19/10/2007

Still worried about Professor Coleman *UPDATED*

And now, onto the coverage of Professor Coleman's incredibly lame figures from 'Influx of immigrants 'costs every UK household £350 a year''. Here they are:


What's that? £690 million for border controls counted as costs of immigration? Border controls are a cost of limiting immigration. You know - the exact polar opposite of immigration.

Question for the hack who knocked this piece together: If border controls cost £690 million a year, then how can you, with a straight face, argue that we have an open door policy on immigration? I want to know.

Also included in Coleman's bizarre figures are costs for local authority race relations, higher eduction race relations, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Ethnic Minority Awards Scheme. Quick heads up for the Professor - not everyone from a different race as you is an immigrant. Some were born here. Stopping immigration tomorrow wouldn't obviate the need for race relations measures or things to do with ethnic minorities. Expelling ethnic minorities might, but I have a hunch the Professor doesn't want people thinking he's arguing for that.


He includes a figure for the cost of immigrant crimes, which I suspect is just for the crimes of foreign nationals. As I mentioned before, not all foreign nationals are immigrants. Still, the paper doesn't provide us with a link to the source, nor any information on where we can find it. It'll eventually turn up on the House of Lords Committee page, but it's not there yet. I'd like to see where he gets these costings from because I smell something unsavoury.

Aside from the figures, Coleman apparently says:
The absent-minded commitment into which we have drifted, to house a further 15million people - one million every five years - must be the biggest unintended consequence of government policy-of almost any century.
I'm really struggling to not use a politically incorrect term, like 'spaz' or 'feckin' eejit' here. Has the man never actually read the report? The bit that explains:
For the purposes of producing population projections, assumptions are made about future levels of migration. It must be stressed that assumptions about future migration are assumptions based on past trends. They are not forecasts. As a result they do not take into account future policy changes (e.g. the impact of the Points Based System on future migration flows).
Seriously. The guy's supposed to be a Professor of Demographics, and yet appears not only to not know that the projection for future migration is 190,000 and not 200,000 and that it is not a forecast, but seems to be operating under the bizarre assumption that it's actually a commitment. As if there's some target that says we must reach 200,000 immigrants a year or else. Div.

The reason I am troubled about this man and his connection to the Galton Institute is compounded here. He appears not to distinguish between 'immigrants' and 'ethnic minorities', two different sets of people that sometimes, but not always, overlap.


How far do his arguments against immigration actually amount to arguments against the presence of ethnic minorities? The table included in the Mail has twelve categories. Four of them are not taken up with things connected to immigration, but to the presence of ethnic minorities. When I've looked into what papers of his I've been able to locate, I've noticed a particular interest in the movement of ethnic groups, which presumably has something to do with his distaste for immigration.

So, interested in eugenics, interested in the movement of ethnic groups, argues against immigration but fails to distinguish between costs of immigration and costs of the presence of ethnic minorities.
Can you blame me for being troubled?

*UPDATE* - Professor Coleman's evidence is actually available on the House of Lords site. I'll post separately about it once I've had a chance to properly read it, but at first glance some of the stuff above is jumping the gun on my part since the paper's table is an oversimplified version of costs included in Coleman's submission that he explicitly says should not be added together as some will overlap and so on. Some of the costs in the Mail table are linked to immigrants that in fact only apply to ethnic minorities as well. Coleman also gives some costings that he points out will be taken up only in part because of immigration, and yet the paper has included the whole lot. So, more to come.

5 comments:

Chris Baldwin said...

Fair enough, but the Daily Star's front page today is far more hilarious.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

Yesterday's was better. It had ghosts. Ghosts trump racists, I think. Unless they're racist ghosts. I'm confused.

Chris Baldwin said...

The ghost one is what I meant. I only saw the headline, but it seemed to be presented as fact.

Anonymous said...

Should also point out that his research has focused on two key subjects:

1) Migration of Asians into Britain
2) Bad cultural habits of Asians

I find it particularly irritating that the BBC presented this guy's conclusions as that of an 'academic expert' (implying neutral, scientific) when he's clearly got a huge predetermined anti-Asian agenda and practically founded Migrationwatch.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

anonymous: Got any links? I'd like to have a look at that.

Cheers.