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ON A visit to the UK some years ago, my husband and I got into conversation with a couple about immigrants.
As far as Harold and Betty were concerned, ‘aliens’ were the scum of the earth who came to Britain to suck on the social welfare teat.
As far as we were concerned, illegal immigrants were probably quite brave and motivated people with enough chutzpah to make their way across continents and seas to a place that promised better opportunities. When they got to the UK, they’d be lucky to end up in the informal economy, doing the jobs that the British no longer want to do (an underworld glimpsed in the 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things).
However, quite a few of them negotiate their way up the ladder and become small business people or contribute to the economy in other ways.
“…locking out immigrants would fundamentally undermine the competitiveness of developed economies. Immigrants are a self-selecting group: they’re the risk takers, the ones who are ready to make a massive sacrifice,” said Ian Goldin, director of the Oxford Martin School and a professor of globalisation and development at the University of Oxford, when interviewed about migrants a couple of years ago by Time.
“It takes a lot of bravery to become an outsider, which makes migrants a great source of dynamism. If you look at the US, more than half the start-ups in Silicon Valley are founded by migrants, as well as many of the most iconic firms - Apple, Google, Yahoo, PayPal.
"Migrants account for more than three times as many Nobel laureates and Academy Award film directors as native-born Americans.”
In fact, the Office of Budget Responsibility said last year that the UK needs a steady flow of immigrants to keep its deficit from soaring sky-high – immigrants are usually young enough to pay tax for decades and as they are of working age, they need less spent on them in terms of education, health and the like.
And a University College of London study (done by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration) showed that between 1995 and 2011, immigrants actually contributed £8.8bn more than they received from the state in benefits.
We didn’t have these facts at our fingertips to make the case to Harold and Betty. Instead, we suggested that the solution to immigration lay not in standing at the shore, like King Canute, flapping your hands and yelling: “Stop! Stop! Go home now!”
Rather it lay in working to make staying at home more acceptable. After all, most illegal immigrants don’t just get up one day and start walking, muttering: “I must go to the UK!” They leave because they have to, they are impelled to, by dying economies or war or oppression or natural disasters.
They leave behind families, familiar terrain, culture and language. Many of them would surely prefer to stay – if life was more liveable. Which provides one very cogent reason for stronger economies to engage with weaker ones – to keep the flow nice and steady, and avoid it becoming an unmanageable flood.
And surely, I thought as I noticed another new informal settlement alongside the N14, the same thing applies to internal migration. Gauteng has a population of around 12.5 million, up from about 7.5 million in the 1996 census – and Census 2011 showed that almost half the people living in Gauteng were not born here.
They came for economic opportunities, for a better education, for a better lifestyle and better services like health. Streams of people have also flowed to the Western Cape and to Durban – the Western Cape, for example, grew from close on 4 million to 5.9 million.
These three centres may lead the economy, with Gauteng way ahead at over a third of GDP (36%, to be precise, and that on only 1.4% of the land), but none of them has the resources to cope with a never-ending tsunami of incomers.
Result: a win for everyone
A partial solution may be for civil society in our provinces to take an active interest in uplifting the regions from which the migrants come, in the interests of preserving our own resources and infrastructure.
Yes, I know that Gauteng, for one, already contributes huge amounts to the fiscus which get doled out to less wealthy provinces. But that’s a passive mechanism.
I’m thinking more along the lines of using our energy, drive, smarts and social responsibility budgets to make targeted interventions (perhaps through NGOs that know rural and small town South Africa well) to support schooling, health provision, market gardening, the establishment of relevant small businesses, communications and IT, and transport.
Here’s an example: if ten rural people in neighbouring villages are helped to start vegetable gardens, linked by good communications, tied in to the markets by IT, and provided with, say, one truck for the ten, they can negotiate market-related prices for their surplus veggies, make a sale, and distribute their produce.
If you are growing food to eat and earning an additional R1 500 a month to supplement the family income, if your children are attending a decent school and can get medical care when they need it, you are far less likely to uproot yourself, disrupt your family life and move to a city shack, aren’t you?
The result would be a win for everyone.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
As far as Harold and Betty were concerned, ‘aliens’ were the scum of the earth who came to Britain to suck on the social welfare teat.
As far as we were concerned, illegal immigrants were probably quite brave and motivated people with enough chutzpah to make their way across continents and seas to a place that promised better opportunities. When they got to the UK, they’d be lucky to end up in the informal economy, doing the jobs that the British no longer want to do (an underworld glimpsed in the 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things).
However, quite a few of them negotiate their way up the ladder and become small business people or contribute to the economy in other ways.
“…locking out immigrants would fundamentally undermine the competitiveness of developed economies. Immigrants are a self-selecting group: they’re the risk takers, the ones who are ready to make a massive sacrifice,” said Ian Goldin, director of the Oxford Martin School and a professor of globalisation and development at the University of Oxford, when interviewed about migrants a couple of years ago by Time.
“It takes a lot of bravery to become an outsider, which makes migrants a great source of dynamism. If you look at the US, more than half the start-ups in Silicon Valley are founded by migrants, as well as many of the most iconic firms - Apple, Google, Yahoo, PayPal.
"Migrants account for more than three times as many Nobel laureates and Academy Award film directors as native-born Americans.”
In fact, the Office of Budget Responsibility said last year that the UK needs a steady flow of immigrants to keep its deficit from soaring sky-high – immigrants are usually young enough to pay tax for decades and as they are of working age, they need less spent on them in terms of education, health and the like.
And a University College of London study (done by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration) showed that between 1995 and 2011, immigrants actually contributed £8.8bn more than they received from the state in benefits.
We didn’t have these facts at our fingertips to make the case to Harold and Betty. Instead, we suggested that the solution to immigration lay not in standing at the shore, like King Canute, flapping your hands and yelling: “Stop! Stop! Go home now!”
Rather it lay in working to make staying at home more acceptable. After all, most illegal immigrants don’t just get up one day and start walking, muttering: “I must go to the UK!” They leave because they have to, they are impelled to, by dying economies or war or oppression or natural disasters.
They leave behind families, familiar terrain, culture and language. Many of them would surely prefer to stay – if life was more liveable. Which provides one very cogent reason for stronger economies to engage with weaker ones – to keep the flow nice and steady, and avoid it becoming an unmanageable flood.
And surely, I thought as I noticed another new informal settlement alongside the N14, the same thing applies to internal migration. Gauteng has a population of around 12.5 million, up from about 7.5 million in the 1996 census – and Census 2011 showed that almost half the people living in Gauteng were not born here.
They came for economic opportunities, for a better education, for a better lifestyle and better services like health. Streams of people have also flowed to the Western Cape and to Durban – the Western Cape, for example, grew from close on 4 million to 5.9 million.
These three centres may lead the economy, with Gauteng way ahead at over a third of GDP (36%, to be precise, and that on only 1.4% of the land), but none of them has the resources to cope with a never-ending tsunami of incomers.
Result: a win for everyone
A partial solution may be for civil society in our provinces to take an active interest in uplifting the regions from which the migrants come, in the interests of preserving our own resources and infrastructure.
Yes, I know that Gauteng, for one, already contributes huge amounts to the fiscus which get doled out to less wealthy provinces. But that’s a passive mechanism.
I’m thinking more along the lines of using our energy, drive, smarts and social responsibility budgets to make targeted interventions (perhaps through NGOs that know rural and small town South Africa well) to support schooling, health provision, market gardening, the establishment of relevant small businesses, communications and IT, and transport.
Here’s an example: if ten rural people in neighbouring villages are helped to start vegetable gardens, linked by good communications, tied in to the markets by IT, and provided with, say, one truck for the ten, they can negotiate market-related prices for their surplus veggies, make a sale, and distribute their produce.
If you are growing food to eat and earning an additional R1 500 a month to supplement the family income, if your children are attending a decent school and can get medical care when they need it, you are far less likely to uproot yourself, disrupt your family life and move to a city shack, aren’t you?
The result would be a win for everyone.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
