The last decade has seen a potent powder keg of greater global mobility coupled with challenging financial circumstances in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008.  While this has led to a groundswell of ill-founded rhetoric from populist politicians across the developed world, it has also led to a renewed attempt to understand the impact the movement of people has on areas such as innovation and entrepreneurship, public service delivery and social cohesion, availability of jobs and overall economic growth.

The issue has been compounded by a longstanding method of stoking “fear of the other”, which has led many to accuse politicians of misinforming the public such that fear of migrants outflanks the reality of migrants.

Both the Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump were typified by anti-immigration support from communities that don’t actually have a great deal of immigration, which led to inevitable accusations of latent racism within these communities.

National or local?

What this narrative perhaps overlooks is the possibility that these communities have experienced quite valid changes that haven’t been captured in the data we have.  New research from the University of Cambridge examines this regional perspective and questions whether the data currently available, which broadly highlights the positive impact of immigration, may be perfectly valid on a national level, but wholly inadequate on a local level.

The researchers wanted to test whether there was actually considerable regional variation in the impact (both positive and negative) immigration had across the United Kingdom.  Through this, they hoped to fully explore whether there was justification for the evident regional variation in attitudes towards immigrants.  If there really are areas that have gained and areas that have lost out due to immigration, then that, if nothing else, provides us with the chance to have a localized response.

The researchers trawled through every UK census from 1971 to the present day to try and find a more localized dataset to work with.  While they openly accept that the sporadic nature of the census does present a challenge, not least due to the changes in boundaries that have occurred in between editions of the census, they nonetheless believe it provides a valid source to work with.

Another challenge they identified was around something they refer to as “spatial spillovers”, which refer to the fact that employment in one area is often heavily influenced by surrounding areas.  After identifying this phenomenon, the researchers were able to control for it.

The researchers were also keen to rule out succumbing to the belief that correlation equalled causation, as people moving to an area could be a case of the migrants generating new jobs, but equally the availability of jobs could have attracted the migrants.

A model was developed to map a series of geographical areas that were consistent across all five of the censuses that were analyzed.  The model showed that no migrant group had a significant long-term negative effect on employment, and that EU migrants tended to significantly boost employment rates.

The researchers believe their findings have significant implications for immigration policy in the UK, although they do fall into the trap of assuming that immigration policy has ever been driven by evidence rather than emotion.  As such, it’s hard not to believe this research will go the same way as other analyses that provided a degree of evidence to inform the debate on immigration, and be largely ignored in favor of emotive dog whistling.