reduce immigration flows have prompted a crackdown of sorts from Blair’s Labour government. Benefits for asylum seekers have been cut back several times since 1997. They’re no longer allowed to work while their cases are adjudicated; they and any dependents can be indefinitely detained without trial if an immigration officer fears they’ll abscond; applicants must now declare themselves to immigration officials as soon as they enter Britain or be denied benefits; the back payments of welfare that allowed Motazedian to buy his pizza parlor after winning refugee status have recently been replaced with a loan; and the numbers receiving government aid have dropped. All of that contributed to a slump in asylum applications of 41% between 2002 and 2003, to 49,405. But because asylum seekers have become the symbol for everything voters think is wrong with their system, the government’s new five-year plan will reduce appeals and devote more effort to deporting those who fail.

THE TYPICAL IMMIGRANT IS AN ASYLUM SEEKER WITHOUT SKILLS OR EDUCATION. In fact, asylum seekers make up only a small part of Britain’s overall intake — and many of them are highly skilled. In 2003, for example, 20,980 asylum seekers were granted permission to stay, compared to 119,000 who came on work permits (mostly to supply skills employers say they can’t find in Britain), 61,800 for short-term jobs and 319,000 as students. Beyond that, almost 91,000 workers from the E.U.’s new member states — more than half from Poland — registered as workers between May and September 2004; half are estimated to have been working illegally already.

Britain and Ireland were the only E.U. countries that provided an open door to workers from the accession countries. Why does the U.K. want them? “Their work ethic is high, they are very disciplined, enthusiastic, responsible, and their attendance is fantastic,” says Ian Payne, operations manager for Alban Recruitment Ltd., an employment agency in Inverness that now has an office in Lódz. So far it has recruited 250 Poles, as well as a few Slovaks and Latvians, predominantly for fish factories in the Scottish highlands. “Basically we are filling the positions the locals don’t want,” he says, “and the employers are a lot happier with them than with the locals.”

For Poles, the attraction is obvious: wages seven or eight times what they can get at home for the same job. Some are exploited by employers who pay less than the minimum wage, or nothing at all. All the same, the influx shows that the opportunities are real. Marek Czubek, from Czestochowa in southern central Poland, arrived in London on a Sunday last May speaking almost no English. By Monday, he had a job in a car wash and lived in a house with 10 other Poles. Now he’s managed to land a job in his field, printing, working 12 to 14 hours a day. “I am very happy here,” he says, in broken English. “I wanted to start a new life and it’s better here.”

IMMIGRANTS DEPRESS WAGES AND TAKE JOBS FROM LOCALS. “It’s still an open debate,” says Christian Dustmann, director of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College, London, “but the strong weight of the evidence is that if there’s an effect on wages and jobs, it’s very modest.” By filling labor shortages and generating economic activity of their own, migrants add to as well as take from the economy. The construction industry, for example, estimates it could use another 24,000 workers — partly to help build houses that newcomers might eventually be able to buy. In 2000, there were 5% more university graduates among immigrants than among white British-born citizens, and their distribution of skills fits well with marketplace needs.

Different groups perform differently. Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants, for example, are poorer than other groups because of relatively low education and a culture that prevents many women from working outside the home, while those from China outperform British-born whites on many measures, including self-employment, education and housing. But “in general, immigrants come to work,” says Dustmann. “It’s very difficult to leave everything behind and start over again. It’s more motivated people who do that.” And Europe will need a lot of motivated people to fill the hole caused by the 20 million drop in its working population projected by 2030.

THE IMMIGRANTS NEVER GO HOME. “Half of global people flows are now made up of women, looking to support their children and families,” says Vertovec. “They aren’t looking to put down roots and tap into the welfare system.” Cheap flights and phone calls “mean that staying and settling down aren’t the model anymore.” When Portugal and Greece joined the E.U. in the 1980s, fears were widely voiced about a horde of cheap workers going north, going on welfare and never going home. Instead, after an initial influx, more ended up leaving than staying, as people returned to retire or take advantage of economies juiced up by joining the E.U.

Even in the face of the 91,000 people from the E.U.’s new member states who registered between May and September, Dustmann thinks the net inflow over the next 10 years from the accession countries will be just 13,000 per year. “Poland is a wonderful country: it’s a member of the E.U., in seven years its people will be able to live anywhere in Europe, economic growth is good,” he says. “We do expect high migration, but much of it will be temporary.”

BRITONS JUST DON’T LIKE FOREIGNERS. With headlines like get them out, it would be easy to forget that the U.K. has been multicultural for decades — and that most British people seem to like the immigrants they meet. “People who live with immigrants tend to get on fine. Anti-immigrant sentiment is usually general, not specific,” says Richard Black, Director of the Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex. A place where integration is largely succeeding is Leicester, near where Motazedian runs his pizza parlor.The city already has 50% ethnic minority and foreign students in its schools, and is set to become by 2011 the first city in Europe with a minority white population. But Leicester took no chances when it accepted the refugees the government in 2000 decided to disperse around the country. The only state housing available was fairly dilapidated — in solidly white working-class neighborhoods. The city started an outreach project, spoke with residents and schools, set up consultative committees, talked to the newspapers, and for a year before any asylum seekers showed up, “went out to bash myths,” says Manny Akyigyina, who runs Leicester’s asylum seekers’ program. Then, when the refugees did come, they were encouraged to volunteer in schools and other community organizations. “The story spread quickly that they were O.K.,” Akyigyina says.

Helen Rhodes, a consultant nurse who runs a health center created specially to treat asylum seekers and refugees, says there’s still a lot of prejudice toward her clients. “I don’t tell people where I work,” she says. “If I do I get a tirade.” But Akyigyina, who came to Britain from Ghana in 1976 at age 15, notes a sea change. Now Somalis granted asylum elsewhere in Europe are moving to Leicester, where there are more than a dozen mosques, and where 42 Somali-owned businesses have been created in the last four years. “At school, my 7-year-old is learning about Hanukkah and Eid as well as Christmas,” he says. “People come from all over Europe to study how we do it, because it’s working well. The culture has changed.”

And not just in Leicester. The British Social Attitudes survey reports that 32% of people now think whether someone is “British” depends only on “civic” characteristics that can be acquired, such as speaking English, having U.K. citizenship and respecting the country’s laws, as opposed to fixed characteristics like race and birthplace. That’s up from 23% in 1995. Only 10% see a person’s “Britishness” as depending only on ethnic factors. So the British are changing, too, being transformed by immigrants even as they impart some of their own characteristics to the new arrivals. That’s a paradox perhaps best appreciated while watching an Iranian metallurgist make a tandoori chicken pizza at a restaurant in a predominantly white suburb of a resurgent old English mill town. “I’m grateful,” says Motazedian,” for all my opportunities.”