Migration Watch row says a lot about modern Britain’s attitude to immigration

This month, a report from Migration Watch apparently claimed a link between migration to the UK and youth unemployment. The derision, of both the report’s method and its claim, was immediate.

Most clearly heard amongst the dissenting voices was the IPPR’s Matt Cavanagh. Writing in the New Statesman, and describing the Migration Watch report as “almost funny”, Cavanagh effortlessly highlighted how simply placing two statistics side by side, and inviting sweeping conclusions, is academically lazy at best.

But Cavanagh also made in-depth points about the Migration Watch methodology. These points are worth repeating here, not just for how well they exposed the Migration Watch report, but for how they also reflect the unthinking myths at the core of the modern British debate on migration, plus our collective inability to spot such myths with ease.

Let’s run through those points. Firstly, Cavanagh pointed to one basic fact. Youth unemployment started to rise in 2002, two years before 2004 when the Migration Watch report begins. That year, 2004, just so happens to be the year that A8 migration, that from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, also began in earnest. So that did for the basic causation suggested by Migration Watch, that between rising A8 migration and rising youth unemployment in the UK. Secondly, perhaps more importantly, and in Cavanagh’s words “the big increase in youth unemployment came in 2008 and 2009, during the recession caused by the financial crisis, precisely the time when net immigration from Eastern Europe fell close to zero”.

That second point is arguably the most important for what it says about the report, but third, Cavanagh also pointed to other countries and other examples ignored by Migration Watch. Germany, with relatively high A8 migration, has not suffered high youth unemployment. Inversely, relatively low A8 migration in countries like Spain and Greece has, of course, not caused their high youth unemployment.

All this left the report looking like something that should be covered in red ink, complete with a large and circled “F” on the last page.

To be fair, Migration Watch did backtrack, posting a sort of defence of the report on their website. That defence, though, basically replaced their original muddling of correlation and causation with a sort of online shrug, saying only “it is implausible and counter intuitive to suggest…that A8 migration has had virtually no impact on UK youth unemployment”.

Well yes, you can’t prove a negative. On that, if nothing else, Migration Watch is correct.

This row says a lot about Britain’s attitude to migration. On the one hand, there’s a powerful right-wing lobby, one producing what amounts to populist fairy tales about the place of immigration in modern British society. But on the other, we have an underdeveloped counter-lobby, to the extent that institutions such as the BBC can report on Migration Watch’s spurious research as “news”. The point is simple: there is a receptive audience in Britain for negative, ill-considered coverage of migration. I’d even go further and say the anti-immigration media have warped facts, and shut down rational debate, to the extent that we’ve come to look at the word “immigration” as an irredeemably negative word in and of itself.

If the anti-immigration lobby can’t even get their facts straight, and produce honest research, it might be assumed that whatever they claim would be easy to reject. Sadly, that such awful research gained so much coverage, and that it had to be publicly disseminated by people like Matt Cavanagh, says very little for the quality of mainstream debate on one of the biggest issues facing modern Britain this century.

Claude Moraes is an MEP for London.