Philippe Legrain

Are banks a vested interest?

Oliver Kamm at The Times, a man I respect a lot, argues in his blog that banks are not a "vested interest".

But unless I have misunderstood him, I think he is being too charitable to the banks.

He argues that "the banks are not some unaccountable lobby seeking to superimpose itself on the public interest: they are an economic sector seeking to maximise profitability within the regulatory framework".

It's worse than that. Banks are unaccountable, since they are not allowed to fail - and capitalism without risk of failure corrupts absolutely.

They do seek to superimpose themselves on the public interest: even now, the notion that what's good for the City is good for Britain is pervasive among many senior officials.

Nor is the regulatory framework a given: it is shaped by banks' lobbying and the revolving doors of finance and politics: boardroom positions for politicians and government advisory roles for bankers - including the astonishing appointment of "Win" (or should that be "Lose"?) Bischoff, the former chairman of failed Citigroup, to co-chair the writing of a report on the future of UK international financial services.

Like Oliver, I am a supporter of open, competitive markets. That's why I find it so worrying that we have allowed a complex oligopoly that earns vast monopoly profits in the good times and passes on the losses in bad to amass such huge economic - and political - power, as I argue in my new book, Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis, which is out on 6 May.

Banks are a vested interest - and a dangerous one at that. 

Greenspan: Blame everyone but me for the crisis

Money quote: “To this day it is hard to find fault with the conceptual framework of our [financial risk management] models as far as they go.”

Of course not.  

Tom Friedman talks some sense for once..

on the benefits of immigration: 

All these kids are American high school students. They were the majority of the 40 finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. The awards dinner was Tuesday, and, as you can see from the above list, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.

Ouch!

 
 from FT.com

Who says Asians don't spend?

Private consumption is 7% up on pre-crisis levels in the 10 largest Asian economies (excluding stagnant Japan) http://bit.ly/9hxgPW

Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis. Out on May 6th

The financial crisis brought the world to the brink of economic breakdown. But now bankers’ bonuses are back, house prices are rising again and politicians promise recovery – all this while unemployment remains high, debts mount, frictions with China grow and the planet overheats. 

Is this really sustainable – or do we need to change course?

In this incisive assessment of the post-crisis world, I look at what went wrong, and how to learn from past mistakes. Reporting first-hand from around the world – frozen Iceland, anxious America and Australia, invigorated India, bubbly Brazil and futuristic Shanghai – as well as from Britain, it combines expert analysis with provocative opinion to warn of the dangers ahead.

• What are the risks of another housing bubble and financial crisis?
• What should governments do about their huge deficits and debts?
• Where will future growth come from?
• How should we respond to the rise of China and other emerging economies?
• What should we do about climate change? 

Wide-ranging, brilliant and impassioned, Aftershock could not be more timely. While making an urgent call for reform, it presents the tantalising opportunities for a fairer, safer, richer and greener world that are well within our reach, if we care to grasp for them.

A good election to lose?

For anyone of a progressive bent, the prospect of the Tories returning to power is profoundly depressing. However sick of Gordon Brown people might be, David Cameron is hardly an appealing alternative. So at one level it is cheering to see the Conservatives' poll lead melt away with the winter snow. While a narrow Tory victory remains likely, according to political betting markets, it is not in the bag. But while keeping the Tories out would be heartening in the short term, Gordon Brown's re-election would most likely be disastrous for Labour in the longer term.

Some election victories are a poisoned chalice. With hindsight, it was fortunate for Labour and catastrophic for the Conservatives that John Major won in 1992. Sterling's ejection from the ERM shredded the Tories' reputation for economic competence, and five years of in-fighting, blunders and scandal consigned the Conservatives to the political wilderness after 1997. It seemed for a while as if the party might never win office again. The Tories would surely have bounced back more quickly if they had lost in 1992. Conversely, a Labour victory in 1992 could have been fatal. Had the pound plunged within months of Labour taking office, the party's chances of re-election would have been remote. The Labour government would have marked a brief progressive interregnum between long periods of Conservative dominance.

While we do not have the benefit of hindsight, 2010 feels a lot like 1992. Most people are fed up with the government but unconvinced by the opposition. The ruling party has become too comfortable with power and often seems bereft of purpose. The prime minister is at best uninspiring, more often dismal. Most importantly, the economic outlook is unpromising – and there is a growing chance that a run on the pound will wreak havoc with the recovery and the government's plans. Even if catastrophe is avoided, running Britain in an age of austerity will be a thankless task, especially for politicians who believe in active government.

Tax hikes, spending cuts, curbing public-sector pay, cutting public-sector jobs – does Labour really have the stomach for it? Do Labour politicians want to spend the next five years undoing a lot of what they have achieved over the past 13? Do they honestly think voters will look kindly on them next time around if their sales pitch is that their cuts were "kinder" and more reluctant than the hypothetical cuts voters might have suffered under a Tory government? Even if the economy stages a phoenix-like recovery, will voters thank Labour for it? If Labour scrapes through in 2010, there is a good chance it would face a 1997-style electoral oblivion in 2015.

All the more so since five more years of Gordon Brown would test the patience of even the most diehard Labour supporters. Whatever his qualities might be, he is singularly ill-suited to being prime minister. His style rankles. His decision-making (or indecision) is erratic. He is tainted by all the mistakes of the past 13 years – not least cheering on the financial bubble that has now gone spectacularly bust. And since Labour has not had the guts to get rid of him over the past three miserable years, it seems highly unlikely that the party would find the courage to do so after he had won an electoral mandate. Besides, whoever the leader might be, voters would doubtless be gasping for change after four terms – 18 years – of Labour government.

To put it another way, if the choice for Labour is between either an unrewarding extra term in office followed by several terms on the margins or a narrow defeat, a period of renewal and a good chance of returning to government within five years, surely the latter is preferable? Surely only those whose political lifespan is nearing its end, those who depend on Gordon Brown for their advancement, and those who cling to the trappings of office would prefer the former?

The possibility of a hung parliament does not fundamentally alter this calculation. Since the Liberal Democrats have all but ruled out a coalition, a minority government (and most likely a second election) would prolong the uncertainty – increasing the risk of a sterling crisis – but would not change the underlying choice between Tory now or Tory later.

Of course, there are ifs, buts and maybes. One objection is that a Tory victory might result in such severe harm to Britain – for instance, a sequence of events that resulted in Britain leaving the EU – that it must be avoided at all costs. A more immediate danger is that if George Osborne slashed spending, the economy would tank again. That is a big worry. But even a re-elected Labour government might be forced to bring forward budget cuts if markets panic. And in political terms, the likelihood of Tory economic mismanagement strengthens the argument that losing the election would benefit Labour longer term.

Another risk is that Labour might tear itself apart in opposition, rendering itself unelectable, allowing the Tories to win again by default in 2015 unless the Liberal Democrats could capitalise on the situation – a rerun of 1983. That said, Labour might also tear itself apart if it was re-elected, as John Major's Tories did.

Others will argue that Labour could succeed where Margaret Thatcher failed and go on and on and on. A Labour victory might cause the Conservative party to implode (extremely unlikely) or result in electoral reform that entrenched a progressive majority. That possibility is certainly appealing, not least to Lib Dems and Greens. But with or without a change in the voting system, it seems highly unlikely that Labour would stagger on into an unprecedented fifth term after five more years of austerity under Gordon Brown, still less that the Lib Dems would want to prop them up in office.

The prospect of a Europhobic, economically confused, anti-immigrant, privilege-defending Tory government led by a lightweight PR man is soul-destroying. But as disheartening as it now seems, this is an election that Labour might be better off losing.

A run on the pound?

Amid all the euro-phobes' schadenfreude about the euro-zone's travails, it is remarkable that the pound is plunging - not just against the US dollar, but also against the much-maligned euro. 

If markets get panicky about the UK government's deficits, we may regret our not-so-splendid isolation from the euro-zone. 

Good news: African poverty is falling rapidly

New research by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Xavier Sala‐i‐Martin, Columbia University and NBER finds that

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala‐i‐Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970‐2006. We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly. (2) If present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time. (3) The growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it. (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade. 

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution

Surprise, surprise

The US government's much-touted E-Verify programme for detecting whether workers are authorised to work in the US detects fewer than half of illegal workers, while initially rejecting some legal workers. 

Technology is not a quick fix for the political problem of what to do with 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US.

Are immigrants stealing 'British' jobs?

In response to a "life-swap" television programme made by Today presenter Evan Davis that will be shown on BBC 1 tonight, I debated how immigrant workers are affecting the UK with Frank Field MP on BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme, Today. Listen to it here

Is Britain full?

The Times asked a number of people, including me, whether Britain is full. 

The country's supposed overpopulation is now the argument of choice for opponents of immigration, many of whose real objection to having more foreigners around is cultural. 

After all, Manhattan, Paris and Kensington & Chelsea are the most densely populated areas of the US, France and the UK respectively, yet they are hardly hellholes.

Read the full article here:

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article7028212.ece

Analysis: Who's Afraid of the BNP?

Listen to Kenan Malik's excellent Analysis programme on Radio 4 tonight

The economic benefits of migration

They remain as large as ever.

Read my pamphlet for CentreForum. It was published a year ago, but I forgot to post it on here until now,

The law of the jungle

British troops are dying in Afghanistan because the government deems the Taliban such a terrible threat.

Yet those who flee the Taliban and the war are denied asylum in this country.

This is an outrage.

With the closure of the Jungle, a makeshift refugee camp in Calais, children as young as 3 are among the desperate people left to fend for themselves.

Scoundrels such as Andrew Green of MigrationWatch suggest they are gathered in Calais because Britain is seen as a 'soft touch'.

He also claims Britain is full up and cannot accommodate any more people.

Those were the arguments used by the Daily Mail to justify keeping out German Jews fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s.

If the government has any shred of humanity, it will give the young victims of the Taliban asylum in Britain.

Iconoclasts: Why we should abolish immigration controls

On September 16 I appeared on BBC Radio 4's Iconoclasts programme to make the case for abolishing immigration controls.

Listen here: Download Radio4-part1 Download Radio4-part2

Sorry for the lack of new posts..

I am busy writing my new book on the future of the world economy after the crisis. The blog will resume in October. Thanks

Why Britain should be buying food from Brazil not trying to grow it all itself

The British government argues that the country needs to try to become more self-sufficient in food. I debated the issue with Peter Kendall, the head of the National Farmers Union, on BBC Newsnight.

Interview with Chris Laidlaw on Radio New Zealand

Listen to it here.

EU migration to the UK is working

By Tim Finch of IPPR. Excellent. Read it here.

Interviewed in New Zealand's Dominion Post

Click here to read the article. Sorry for the poor quality of the scan.

In case you're wondering, I'm the one (very jetlagged) in the photo on the right.

Sharp fall in Mexican migration to the US

The New York Times reports that:

about 226,000 fewer people emigrated from Mexico to other countries during the year that ended in August 2008 than during the previous year, a decline of 25 percent. All but a very small fraction of emigration, both legal and illegal, from Mexico is to the United States.

Opponents of immigration tend to assume that people want to move from poor countries to rich ones irrespective of the economic circumstances - perhaps to languish on welfare, for instance.

This is nonsense, of course. Most people who uproot themselves to another country do so in order to better themselves by working hard.

When there are jobs to be filled, they come. When there aren't, they don't.

Immigrants? Not us - we're British

There is an interesting article in The Times about Brits who had been living in Spain returning home because of the economic crisis.

Tellingly, though, they are referred to as "expats" throughout.

It seems that British people abroad aren't migrants, or worse still immigrants.

That's a term we reserve for nasty foreigners.

Little New Zealand has a big strength

I'm in New Zealand for 2 weeks speaking about the economic benefits of diversity at a series of events in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch.

NZ is small country that will always be geographically remote, but it is intimately connected to the rest of the world through its wonderfully diverse people.

Their diversity is an often undervalued asset, especially in these difficult times.

Yet just as ethnic Chinese networks have long been at the centre of trade in Asia, Chinese New Zealanders can help New Zealand connect with China and the rest of Asia's dynamic markets.

What's more, New Zealand's diverse workforce can boost creativity, innovation and enterprise, and thus boost productivity growth. That makes everyone richer and helps pay for the schools, hospitals and other things we cherish.

To any NZ-based readers on this blog, I look forward to meeting some of you over the next weeks.

Paranoid fantasies about immigration in Europe

Christopher Caldwell is an intelligent and educated man. His columns for the FT are often perceptive and original. But his views on immigration in Europe, presented in his new book, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West", are paranoid and delusional.

Caldwell's book is a cocktail of projected fears: Europe is in decline, its population ageing and falling, its citizens decadent and weak; immigrants are a threat, Islam an even bigger one, and Muslim immigrants are multiplying like rabbits; ergo, Muslim immigrants are a united force bent on conquering a continent that has lost the will and the means to fight. I simplify, but only a little.

Caldwell's book tells us more about Caldwell himself than it does about immigration in Europe. But sadly, it will get huge play, because it plays to the prejudices of all sorts of people.

Read a full review of Caldwell's book in the FT by Mark Mazower here.

Dozens dead, hundreds missing

Three, perhaps 4, boats laden with migrants people heading from Libya to Italy sink. As many as 300 people could be dead.

Europe's border controls claim more lives. The official response? We need tougher controls.

Kenan Malik on the UK government's multicultural policies

Rather than appealing to Muslims as British citizens, with a variety of views and beliefs, politicians of all hues prefer to see them as people whose primary loyalty is to their faith and who can be engaged only by other Muslims. Should we be surprised then if, as a consequence, many Muslims come to see themselves as semi-detached Britons? Last week the government published Contest 2, its new anti-terrorism strategy. But it has still not understood the extent to which its own multicultural policies have helped fan the flames of Islamic radicalism.

Citizenship has no meaning if different classes of citizens are treated differently, whether through multicultural policies or through racism.

Read the full article in the Sunday Times.

On a march against the US Border Patrol

Our biggest domestic menace never was waiting outside Home Depot, hoping to clean your basement. Unauthorized immigrants are not about to destroy anything, not even when they get angry and loud and march in large groups. On the contrary, they are inspiring. Their ethic of self-reliance and hard work is one that Americans should recognize and celebrate.

Exhibit A: Riverside, Calif., where I went recently to watch immigrant advocates march against the Border Patrol.

Read the full article in the New York Times

American jobs for American workers

As more Americans lose their jobs, the U.S. government is actively discouraging the recruitment of foreign workers, from dude ranchers and fruit pickers to lifeguards and computer programmers. Full article in WSJ.

In the NYT, Casey Mulligan points out how that preventing foreigners working to save American jobs is as absurd as the "marriage bars" which proliferated during the Great Depression. These prevented married women getting jobs, or led to women being fired when they got married. But since then, as the share of women working has soared, the share of men working has remained unchanged.

There isn't a fixed number of jobs to go around. Women don't take men's jobs, and immigrants don't take local workers'. Full article here.

Don't take globalisation for granted

Today, globalisation is neither uniform nor universal. It will always be incomplete. Clearly, then, it is also reversible. Read my new article for McKinsey here

Madhouse economics

Ha-Joon Chang's suggestion that the world needs a dose of protectionism to tide it through the global recession is utterly misguided. Read my new article for Prospect here.

Protectionism watch

After the Omnibus Appropriations Bill signed into law by President Obama scrapped a pilot programme that allowed a small number of Mexican trucking companies to carry cargoes north of the border - as NAFTA requires - Mexico has responded by slapping tariffs of up to 45% on 90 American agricultural and industrial imports.

Renault is to move production of its new Clio from Slovenia back to France, after President Sarkozy granted a bail out to French carmakers on condition they repatriate production from central and eastern Europe. Renault insists the decision is a commercial, rather than a political, one. So much for the EU single market.

I'm writing a new book. Can you help?

I'm writing a new book, on the future of globalisation. It will look at the risks to globalisation from the ongoing crisis (such as protectionism, nationalism and political extremism) and ask what needs to change in the global economy - and what shouldn't. As with my previous books, this will involve a combination of first-hand reporting, economic and political analysis, and reasoned argument.

As part of my research, I am reading a lot, talking to lots of people, and travelling around the world. I'd be really grateful if you could suggest papers I should read, people I should talk to, and places I should visit. I'm particularly interested in hearing about people that the mainstream media often neglects.

You may be able to point me to a small business in China whose exports have evaporated and whose migrant workers are going home, or to one that is prospering by taking on a new line of work.

You may know Icelandic people who can relate how their lives have been turned upside down by the financial collapse.

You may have connections to communities in Australia that until recently were booming by exporting to China, and drawing in lots of foreign workers as a result; how are they coping?

You may know Mexicans who have gone home from the US, or Poles who have left the UK or Ireland, because of the recession.

And amid all the gloom and despair, what new opportunities are emerging that could help build a better and fairer global economy?

Or something else entirely.

Please email me on mail AT philippelegrain DOT com

I'll get back to you if I think there could be a fit.

Thank you very much.

Remittances at risk

Jenny Abura on the benefits of migrants' remittances to Uganda

Remittances to Latin America are falling Ecuador, which receives most of its remittances from recession-hit Spain, suffered a 22% fall in the last three months of 2008.

Finland's former finance minister on the need to protect the world's poor from the consequences of falling remittances

Gardening is still a step up for US immigrants

Hispanic immigrants who work in construction, hotels and other blue-collar jobs have suffered from the brutal economic climate. But immigrant gardeners appear to be weathering the harsh conditions well.

"Gardening isn't like working at a factory, where you depend on one employer," says Manuel Quezada, a 54-year-old veteran gardener, as he and his team put down sod in the front yard of a house here. "If I lose one house, it doesn't hurt that much."

The full article is in the Wall Street Journal.

Frost over the World Interview on Immigration

I was interviewed on Frost over the World on 20 February. They won't be making a film about the interview, but it was a great opportunity to meet a living icon.

Review of Immigrants in the Observer

Very kind review by Michael Englard in the Observer:

Legrain's book makes a timely case for the benefits of migration and crisply counters the views of its prominent critics

Legrain is able to communicate complex ideas through impressively chiselled prose.

Thanks

A speck in the night

A vessel overladen with migrants, near the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Photo by Mashid Mohadjerin/ Reporters, from the World Press Photo Awards.

Foreigners aren't grabbing "British" jobs

As the recession bites, unemployment soars, and protests against foreign workers proliferate, the publication of Office for National Statistics figures (pdf) showing that the number of foreign-born people in work rose last year would appear to confirm what opponents of immigration have been saying all along: foreigners are taking "British" jobs. But the picture is far more complex than that.

Note, for starters, that critics would single out immigrants whatever the statistics showed. When immigrants are in work, they are taking our jobs; when they are out of work, they are a burden on the welfare state. Immigrants can't win: they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Second, opponents of immigration (and others, including myself) have previously pointed out – correctly – that ONS migration figures were deeply flawed. In particular, they did not accurately count the number of migrants from central and eastern Europe, who as EU citizens can come and go freely. If many of the Poles taking up jobs in Britain were not counted in the boom times, they are unlikely to be counted if they have since lost their jobs or left now we are in a bust. Foreign-born workers may thus not be faring as well as the ONS figures suggest.

Third, the category that the ONS has highlighted – foreign-born people – includes British citizens born abroad and immigrants who arrived as children and are only now entering employment after finishing school or university. In fact, 40% of the UK's foreign-born workers are now British citizens. On what grounds would the wildcat strikers and opponents of immigration object to their employment?

The other category that the ONS provides figures for – non-UK nationals – includes people who have been in this country for decades but have never taken up British citizenship. Again, what would be wrong if more of them were now working? What we would really like to know is whether the number of recent migrants in work is rising, but unfortunately those figures are not available. We would also need more research into what is driving the employment trends, which again we don't have.

Digging a little deeper in the ONS statistics that we do have, one finds that the 175,000 rise in the number of non-UK nationals in work (which is subject to a margin of error of plus or minus 111,000) comes from an unexpected source. Employment has not risen among east Europeans, it has increased (subject to big margins of error) among Indians (up 24,000), citizens of the 14 other countries that were EU members before 2004 (up 25,000), South Africans (up 27,000), and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (up 31,000). At the same time, figures released to parliament last month show that the number of work permits granted to Indians last year rose by 24,000 to 50,000, while those granted to South Africans rose by 2,000 to 4,900 and those to Pakistanis by 1,700 to 3,300 (a mere 725 were granted to Bangladeshis). Together, this suggests that nearly all of the rise in the number of South Africans and Pakistanis in work last year is due to people who were already in Britain finding jobs, not new arrivals. Since the employment rate among Pakistanis, particularly Pakistani women, has historically been low, it is surely a good thing that more of them are now working.

The bigger point, which bears repeating again, is that there is not a fixed number of jobs to go around, so that making divisive statements about one group of people taking jobs off another is not only invidious, it is also inaccurate. Everyone who works creates jobs for others when they spend their wages as well as in complementary lines of work. Women who work are not taking jobs off men; black employees are not depriving white people of work; people from outside London who work in the capital are not nabbing jobs off those who were born there; and foreigners are not grabbing British jobs. The debate we should really be having is how to create more jobs. Investing more in our rickety infrastructure would be a good place to start.

Mass murder in Australia

 
(Andrew Brownbill/EPA)

The Australian Prime Minister accused arsonists of “mass murder” today as the death toll from savage bushfires sweeping parts of the country reached 131.

What on earth motivates people to start fires like that? It's horrific.

Berlusconi's noxious immigration crackdown

First they went after the gypsies... and now the vile Berlusconi government is trying to crack down on immigrants more generally.

Under a proposed new law, doctors would be able to snitch on illegal immigrants they treat, while foreigners who fail to leave Italy after receiving a deportation order could be imprisoned for up to 4 years, reports El Pais.

During his various terms in office, Berlusconi has pushed through all manner of legal reforms to protect himself against potential criminal proceedings. Opinions may differ as to who belongs in jail. I couldn't possibly comment.

The Independent reviews updated paperback of Immigrants

With the X-word currently dominating the headlines, there could be no better time for this intelligent, wholly persuasive defensive of immigration. Scourging the xenophobia that sprouts at times of economic downturn, Legrain insists that clamping down on immigration is "morally wrong, economically stupid and politically unsustainable".

He points out that immigrants, who usually only wish to work abroad temporarily, make their host nation "more interesting and culturally rich". Legrain might have added that they bring a wonderful variety of culinary riches. As JK Galbraith said of immigration, "What is the perversity in the human soul that causes people to resist so obvious a good?"

Link here. Thank you.

Two more American immigration fiascos

What do you get when you mix inhumanity with bureaucratic targets? Immigration raids that make up the numbers by rounding up the easiest targets rather than the most dangerous fugitives.

The New York Times reports that:

Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Meanwhile, America's border wall is proving to be another fiasco, the Wall St Journal reports:

Opponents of the fence have petitioned the Obama administration to halt construction. Environmentalists are demanding a top-level review of the route, which they say would block such rare species as the ocelot from critical habitat. Property owners are contesting federal seizure of their land. Engineers are struggling to address flooding concerns.

And all the while, drug smugglers and illegal immigrants continue to breach the fencing that is up, forcing Border Patrol agents and contractors to return again and again for repairs. The smugglers build ramps to drive over fencing, dig tunnels under it, or use blow torches to slice through. They cut down metal posts used as vehicle barriers and replace them with dummy posts, made from cardboard.

Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh gets it right:

What we see is a muro del odio [wall of hate]. Simply put, it doesn't work. We hope Obama will take the wall down.

Overturn the barricades

Free movement of labour makes economic and moral sense. Without it the EU would unravel
Read my article in today's Guardian

Into the light

As the era of the dark side recedes a little, my sense of the looming reality is as follows. The men who ordered a man tied to a chair, doused in water, and chilled to hypothermia so intense he had to be rushed to emergency medical care, the men who presided over at least two dozen and at most a hundred prisoners tortured to death, the men who ordered an American servicewoman to smear fake menstrual blood over a Muslim's face in order to win a war against Jihadism, the men who ordered innocents stripped naked, sexually abused, terrified by dogs, or cast into darkness with no possibility of a future, and did all this in the name of the Constitution of the United States, the men who gave the signal in wartime that there were no limits to what could be done to prisoners of war and reaped a whirlwind of abuse and torture that will haunt American service members for decades: these men will earn the judgment of history. It will be brutal.

Andrew Sullivan on the end of the Bush years.

Why Britain still needs immigrants in a recession

Speaking on Five Live Breakfast News this morning, with Andrew Green of MigrationWatch. Listen here

Kaletsky endorses directing Northern Rock to lend

Britain's banks aren't lending, which is strangling the economy. The package of measures to support lending to smaller businesses which the government announced yesterday will do some good. But it is not enough.

As I have argued previously, the government should direct nationalised Northern Rock to step into the breach. Anatole Kaletsky endorses this position in today's Times:

the quickest and least costly emergency response would be to reverse the policy of running down Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. Both these banks are now fully owned by the Government and could be turned into rapidly growing state-guaranteed lenders.

The plans to run down their lending were right in the circumstances in which they were nationalised last year, when other private banks were functioning more or less normally. But things have completely changed and it now makes sense to reverse their policy of credit contraction. Northern Rock is ideally positioned to re-expand the supply of mortgages to first-time buyers, while Bradford & Bingley could revive the flow of finance to commercial and social housing. The Government could also be much less shy about exerting its majority control over the Royal Bank of Scotland and its 40 per cent stake in Lloyds-HBOS, by far the biggest commercial and mortgage lender in the country.

Paperback edition of Immigrants out on 5 Feb

The updated and revised paperback edition of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them will be published in the English-speaking world outside the US on 5 February.

It is available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk here.

Thank you to everyone who visits this website for your support.

'War on terror' was a mistake

UK foreign secretary David Miliband has written an excellent piece in today's Guardian about why the notion of a 'war on terror' is inaccurate and harmful. He argues that:

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.

The "war on terror" also implied that the correct response was primarily military. But as General Petraeus said to me and others in Iraq, the coalition there could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife.

He concludes:

We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society. We must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad. That is surely the lesson of Guantánamo and it is why we welcome President-elect Obama's commitment to close it.

Immigration round-up

In Britain, the government is today publishing its long-awaited citizenship, immigration and borders bill. It proposes that prospective citizens should have to "earn" British citizenship after going through a probationary period. I have written a critique of the earned-citizenship proposals here.

I debated whether Britain still needs immigration in a recession of Radio Five Live this morning, with Andrew Green of MigrationWatch. The audio clip will be posted once it is available on the BBC website.

In France, immigration minister Brice Hortefeux has been replaced by Eric Besson, an ex-Socialist who quit Segolene Royal's presidential campaign last year to support Nicolas Sarkozy.