In a major study published last week,
the OECD has concluded that the costs and contributions of immigrants
in most OECD member countries sum to a net positive outcome. That is to
say, that in most OECD countries the benefits of taxes, v.a.t. and
other payments by immigrants into the economy amount to more than the cost of
pensions, child care and other elements of social welfare that immigrants receive.
This encouraging message hides the less
comforting truth that the data the study uses to reach its
conclusions does not distinguish between the countries of origin of
the immigrants. They are merely classified as either “native-born” or “foreign-born”.
However, it so happens that the countries of immigrants' origin tend to be of
basically two rather different kinds: 1) countries more or less
similar to the receiving country, e.g., immigration to European
countries from other European countries; 2) immigration from non-OECD
(mostly third world) countries.
It is well known that immigrants from
the first group have come to find work and are usually qualified for it, hence are overwhelmingly contributors to their host
country. Large numbers of immigrants from the second category are poorly qualified for the labor markets of OECD countries, even though many have come for work or economic betterment, and so represent mostly costs.
Hence, the OECD is misleading and
confusing the debate about immigration policy by treating European
(or: “industrialized world”) immigrants and third world
immigrants as if they were comparable units. The report occasionally
refers to the lack of separate data for third world immigrants as a
technical statistical problem, but I have little doubt that with the
use of a little more imagination this problem could have been solved.
As it is we now have a 400-page study with lots of superficially
relevant statistics, but less of the incisive analysis that this
problem requires.
A policy that regards country of origin
as immaterial is bound to overlook the challenge of insufficient
resources in the receiving countries, and of injustice to the
remaining (non-emi/immigrating) third world population who stay at home. This debate is of course continually being suffocated by
the stereotypical charges of racism, exclusivism, anti-islamism etc.
With the OECD now so generously helping out, there seems to be no way
out, only further rounds of irrelevant talk, in this “benevolent” circus of immigration debate.
4 comments:
Olav,
also, unless the intra-european migration stats are all persons who were not employed in their home (or previous host) country, then there is a loss of tax revenue to their previous european country of residence.
Bob
Bob, that seems logical. The thing is, though, that you would have to compare those who move from a (tax-paying) job in one OECD country to a new job in another OECD country, with those who move from unemployment (with or without benefits) in one OECD country to new employment in another OECD-country. I will not continue to belabor the obvious, it gets pretty hairy after a while, which is why we have statistics bureaus in all OECD countries who ought to have all of theses categories in order.
Olav, just a few questions and comments on this. Excuse me for not having read the report before commenting, so please correct me if I have misunderstood something. I fully agree with you that statistics like this should be as transparent as possible. People deserve to be informed also about things that some others perceive to be "sensitive". That’s (should be) democracy.
But I wonder how "immigrant" is defined. Does it include refugees? If so, the data will be skewed, I guess, since not many people from OECD countries have to flee. In other words, the latter group move because they think they could find a new job. They are probably quite qualified, since most countries do not accept immigrants if there is no perceived need for the particular competencies they bring.
Second, given that immigrants (or rather, refugees) take care of most jobs related to communication, cleaning, maintenance and so on, are you really sure that the value of the work they as a collective perform is so low? Note that the relevant comparison is here not how much immigrants from OECD countries vs. other parts of the world pay. Instead, I guess, more relevant is the question how much we would have had to pay for these services, had not the non-OECD immigrants been here (and the same goes for OECD workforce immigrants, of course).
Björn H
Björn, immigrant is defined differently in different parts of the study. Take a look for yourself, the link is there at the bottom of my blog. The report is in fact well written and pedagogically structured. The first 125 pages deal with labor markets and the international movements that people make for all kinds of reasons – this section is quite specific in its definitions of the people who move. It is also a very full and rich report on these topics. At the same time, these first two chapters do not try to estimate cost and benefit, only numbers of individuals moving. However, the main aim of the report – and its main body from p 125 on - is to assess the cost and the contributions of immigrants to their host countries, and here only the categories foreign-born and native-born are used. The reason as I understand it is purely technical; there are no comparable statistics for all OECD countries to allow more fine-grained analysis; and notably not for a category of “immigrants from non-OECD countries” to compare with “immigrants from OECD-countries”. What I criticize is not this technical difficulty, but the unwarranted certainty with which the conclusions are presented, as if they show something that in fact is not proven.
And I am not saying the contributions of the many non-OECD immigrants working are particularly low, but I suspect the cost of their non-contributing cousins from non-OECD countries is substantial. I may be wrong, but then again I would have liked to see figures that could enlighten us all on this question.
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