Abstract
“Lurid immigration front pages sell papers,” said a fellow journalist who had just joined the Daily Express city desk, when I asked how he could join a newspaper that seemed to be running as many front page asylum scare stories as it could get away with. The response was dispiriting: every time an asylum front page ran, sales increased. The argument was difficult to rebut in economic terms, but what of those other roles of the media – to educate and inform?
As a country that has just voted to leave the EU, perhaps primarily on the premise of the need to reduce immigration, Britain has reaped what it has sown. The consequences could be dire for a country with skill shortages in vital areas and a rapidly ageing population. It needs a significant inflow of migrant labour every year to retain current standards of living. But this positive side of immigration has failed to register in the public consciousness as a result of the way in which the subject has been covered in the media.
Politicians should take some of the blame for failing to tell a positive story about the benefits. The government's own figures show that net migration of 250,000 a year boosts annual GDP by 0.5 per cent. This growth means more jobs, higher tax revenues, more funding for schools and hospitals and a lower deficit. Many of the jobs created over recent years have been done by migrants, with figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that three-quarters of employment growth for the year to August 2015 was accounted for by non-UK citizens. So the economic boom, before the Brexit vote, was largely migrant driven.
Migrants tend to be younger, contributing more tax revenue than they consume in public services, and the majority leave before they get older, when they would become more reliant.
According to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, migrants contribute 64 per cent more in taxes than they take out in benefits. A study by University College London found that EU migrants made a net contribution of £20billion to UK finances between 2000 and 2011.
And a large part of the migrant population of recent years has been students coming to study A study for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills found that since 2011, students had contributed more than £14billion to the economy
Let's not claim that everything is positive. Successive governments allowed migrants from the EU accession countries into the UK in the early years of this century with little control. There were no minimum standards of pay, terms or conditions of work, so migrant workers could come in and undercut the indigenous workforce. The failure to set and enforce minimum standards meant that migration effectively became a policy to keep wages down. This bred resentment in many areas of the country Revenues generated from the migrant workforce should have been used for public services, including housing provision.
Nevertheless, the overall effect has surely been positive, a view you won't have found in much of our media, determined as it seems to present a negative image of migration. So many tabloid papers put the fact that a migrant had committed a crime on the front page, sending a subliminal message that migrant equals criminal. There is little balancing good news about net tax revenues, diversity, contributions to our health, education and social services. As a result, many readers have a negative view of immigrants.
The disconnect was well illustrated during the EU referendum campaign, when the BBC's home affairs editor, Mark Easton, spoke to a group of old and young voters in Eastbourne. The concern of many in the older group was migration, yet they lived in a town where the care homes, hospitals and social services were propped up by migrant labour.
We've also seen reports of hostility to migrants in areas where few actually live. Clacton elected the Ukip MP Douglas Carswell on his party's anti-migrant ticket, yet levels of migrant workers in that town are low. Comparatively, in London, where many of the migrant workers who come to the UK to live and work, anti-migrant sentiment is lower.
The result of a public debate on immigration driven by a media trying to sell copies has been to poison the public well. The starting point for any public discussion has been the reduction of numbers. Success on migration is apparently to be judged on how many migrants can be stopped.
The Conservative government has not helped matters, setting unachievable targets of cutting migration to the 10,000s, then palpably failing to get anywhere near that target. The only way migration will decline is if the economy plunges into recession, for then there will not be the jobs available in the UK for migrants to come to.
That, of course, is where one of our other media myths kicked in. The misrepresentation of the immigration question led to a public perception that migrants came here to get benefits. The reality is most come here to work. If there is no work because the British economy has bombed there will be fewer migrants – presumably to the satisfaction of the press.
Those of us who work in the media have to question our failure to represent a balanced and informative picture on migration. Newspapers, particularly at the tabloid end of the market, have helped build the anti-migrant atmosphere that exploded following the EU vote to leave. Broadcast media have also played their part, adopting the anti-migrant lexicon for its coverage. The wobbling lid that has been kept on anti-migrant racism over recent years has blown off, revealing a particularly ugly side of society Some responsibility for the racist incidents seen on our streets resides in editors’ offices.
Now we must repel that anti-migrant racism. One way is to start telling a more positive story about migrants, not the simple, lopsided hysterical view that may sell papers but has pernicious consequences. It is late to be making these moves, with the racist genie already out of the bottle, but a start has to be made, otherwise we will all be staring into a particularly unpleasant abyss.