Immigration and austerity, Brexit version

Simon Wren-Lewis takes on the ever-vexing question of class-vs.-identity politics, which is a lively one at the moment in Europea as well as the Democratic Party in the US, Links between austerity and immigration, and the power of information Mainly Macro 11/01/2017.

Wren-Lewis looks the role of xenophobia in rightwing nationalist politics in Britain, and argues that:

... it is a mistake to imagine it is all about economics, or even ‘culture’. One of the unfortunate consequences of the culture vs economics debate over populism is the implication that one way or another views are deterministic, and the only issue is what kind of determinism. The reason I go on about the media so much is that information matters a lot too. Although people may be anti-immigration because they have xenophobic tendencies which are reinforced when times are bad, they can also be anti-immigration because they have poor information, or worse still have been fed deliberately misleading facts. [my emphasis]

Political motivations are overdetermined, in other words. A good formulation of it, and that's important. "Operationalizing" it in practical politics is considerably more complicated.

He links to an article by Roger Scully, I spent a year researching why working-class Welsh people in the Valleys voted for Brexit, and this is what I found Independent 10/26/2017. Scully reports on the findings of a Cardiff University study that analyzed the Brexit vote in the Wales Valleys, a longtime Labour stronghold that voted Leave, despite the Labour Party's pro-EU position. Scully notes that elections in June 2017 showed that Labour still remains strong in voter preferences. The study found that immigration stood out as a key issue in the Leave voters expressed motivations for their vote:

Focus group participants in Merthyr and the Rhondda were notably unhappy at the increase in the Polish communities in those places. This was not articulated simply as xenophobia: a specifically working-class objection to immigration advanced to us was that, by making the jobs market much more competitive, the wages of locals were driven downwards. Thus, immigration was viewed as working much more to the benefit of managers and companies than for ordinary working people. Immigrants willing to work for low wages were also seen as contributing to the decline in some town centres, and in particular leading to the growth of charity and low-value shops catering to the needs of a low-wage economy.

Scully also wrote about the findings of the study in New research shows deep divisions persisting on Brexit Welsh Brexit Blog 10/26/2017:

• There remains substantial hostility among many of these voters towards immigration, with specific problems cited being immigrants taking jobs from locals and driving down wages – to the benefit of employers rather than ordinary workers;
• The statement that Wales is a net beneficiary from the EU budget was treated with significant scepticism by focus group participants. And much EU spending in the valleys was viewed as wasteful ‘vanity projects’.
• Many Leave voters expect that Brexit may cause short-term problems, but they expect it to be worth it in the longer-term.

Wren-Lewis uses the findings to discuss how austerity economics interacts with fear about immigration:

Why might attitudes to immigration change? I strongly suspect that anti-immigration attitudes, along with suspicion about benefit claimants, become stronger in bad times. When real wages are rising it is difficult to fire people up with arguments that they would have risen even faster in the absence of immigration. But when real wages are falling, as they have been in the UK in an unprecedented way over the last decade, it is much easier to blame outsiders. Equally when public services deteriorate it is easy to blame newcomers.

It is wrong to think that this only happens among working class, left behind communities. Catalonia is a relatively rich part of Spain, and there has always been resentment about this area ‘subsidising’ the rest of the country. But it is very noticeable how support for pro-independence parties increased sharply as Spain turned to austerity, although that could also be a reaction to corruption scandals. [my emphasis]

The dominance of neoliberal economic policies and their endorsement by the Labour Party for many years also meant in practice slow in real wage growth and a decline in public services, both key parts of the neoliberal gospel.

Wren-Lewis emphasizes the pro-immigration politicians can't just cower in fear of xenophobic propaganda and sentiments, they need to make the case for the benefits of immigration:

Of course most people want to stop immigrants coming here and claiming unemployment benefit. This is why newspapers keep playing the trick of talking about the large number of migrants ‘who are not employed’, conveniently forgetting to mention that this includes people like mothers looking after children. In reality unemployment among EU immigrants is below that among the native population. In addition, we can already deport EU immigrants that remain unemployed under EU law if the government could be bothered to do so.

For politicians who do want to start making the case for immigration, the place I would start is public services. Few economists would dispute that immigrants pay more in tax than they take out in using public services. Yet most of the public believe the opposite. [my emphasis]