Just How Big Is Britain’s Immigration?
Some Data For Your #Brexit Speculations
The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union. More importantly, this is a neat topic that is likely to drive a lot of clicks, and I am a slave to the clicks.
I know nothing whatsoever about British immigration law or policy. I am not an expert in British history. And I won’t venture any speculation or opinion about whether Brexit is good or bad, or what caused it, etc.
Rather, I’ll not one thing: there seems to be a sense among many commentators that Brexit was largely motivated by concerns about immigration. True or not, it’s a narrative that is being advanced. Thankfully, we can provide some data about that narrative.
I dug up UK migration data going back to 1922. Now, from 1922–1960, all I really have is an implied estimate of net migration, based on decennial Censuses. But what I want is gross inflows, so I can compare to my long-term estimates of US inflows. So to get gross inflows, I look at changes in the foreign-born population across decades, then try to maintain a stable statistical relationship between foreign-born population change and gross inflows pre-1960 and post-1960, to assign estimates of gross inflows by decade. To annualize, I then just assume that inflows are more volatile than outflows, as most research suggests, and thus have inflows correlate pretty strongly with the annual estimates of net flows I have on hand. The result is a very rough ballpark estimate of annual inflows. But, as you’ll see, the errors don’t matter that much.
So now, the data. Below, I provide an estimate of gross migration per year for the US and UK from 1922–2015, represented as a percent of their populations. This, then, is the rate at which people are immigrating into these two countries.
What is most interesting here to me is how unimpressive the US’ record actually is for much of the period. I mean we just did not draw that much more immigration than the United Kingdom for much of the period. The spike in the late 40s and early 50s is entirely due to illegal immigration, by the way, and is probably overstated, but alas, such is the way of the data.
From the 1970s to 2000, more open US immigration policy and rising illegal immigration drove persistently higher rates of immigration. But by the 1980s, increasing integration in Europe drove growing immigration into the UK.
What is remarkable, though, is that since about 2005, the United Kingdom has consistently drawn higher immigration rates than the United States. And, for the record, those are quite high rates of inflow: the US’ highest rates ever were about 2.3 or 2.4 percent, during the early 1850s, when Irish and German immigrants flooded into the United States under a regime of near-total open borders. But aside from that episode, immigration has almost never cracked 1.5% in the United States, and the average rate during the open-borders period from the 1840s to 1910s was about 0.75%.
Make of this what you will. It is true that the UK’s recent rates are quite comparable to US immigration rates a decade or two ago, so not that extreme. Then again, the US is facing its own nativist backlash. Furthermore, the US has a long history of immigration, while the United Kingdom has often been a net-loser of migrants. These different experiences mean the experience of immigration varies.
All of that to say: recent immigration into the UK really has been a sharp break with their historic experience, and has actually been at an even higher volume than the US, for the first time since the 1960s and decolonization. I’ll leave the policy and political interpretation of that fact to others.
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
