The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, the UK needs migration for its future prosperity

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

The fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport, England set off one of the worst periods of unrest across the UK. Mobs motivated by racial and religious hatred attacked hotels housing migrants and set buildings across the country on fire. The riots exposed an underlying anger at mass migration that has divided the nation. Left wing activists argue that migrants should be welcomed with open arms. They contribute more to the public purse than native born Britons, provide a much-needed influx of labour to an aging population, and are being unfairly targeted for a breakdown in social services by local governments. Others argue that while mobs and rioting should never be tolerated, the anger driving this unrest has merit. Mass, uncontrolled, low-skill, and low-wage immigration weakens the economy, puts a strain on the UK’s social safety net, and weakens its social fabric and cultural identity. Arguing in favour of the resolution is Ash Sarkar. She’s a British journalist, a senior editor at Novara Media, and a political activist. Arguing against the resolution is Matthew Goodwin. He’s a British academic, pollster, and author of one of UK's biggest Substacks: mattgoodwin.org   The host of this Munk Debates podcast episode is Rudyard Griffiths Free Members can vote on who they think won this debate on our website www.munkdebates.com.   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We tried socialism all through the 20th century, and it failed every time. We should restore dignity to the working class and stop saying you need a credential in order to achieve the most basic, modest version of the American dream. Netanyahu is the worst leader the Jewish people ever had. He should be impeached. Genocide is the latest modern blood liable that anti-Semites use to justify their anti-Zionism. We should prioritize making sure that no more Ukrainians die, that this war is brought to an end. All parents want to help children with their feelings, but I argue that not every feeling is worth paying attention to. Why are these students covering their faces?

I think it says something about their movement, about their ideology, and also simply the fact that they're also cowards. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day. Our goal with each and every program of the Monk's. debates is to arm you with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be at resolve, the UK needs migration for its future prosperity. Startless hour here in the UK, where there's been renewed rioting in some cities in England and

Northern Ireland. In Rotherham, rioters shouted, get them out, broke windows and some appeared to smash their way inside a hotel housing asylum seekers. The top prosecutor in England and Wales says he is willing to consider charging some people involved in the disorder with terrorism offenses. Fatal stabbing of three young girls at the dance class in Southport, England this summer set off one of the worst periods of unrest in recent UK history. Mobs motivated by racial slurs and religious hatred attacked hotels, housing migrants and setting buildings a liar across the country.

Here's UK Prime Minister, Kier Starrmer, condemning the attack. attacks. I won't shy away from calling it what it is. Far-right thuggery to those who feel targeted because of the color of your skin or your faith. I know how frightening this must be. I want you to know that this violent mob do not represent our country. The riots exposed an underlying anger at continuing high rates of migration that has divided. UK citizens, left-wing activists argue that migrants should be welcomed with open arms. They contribute to the public purse. More than native-born Britons provide much-needed influx of labor into an aging population

and are being unfairly targeted for breakdown in social services by local governments. It's impossible to ignore the racist undertones of these protests which are targeting Muslim migrants in particular. The wider issue is that scapegoating of Muslims, of migrants, of people of color that we've seen decades and time and time again in the news where migrants are referred to as illegal immigrants or far-right thugs are sort of a class as just protesters rather than what they really are, which is racist, Islamophobic riots. Others argue that while moms and rioting should never be tolerated, the anger driving this unrest has its foundation in some real, social and cultural issues. Here's one of the protesters. It's our country and we're getting pushed out. I understand how the native Indians felt in America now because that's what the white man did. We're going to push them out. And is the white man getting pushed out of this country?

Large scale, uncontrolled, low-skill, low-wage migration weakens the economy, its critics argue, putting strain on the UK's social safety net and the country's social fabric and shared cultural identity. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, the UK needs migration for its future prosperity. Arguing forward, the motion is Ash Sarkar. She's a British journalist and editor at Novara Media, political activist and former monk mainstaged debater.

Arguing against the resolution is Matthew Goodwin. He's a British academic, best-selling author, Polster, an author of one of the United Kingdom's biggest substacks, mat-goodwin.org. Ash, Matthew, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Important debate, not only in the United Kingdom,

but here in Canada and around the Western world. It's about migration and its impacts on our economy and a collective way of life. We're getting to that issue with our resolution. be it resolved. The UK needs migration for its future prosperity. Ash Sarkar, you're arguing in favor of the motion. Let's have you kick off today's debate. Yeah, so this is probably not a good way to kick off, but I don't actually think I'm the best at these debates. And the reason is that I often find myself quibbling more with the proposition that I'm meant to be defending than thinking up ways to actually defend it. And so in the spirit of quibbles, I suppose I would really want us to ask, ourselves, how are we defining prosperity? And that's particularly important for this discussion, because in the UK, for years, what the government has done is use inward migration to conceal

the fact that our economy is circling the drain. So simply by adding new people to the population, they spend money, growth in GDP gets boosted, a bit above zero. And if I wanted to, I could be really dishonest and be like, oh, so you migration creates prosperity. But I don't actually believe that is what we're seeing here. Because to think that, you'd have to ignore things like widening inequalities, income inequality, asset wealth inequality, inequalities in job creation, inequalities in infrastructure investment across the different regions of the UK. It would mean we'd have to ignore crumbling public services, the sky high cost of living, and more than a decade of lost wage growth. You know, people in the UK right now feel poorer than they did 14 years ago,

then they did maybe even 40 years ago. And it's no good just pointing at like, oh, look, the line goes up and thinking that's going to convince them otherwise. So the thing I'm going to say is slightly different. And it's that the UK needs migration to be able to address this crisis that I've just described, this crisis of living standards. And the place I'd like to begin for this debate is that it is just a fact that we are not having enough babies to maintain a stable population without inward migration.

So in London, which is the city where I live, live. Primary schools are closing because there's literally not enough children being born to keep them open. Our birth rate is 1.56 births per woman. You need about 2.07 just to keep the population where it is. And our population is aging. So by 2029, we're going to have more people retiring than people entering the workforce. And that's going to have a massive impact on our ability to fund public services like the NHS, build infrastructure, pursue the goal of energy sovereignty. and it's going to put close pressure on young people just to look after their ageing relatives, right?

Which will then make it more difficult to have kids of your own. And we do have examples of countries with aging populations, low birth rates and low immigration. And there are lots of very good things about Japan and South Korea, but their demographic crises, not one of them. By 2040, Japan will have a labor shortage of 11 million people. And this is a country with much more advanced infrastructure than our own. So if they're struggling to cope with how,

having too few workers and a growing demand for pensions and social care, what's it going to be like for us? It's no secret that I do want us to invest in our own workforce to train our own doctors and nurses, but that isn't going to be enough to compensate for the contributions made by immigrants in crucial sectors. So right now there are more Ghanaian nurses working in the NHS than they are in Ghana. That's very bad for Ghana. It's unfair globally, but it is actually quite good for us. Half the doctors registering to practice with the GMC are qualified outside. the UK. 38% of food manufacturing workers foreign-born, 22% of workers in science, research and development.

And if immigration drastically is reduced tomorrow, we're going to spend more time trying to plug those gaps than we can planning for the future. We've got so much catching up to do when it comes to things like high-speed rail, insulating houses, installing green technology that will make everything cheaper. And that's before you get to the bit about addressing

our own aging population. So for me, it is absolutely self-evident that when you look at these interlocking multiple crises, we absolutely need inward migration to have a snowball's chance in hell of having bettered living standards rather than worsened ones. Thank you, Ash Sarker, for that terrific opening statement in our debate today. We're now going to call on Matthew, who's arguing against our emotion. We're going to give him the same opportunity, two minutes on the clock or a little bit more, should he want, just to even things up. Our motion before the proverbial house, be it resolved, the United Kingdom needs migration for its future prosperity. Matthew, take us away.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you for arranging this debate. I'm arguing against the motion. And to be honest, as much of what Ash has just said that I actually agree with, I think many people who are within the political and economic, elite are using mass migration to basically keep profits high, keep costs low, keep consumption going. And what it's giving us is a very hollowed out weak economy that isn't working primarily for the British people. Where I think I differ is that I don't think continuing mass migration is a way out of that. I think mass migration is actively worsening the status quo. Just in the last few weeks,

We've had one of the first serious studies by the Office for Budget Responsibility, which has shown that the exact kind of migration that Britain has been encouraging post-Brexit, which is mainly low-wage, low-skill, non-selective migration. On average, a low-skill migrant living to the age of about 60 is costing the British taxpayer, on average, £150,000, which rises to £500,000, pounds if they live to 80, which rises to a million pounds, if they live to 100. It's a very crude way of looking at the economic impact. That's interesting, but actually the real story here is that the British state is actively

concealing information about the fiscal effects of migration. So if you look at our department for work and pensions, if you look at our home office, basically we are simultaneously accusing voters of misinformation around the fiscal effect of migration while not making information about the impact of migration available to ordinary voters. So, for example, hiding tax credits and tax payments by nationality and immigration status, hiding data regarding crime, imprisonment, arrest rates by nationality and immigration status. These things really need to be put into the public domain so we can all have a transparent debate about this question and they're not because people within the British state

are actively concealing that data. So the OBR study that we've just had is important, but is also why if you want to look at the fiscal impact of migration, you actually have to look outside of the UK at studies in the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Germany, which have got more granular data on the fiscal impact of migration. And they all basically say the same thing, which is that migration, primarily from outside of Europe, from the Middle East, Northern Africa, low-skill, low-wage migration of exactly the kind that Brexit Britain is now encouraging is consistently a net fiscal cost, not benefit to the economy, and I'm sure we'll come back to those points.

So I don't think the evidence is there to support the claim. But lastly, just on this issue of ageing, one of the things that I think people who make that argument tend to downplay is that migrants get old too. And what's happening in Western economies is that mass migration, as countries like Canada are now accepting, are accepting, is pushing Western states into what we might call a population trap, which is whereby the pace of demographic change

is exceeding the capacity of the state to provide basic public services. Now, the OBR report in the UK, my last point, made this point very subtly, very few people picked up on it. It said, actually, what we're seeing is capital dilution in the UK. By that, they mean infrastructure, schools, education, healthcare is all basically being eroded by widespread, unprecedented rates of mass migration. So this population trap point to me is absolutely key. I don't think mass migration is driving prosperity. I think it is undermining prosperity. And those are some points to kick us off. Thanks. Excellent summation. Matthew, two terrific opening statements. Let's move now to rebuttal. So a similar opportunity. Let's try to keep it to two minutes if we can because we have lots of opportunity in the back and forth moderated middle of this debate to unpack all of your different issues and ideas. So Ash Sarkar, let's have your rebuttal first. I mean, there's so much to get into you there. I think maybe the first thing that I want to talk about is what Matt described as the issue of low-skill migrants who are coming here, living to the age of 60.

Because when I was doing my research for this debate, I was reading about the 1905 Aliens Act. The 1905 Aliens Act is pretty much the first piece of legislation in British law that's really, really dealing with immigration controls. And the background to this legislation being introduced in 1905 was that through the 1890s, Jewish people who were living in the Russian Empire were subject to religious persecution. They were victims of pogroms and they were living in deep, deep poverty. And so many of them left and immigrated to the United States, but about 150,000 came to the UK. They were poor. Many of them were illiterate. Many of them lived in poverty when they got here.

They absolutely transformed London's East End, and they were subject to some pretty disgusting anti-Semitism. So a quote from the Manchester Evening Chronicle in an editorial in 1905 said that the dirty, destitute-deas, verminous foreign criminal who dumps himself on our soil and rates simultaneously shall be forbidden to land. There were MPs who formed an alliance, which I think was called like the British Brotherhood League, which is hilariously shortened to BBL. They said that Britain was becoming the dumping ground of Europe. Now, why I think it was so instructive to go back and look at this particular wave of migration of Jewish people from the Russian Empire coming here?

They came here poor, they came here illiterate, is that quite obviously they didn't stay poor and illiterate. So, yes, they transformed the East End culturally. We have since absorbed that into our idea of Englishness and Britishness. We now look back on those waves of immigration of Jewish people fleeing pogroms and look at that as a British success story in terms of social mobility, in terms of integration, and in terms of our own sense of national identity. And I suppose there's so much that Matt said, and I'm sure we'll get into it in the back and forth. But the thing that I would put to him is this, is that when you're taking that snapshot of immigrant communities and saying, you know, they're low skill and they're low wage, do you accept that over generations that can and does really profoundly change? Important points from Ash Sarkar there. Now an opportunity for Matthew Goodwin to have his rebuttal to either Ash's opening statement.

or what he's just heard? Yeah, thanks. Let me just say a couple of responses to the opening statement, because it's a really important one. I think there is a temptation to say, well, Western nations are aging, therefore, we need mass migration. And to be clear, the level of migration that we are now experiencing is completely unprecedented. It's not like anything we saw in the early 20th century. I mean, we've had, for example, around 6 million people be added to the UK population since 2001. We're scheduled to have or forecast to have close to another 7 million people over the next 12 years, which is about 75% of the way to another London. So the demographic change we're experiencing

right now, 10% population growth is like nothing we've seen before. And Britain wasn't always a nation of migrants, but we can come back to that. The point about aging is absolutely critical because where this debate falls down is that many people are losing sight of this issue around capital dilution. So as we're relying on more and more migration to basically keep the show on the road, the capacity of the state to provide basic public services, or even provide things like housing, is being rapidly diminished. I'll give you one example. We have this report recently in the UK, this Office for Budget Responsibility report, the first time people within the civil service have actually looked at different kinds of migration.

And they concluded, shocker, that low-scale, low-wage migration is a net fiscal cost on average. But remarkably, what they also assume is that migrants don't have any children, which is utterly bizarre. So they don't take into account of the wider impact on the system, on education, on healthcare and so forth. and they don't look at many of the things that I've talked about in terms of data. They don't look at the impact on the welfare state. They don't look at the impact on things like crime. They don't look at the impact on things like the welfare state. Why is that important?

Well, because academics like Robert Putnam and others have shown that as you go into rapidly diversifying societies, public trust falls down, declines, and support for welfare declines, too. Which is why I think many people on the left of politics really need to grasp the longer-term consequences of the experiment that they're supporting because as society's fragment, people become less willing to pay into the collective pot, support for welfare goes down and public service delivery is undermined. Give you one example briefly, which is housing. In the UK, we built 180,000 homes last year. I know Canadians will relate to this point. You've got a housing crisis as well. We've built 180,000 homes in England and Wales. On current estimates, because of mass migration,

we need to build somewhere between 500 and 600,000 homes every year for the foreseeable future just to keep up with demand from previous migration. Before you take into account anything that happens after our debate today. Now, that's an example of the state failing to provide a core good, a core right, if you like, for citizens because demand is massively outstripping supply. I don't think that's a very progressive, fair place for any society. to be. So as we turn to mass migration to alleviate this aging issue, rather than think about ways of boosting family growth, fertility rates, or even actually, God forbid, deciding on a different

economic model that looks to things like innovation or, you know, automation and so forth, rather than actually relying on this mass consumption model, I think that, you know, the state's ability to actually do what it's supposed to do, keep people. safe, provide basic services will just erode over time. And the real risk there is support for democracy, support for the welfare state, support for legitimate government will also diminish. Thank you, Matthew. Good one. Great rebuttal also. Well, let me join the conversation with just some thoughts on the minds of our audience tuning into this terrific debate. Our motion today, be it resolved. The UK needs migration for its future prosperity. And Ash, let me come to you first.

I think one thing that international audiences would be aware of in terms of news coming out of the UK in the last while were the large riots that occurred across your country that had a incorrectly, but nonetheless had a claim, an anti-kind of migrant anger that was elicited mistakenly, but nonetheless expressed on a fairly mass scale. And Ash, I think the question is, what is the absorptive capacity of the UK? Just moving away from economics for a moment. What's the cultural capacity of the United Kingdom to absorb large numbers of new immigrants, understandably, bringing lots of different cultures and traditions and religious beliefs to the United Kingdom? It seems that your country is really struggling with this. Would that suggest that it's time to ease up for cultural reasons and have a more sustained pace of migration that allows this to happen successfully and maybe gives you a chance to bridge what seems to be a growing golfer,

a set of cultural divides between migrants and longer standing citizens. Yeah, that's a really great question. I suppose the first thing I would say is that I think there is a danger in narrativeizing the recent riots as being solely about one thing. So some people want to say it's all about racism. Some people want to say it's all about immigration policy. I think you have to look at these two things happening simultaneously and the line's getting very blurry. And the reason why I say that is because there were many cases, whether in Manchester or in Tamworth or in Rotherham, of British people of colour who are black, who are Asian, being racially abused and even attacked. Now, that only has something to do with immigration if you think that people of colour when they're British born are always going to be somehow, you know, carrying the taint of immigration, even if we've been here for.

generations. There was a man in Manchester Piccadilly attacked by a gang of thugs and it was really, really distressing to watch. Similarly, of course, when people were attacking hotels where asylum seekers were being held, that is an expression of anger with British asylum policy, but there is also racism there as well. And people are spray painting, and just to be very crude, when the spray painting literally the words, packies out and fuck packies, right? That isn't just about immigration. It's also about race.

I am not one of those people that thinks that any discussion of asylum policy or immigration is just, you know, out of hand, you can't have it because you're racist if you do. I am one of those people, however, who thinks that you have to look quite carefully about the ways in which racist scaremongering has always been present within our discourses about immigration. That doesn't mean the discussion itself is racist,

but it means it's always been present. And while I think Matt and I will agree on some things about modern society being very fragmented, I think where we disagree is on the causes of that. I don't think that the hollowing out of society is to do with mass migration. I also don't think that mass migration necessarily results in a lack of community. Again, in the area where I live, if you want to look at who's in the churches, it's not really white Brits. It's immigrant communities kind of keeping that religious tradition alive in this country.

So it's a lot more complex than I think the anti-immigration side of the argument would like to have you believe. Thank you for that, Ash Sarkar. So similar question for you, Matthew. We're going to get to the economics because that is key here. But just to begin this back and forth on culture, do you accept the premise that there is a step limit, a rate of integration that's optimal? Well, I think the issue of the step limit is one that's now being debated. quite vigorously across Europe. I mean, we're speaking against the backdrop of election results in Austria, which would become, you know, the latest country after Germany, France, Sweden, you know, Netherlands,

etc., Italy to see a very strong political reaction to mass migration. And that's clearly what it is in all the surveys of those voters. My view would be that, especially regarding the UK, we are at or have surpassed that step limit in terms of what we're able to absorb. And it's not simply the riots and the protest. I think the first thing to say is everybody in the UK of Sound Mind would reject the violence and criminality that we saw. But where many people will then go in different directions is the extent to which they attribute the wider protest to the recent policy of, of mass migration. Now, if you look at the polling, by you govern others, over 60% of Brits, to some extent, associate those disturbances with recent immigration policy. Now, they also say,

well, they associate them with far-right figures or right-wing politicians, but arguably, you know, those politicians themselves are only really in politics or only visible because they're tapping into these widespread concerns over migration. So I think it's not only the riots. I think over the last five years, we've had a number of symptoms that have kind of alluded to that step limit that you referred to. Multiculturalism as a policy is visibly not working in the UK. We've had riots, not just those in the summer, but we've had riots in places like Leeds. We've had very visible signs of communalism in places like Leicester. We've had sectarianism at our recent general election, where very isolated, segregated communities have been mobilising along issues that are not related

really to UK domestic policy. Much of the evidence, I would argue, shows that segregation in the UK is going up, not down, that many groups are self-segregating. So for those listeners not in the UK, the key point is we are no longer experiencing inward migration from other parts of Europe. we are now experiencing much higher and faster rates of migration from outside of Europe, from Africa, the Middle East. And as in Germany, Austria, France and elsewhere, the question now is not only to what extent can we accommodate that economically, which I think is a really powerful, important question, but actually to what extent can we build an integrated and culturally cohesive society

around those forms of migration. I'm very skeptical that we can without some kind of pause where we freeze all non-essential migration, and by that I mean migration that does not directly contribute to the National Healthcare Service and to social care.

Thank you, Matthew. Ash, what are your views on this idea of a pause that one of the things, I'm sure both you and Matthew want to sustain and that you think is valuable is that multicultural mosaic, a sense of kind of harmony between groups and traditions, and just based on the fact that migration levels across many Western countries have increased substantially over the last few years, why not take a pause? Why not consolidate these gains

culturally and economically and then proceed on a basis where housing, healthcare, and all these vital public services aren't at the breaking point. In other words, wouldn't it be best to add population when our countries aren't as supply constrained as they are right now in so many different ways? Yeah, that's a really good question. All right. So in my head, and tell me if this sounds like it's not making sense,

in my head, imagine government policy is like a piano. All right? It's like a piano and you've got different keys. And one is migration, another might be building council housing, one might be nationalising certain industries, one might be taxation, one might be green investment, whatever you want. At the moment, and the nature of this discussion is that we're just hitting one key and that's migration, whether it's migration upwards or migration downwards and we're going, can this fix absolutely everything that's wrong with British society, either by pausing migration or increasing it or whatever.

Now, London, which is, you know, I'm sorry, it's just objectively the best city in the world, like anyone else who doesn't think so can like sit and swivel, is in some ways a success story. London, when I was growing up, actually had some real problems with unequal rates of educational attainment. And it was children of colour, working class children of colour who are falling behind. And there was this thing called the London Challenge, which just pumped in loads of money into London schools. And they went from being some of, you know, the worst performing to the best performing to the best. performing in the country. And that had a massive impact on things like integration. The area where I live is called Tottenham. There's a lot of poverty here, right? A lot of problems here. But ethnic harmony is not a problem, right? I can go out my house and it's, you know, Afro-Caribbeans, it's Bangladeshis, it's Romanians, it's, you know, Latin American migrants. People get on really well in part because those education systems, that kind of infrastructure, got a fair bit of money in the 2000s. So rather than talking about, okay, well, can we fix all these things just by pressing that one key migration downwards, I'd say, well, why don't we press some of these

other keys? Like investing in schools outside of London, which have really, really been hard hit by decades of austerity, why don't we have an actual industrial strategy, which is geared towards, you know, rebuilding some of those former industrial heartlands in the North and the Midlands, which had the economic beating hearts ripped out of it in the 1980s. And what's replaced it, by the way, is just, I mean, I mean, again, not to be crude, but like really shit jobs. Like a massive Amazon distribution centre opens up and you're on minimum wage and it's a crap job. Again, just pressing the one key that is immigration. I just don't think that it goes anywhere near to fixing those problems and I think that actually immigration can help us solve those problems because it

can increase the tax intake. I think the last thing I'd want to say is about the process of integration. I'm an integration optimist when the right things are in place. I think that where you've got high levels of deprivation, where you don't have a lot of economic opportunity, where you don't have unionized jobs for life in places where you're brought into contact with other people and you're forced to like drive a taxi or you know work in a kebab shop obviously you're not going to see great levels of integration the city where I live I do think has been a success story for that and I think that is reflected in the levels of social mixing that you see in the city which are really quite high I was looking through the census results of 2021 there is a massive increase in the numbers of

people living in multi-ethnic households so I'm confident in that sort of culture elasticity and absorption, if there are the right, economic and state measures in place. And I just don't want us to be bashing that one piano key again and again and again and expecting it to solve all our problems in society. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Mugt debates. Well, if you're enjoying the kind of civil and substantive conversations that we have at the debates, where we're really trying to get at the big issues and ideas that are driving the public conversation, I want to urge you to check out the hub.

The hub is Canada's fastest growing digital and news outlet. And like the monk debates, it's focused on those important conversations and bringing them to you in ways that are enlightening, enriching, and again, focused on civility above all. You can check out the hub right now at triplew the hub.ca or open your favorite podcast app and type in The Hub Canada. You'll go to the Hub's channel and see all kinds of great interviews, roundtables, discussions with thought leaders from around the world. So, Monk Debate Community, check out the Hub. We think you'll like what you see, listen, read, and hear. Do that right now at triple-W the hub.ca. Now let's get back to our Monk Debates program.

Let's move on to a couple of economic issues. I'm conscious of our time, but we've got to talk about them. Matthew, you've, in some of your earlier remarks, flagged the issue of productivity. There is an argument out there that by replacing what would normally be investments in technology or automation or other things that would drive productivity growth, which is really just the efficiency of each unit of labor in terms of how it's applied in a business, this is being substituted by labor, particularly cheaper labor, that immigrants and migrants often afford businesses. It's in effect creating productivity trap, a trap that in turn has led to here in Canada also,

multiple years now of declining per capita GDP. So the total wealth of society divided by a population is going down, and I know that's been a story in the United Kingdom too. Some would say, though, Matthew, that Western societies have struggled with productivity for an awfully long time now. And to blame this on migration or immigrants is really to ignore the fact that they are a way

to grow our economies, that they do bring savings and economic activity and a willingness to often do jobs and work that longer standing citizens either refuse or are unable or unwilling to do. So talk to us a bit about productivity. I think people want to hear more as to why you think migration is a solution

to this when others would see migration and immigration is a pretty important economic force in 20th century society. Let me start with a story. I have a car wash around the corner from where we live in Hartfordshire and the car wash used to be automated. So you'd drive your car in, you wouldn't see anybody, you'd go in, you'd buy a token, you'd put it in, you'd have your car washed. Now we have a manual car wash with five or six people working there, most of them from Albania, I don't know if they're legal. I don't know if they're illegal, but the car wash is now dependent upon what is presumably cheap labor. That is a microcosm of the broader issue that is playing out within Western societies, including, by the way, Canada and also Sweden. Canada and Sweden are both fascinating to me because I used to live in Canada. I went to Western. And in Canada and Sweden, you know, 20 years ago, you really wouldn't find anybody who was critical of the economic, of mass migration. I mean, they were notoriously liberal, tolerant, progressive societies. I was in Sweden a month ago I couldn't find a single expert academic that I was talking to

that was suggesting mass migration had been an unalloyed positive for Swedish society. Now, most of that, in fairness was about cohesion, crime and security, not about the economics. But I think even in Canada, Justin Trudeau and others have pointed to this issue of a population trap, whereby you're basically using large-scale migration to try and prop up a consumption economy that's no longer providing basic public services. Now, people on the left, like Ash and others, used to care about that.

They used to say, actually, what we really care about, good public services and treating people with fairness and equality. But what's happened is for the left, pro-migration has become a sacred value. It's become like a religion. So you can't question it at all. And if you do, you're presented with a very, sort of simplistic, quite extreme interpretation, like the one you just heard, whereas, you know,

if you're critiquing migration, you're suggesting that, well, migration should just come down and you're not bothered about anything else. I don't know anybody who's making that argument. What we're saying is, to be clear, the current model of mass immigration is bad for national economies in the West because it is suppressing productivity, GDP per capita, and is allowing big business to get away with relying on cheap workers rather than innovating their business practices. And the UK GDP per capita has been going backwards. It's the weakest since the 1970s.

Now, this is not what economists told us. In the 1990s, the economist told us trade liberalisation and globalisation would increase GDP and GDP per capita. They told us it would make our economies more productive and it would lift all boats. Tony Blair in 2005 said if you didn't believe that, basically you were a close-minded idiot. That was his speech at Labour Conference. They were all wrong.

I mean, the economists are now, with the exception of the more extreme ones, coming to the view, that this is not a good economic model. The only people who basically won't accept that are the economists who are either invested in promoting globalization to begin with or people on the left who now view pro-immigration as a kind of new religion that cannot be questioned at all. What we need to do, I think, to boost productivity is stop allowing companies to get away with relying on cheap labor, with projecting their sort of luxury beliefs.

You know, it's not big business that's going to pay the costs of mass migration. It's going to be ordinary people in northern England and elsewhere. And we need to get back to, I think, building an economy that is much more selective in how it uses migration, And where Ash and I will depart is, I would argue, an economy that is embedded around a principle of national preference, which is that public services and the economy need to be built around ensuring that British workers, British families, British people are put above the interests of big business and corporate lobbies. And that's really where I think we depart. And just lastly, I would just say, London, you know, I've lived in London, in and around London, my whole life, I'm 42. London is not Britain and London is certainly not England.

There are lots of areas outside of London that really do not exhibit the kinds of success stories, if that's what Tottenham is, that you can see in London. I would argue that the kind of integration and cohesion that you have in big capital cities is not always high trust cohesion. It's a transitory fluid cohesion, often built around. communities that are very fast-paced and transitory. I think the real test is what you're seeing outside of capital cities, small, medium towns, and also overall levels of trust. In the UK, trust in institutions has never been as low as it is today. We're not a high trust society anymore.

Now, immigration isn't the only reason for that, but I think it's a really big reason for that. Lots of people no longer trusting their institutions. And of course, this is lastly what Putnam suggested in 2011 when he was widely criticized by the academic community for suggesting that mass migration erodes trust. But that is actually what we're seeing now in the UK. So, Ash, I'm going to give you an opportunity to weigh in on the kind of economic frame here of this debate. But just to address, if you can, your answer one question, which I think people, again, listening would have on their minds, is the idea that wage growth in UK, Canada, elsewhere for working class, blue-collar workers has been abysmal over the last decade. And how can we, how can we address that in an era of

increased immigration and migration, which just demonstrably seems to push down wages because you're adding more people in this most recent tranche, increasingly unskilled, lower educated migrants and immigrants. How does that help the very types of workers that, that, You know, many, the Labor Party of Great Britain, arguably, is there to support and help or the new Democratic Party here in Canada. It's, I guess, would just seem a bit contradictory to some people to try to understand why the so-called left, the political left, supports high rates of immigration and migration, and how they square that with their agenda to support workers and living wages for workers when you're simply at, adding supply to a market. And when you add supply, you lower demand. Okay. Well, this is an example where I think we're bashing the one piano key again. Yes. In certain sectors of the economy, migration has had an impact in depressing wages. I think that

that's in arguable. However, there are other ways of dealing with that. And I think other factors, which have had a much more severe impact on flat-lining wages. One is the decimation of the trade union movement and the deliberate curtailing of collective bargaining rights. So in this country, we make it basically impossible for a trade union to organise workers and say, okay, this pay deal that we've secured, it's not just going to apply to this one atomized workplace,

it's going to be for the whole sector, Right. For me, progress doesn't look like saying, okay, well, these really, really hyper precarious jobs, they're going to be for Brits only, right? They're going to be for Brits only. And when you have income threshold saying, okay, you've got to earn more than, you know, $38,000 or whatever it is to be able to come here to this country. Really, what we're saying is, okay, those shit paid jobs, that's good, those are going to be for Brits, right? I don't think that looks like progress. I think that the way you deal with that isn't by fiddling around with immigration policy. I think that, think the way you deal with that is by strengthening workers' rights and in particular collective bargaining. I wanted to, I think, come back to a point about corporate power. The reason why I think we've seen just the decline of nearly everything, the decline of quality in your public services, the declining quality of your housing, the decline in the availability of affordable housing, it's because what neoliberalism has done, and globalisation is, of course, a part of it. Migration just fit into it, but I think it's actually relatively small part. What neoliberalism has done is create

these huge parasitic sectors of the economy, where their only job is to suck the money out of everything. And I think that reducing immigration doesn't even touch the sides of those sectors. And actually, if what we wanted to do was strengthen the position of the working class in this country, whether it's the British-born working class or the foreign-born working class, the descendants of migrants, why British people? It's about strengthening the hand of labor versus capital. It's not by making the position of migrants even more precarious by tying them to things like temporary working visas,

which just makes them more exploitable. Excellent. We've touched on, I think, some of the key economic features and facets of this debate in those two answers. So I really appreciate it. I'm also just conscious of our time. So I'd like to move us to closing statements, Matthew.

What are the key points, the one or two ideas that you want to leave our listening audience with as we wrap up this terrific debate on migration and prosperity? I would urge listeners just to think about a useful way of discussing immigration. It's a very difficult thing to talk about because people, you know, tend to be very sensitive to any perceived criticism. but I think this debate is basically between realists and a sort of religious view of migration. I think the evidence on mass migration undermining prosperity in Western nations is overwhelming. I think we might not like to think about it. We might not like to talk about it, but I think it's overwhelming. I mean, even Ash conceded, you know, migration depresses, depresses wages.

I think lots of serious scholars from the Netherlands to Finland to Canada, to Denmark are showing over and over and over again the kind of migration that we now have in Western economies is hollowing out those economies. So I think we can either be realistic when it comes to the evidence or we can pretend that evidence isn't there and we can just, you know, guide this debate with hopes and dreams. My argument would be we can simultaneously lower migration in the UK to 50 to 100,000 a year while reshaping migration policy around high-skill migration that contributes to the collective pot, that contributes to public services, that generates tax revenues, okay, that is a net fiscal benefit, not net fiscal costs.

We can also do that and improve workers' rights at the same time. It's not either-all. Now, I've heard a lot of either-or in this debate, and I don't think that's necessarily true. My concern is if we don't do some of this stuff now, what we're going to see is what you're seeing in Germany, in Austria and Sweden, and I've sound like a broken record because I'm making this argument for 10 years. We've now got populism back in the UK and we thought we got rid of it with Brexit and so on. What we're going to see is more and more and more voter rebellions that are going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. As voters are saying to the elite class, are you listening to us? Are you going to give us a pause? Are you going to give us an economy that works? And ultimately, it's a question for the left today.

You're actually going to strike a compromise because at the moment there are lots of people on the left that are selling workers rights down. the river, are selling the welfare state down the river, are selling public services down the river in the name of this religious belief in pro-immigration. And I think there needs to be more nuance in this debate. So those are my closing statements. I think it's time to be realistic about the actual economic effect mass migration is having on Western economies. Matthew Goodwin, thank you for that closing statement. We're going to give Ash Sarkar. As per debate tradition, the person arguing for the motion gets the last word. So Ash, wrap up this debate for us. I think there's something really quite wonderful about someone on the one hand

pleading for nuance and then on the other casting their opponents all as religious zealots. But as I was listening to you talk, Matt, I was thinking about my grandma. She died a couple of years ago. When she came to this country, she was 17 years old. And I think by whatever metric you look at her, she's not what you would consider a high value migrant. She came here by herself, unaccompanied, completely at a loss for what to do. She ended up in this really exploitative job for a bit, working basically as a carer in a hospital. But that was not the end of her story.

So if you wanted to take a snapshot there, what you'd see is a scared 17-year-old being exploited by uncaring institutions, and you would say that is a reason not to have mass migration, undercuts wages here, and look at the victimization of the migrants themselves. But she got married. She had kids.

She trained as a social worker. She was a trade union activist. She was an anti-racist activist. And then by the time she passed away two years ago, her legacy was not one of a poor, uneducated migrant who was a drain on the state. It was the legacy of someone who had contributed to her community, to her neighbourhood, and I think to the country as a whole. And I don't think that that is an unusual story

when we're talking about migrants. Similarly, when we look at that snapshot of Jewish migration in the late 19th century, what we see are people who are not ideal candidates for contributing to the economy, but that was not the end of their story either. So while I agree that there are issues associated with mass migration, I don't think that that's the end of it.

And ultimately, the benefits that we get culturally, economically, the widening of our horizons that comes from coming into contact with other people, I think they far outweigh the negatives if we're committed as a society to strengthening the position of workers against capital, to building the necessary infrastructure, and wean ourselves off of the addiction, to blaming migrants for everything, and letting elites off the hook.

And I suppose the place that I would like to end up is here is that I know that there will be people looking at me and saying, okay, well, you're actually a living embodiment of why I'm against mass immigration. The fact that you descended from migrants isn't actually much of an argument for it. But what I have seen in my own family is that the resilience and ingenuity of people,

migrants is something which strengthens this country. It's something which has strengthened me personally. And I think we would be idiots to let that go. Thank you, Ash, Sarkar, for a terrific closing statement to Matthew, Ash, I just want to thank you guys for a great debate. This is such a hot, feebrile issue most of the time, and you've approached it with substance, civility, a lot of thought and a willingness to engage. So I feel like we've moved the debate forward. We haven't solved it, but we certainly moved it forward

in a way that I think we can take some pride and pleasure in. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you so much for coming on the program today. Thank you. Cheers. That wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Ash and Matt. You certainly give us a lot to think about.

A reminder that you can vote on who you think won today's debate. Go to our website, www.w.w.mcdebates.com. free member and cast your vote. We love your feedback and reflections on what you've just heard to this or any of our podcast. Please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of public debate. One conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Renugress. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations.

Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.