What policy should the UK Government adopt towards immigration?

(A) Introduction

For some time there has been considerable discussion and speculation about immigration into the UK , and on a wider scale, into Europe and other developed regions of the globe. We feel that it is important to have an ecological perspective on this matter, a perspective noticeably absent from most of the discussions. Many people feel we are already an overcrowded country. And certainly, we are one of the most densely population countries in Europe . At a later stage in our other essay (“how many people can the world support?”) we will argue that the present UK population greatly exceeds carrying capacity (2). Now large numbers of people are already seeking to enter and stay in the UK and this immigration pressure is likely to become stronger through the global increase in the number of environmental refugees - see our discussion of the Royal Society paper by Myers on our “other literature” page.

At the present, many people are concerned by the prospects of population decline. Yet, as we show in our Population Trends page, the UK population is set to go on increasing considerably for a couple of decades and is not projected to decline until after 2035; over half of this increase will be caused by net immigration. Further, there would be some very real advantages in population reduction including reduced expenditures on infrastructure such as roads and schools, lower consumption of natural resources, and decreased production of greenhouse gases and other pollutants (14) . To put it another way, with fewer people, nations can do so much more for their people – be it improved education, better housing etc. (3) .

There is also much concern over population ageing: people are living longer so that a growing proportion of the total population consists of aged people requiring support.

Now it is important to get a few facts clear on this subject before we go any further:

(i) Population ageing is currently taking place in virtually all the countries of the world (11) .

(ii) Population ageing is inevitable. It is an inevitable consequence of the slow down of population growth.

(iii) When death rates fell during the last two centuries in the developed world and the last century in the developing world, population started to grow fast. So world population increased from 2 to 6 billion during the last 100 years. During this period, the population temporarily acquired the burden of increased support for the below working age young people. But now, as populations grow older, we are leaving this situation behind - in the developed countries sooner than the developing ones - and the burden of young people is being replaced by the burden of older people. Population ageing and its consequences seem particularly serious to us in the developed world because we are coming to the end of a short but transient period during which age-structure has been particularly favourable. During about 50 years in the later 20 th century, we enjoyed the new benefits of low dependency from children and relatively low from older persons as well. This was because birth-rate had declined in most developed countries as early as the 1930s while small retired age-groups were inherited from an earlier period (8) .

The burden of older people is commonly expressed as the relative size of the working age groups and the older age groups, and two definitions used are the following:

The aged dependency ratio (ADR). This is the ratio of the number of people aged 65 and over to every 100 people aged 15-64, i.e. to every 100 people in the working age groups.

The relationship between these portions of the total population is often rather expressed as the Potential support ratio (PSR). This is the ratio of the number of people in the working age groups (15-64) to people who are 65 or over (population 15-64/ population 65+).

Finally the various concerns mentioned so far may be regarded as part of an overall European concern about whether or not there will be a shortage of workers in the future. In the short term this is unlikely. Various projections based on past trends and present policies, current levels of unemployment and productivity gains, suggest that there is no risk of a shortage of workers up to 2020. Things are more problematical in the long term (12) .

(B) Arguments in favour of immigration

Coleman (4) notes three arguments which are generally advanced in support of immigration into Europe :

(i) Since populations are ageing, we need immigrants to reinforce the population of working ages so as to ensure the incomes and tax revenue to pay for pensions and medical care, and assist in the actual care of the elderly.

(ii) Even leaving aside support for the elderly, domestic supplies of labour are insufficient to meet demand in various sectors.

(iii) The average age of the work force is rising, which is harmful to productivity and innovation (it is assumed young people are more productive and innovative). So we need to make the work force younger with immigrants.

We now discuss these arguments.

(C) Can we effectively maintain the support ratio for older people by immigration?

The notion that we could solve our age-dependency problem through immigration was really brought to the fore by the publication of the United Nations Population Division report “Replacement migration: is it a solution to declining and ageing population?” (17) . The underlying idea is that the immigrant population pool will contain a higher proportion of working age people than the host population. This report was seized upon by the media, and by some groups which support immigration or refugees as suggesting that replacement migration would be a practical solution, which in fact the report did not do. And demographers know it is impracticable. As Coleman put it, the publication of the report gave rise to the idea of demographic salvation among the credulous (9) .

The report was concerned with analysing what would be the consequences of various rates of immigration, and considered five different future scenarios. It was scenario number 5 which provoked the controversy. This scenario did indeed look at the level of migration needed to maintain the potential support ratio between 2000 and 2050. For the European Union, this would require a total of 674 million (on average, 13 million a year). Considering just the UK , scenario 5 keeps the support ratio at its 1995 level of 4.09. This would require 59.8 million migrants between 1995 and 2050, on average slightly more than a million a year, rates far in excess of what we have experienced in the past. The overall population would reach 136 million in 2050, so our population would more than double. So maintaining this support ratio is a wholly unrealistic scenario (16) . Imagine the consequences in terms of increase of city size, and the tremendous loss of green countryside to housing! David Coleman takes up the topic in his new Royal Society publication (9) which bear the title ‘Replacement migration', or why everyone's going to have to live in Korea . His title draws attention to the extreme case of Korea . Preserving the PSR in that country would require the entire current population of the world to go to live there by 2050! Finally, although we will be dealing with changing population composition in a later section, we simply note here that of the 2050 population of 136 million, 80 million (59%) would be post-1995 migrants or their descendants.

Now there is a further point to consider. Immigrants of working age will themselves become part of the aged population in a few decades. So importing immigrants now to swell the work force only postpones to a later date any decision about limiting immigration. Furthermore, as at 1995, immigrant populations were only about ten years younger on average than the host population (5) . The recent Home Office Report on International Migration (12) admits that the impact of immigration on population ageing is widely acknowledged to be small because migrants also age. So it concludes that for a substantial effect, net inflows of migrants would not only have to occur on an annual basis but would have to rise continuously.

Actually this last point is inaccurate, and the inaccuracy covers up another reason why maintaining a constant support ratio by immigration would be very difficult to achieve. Past fluctuations in fertility mean that if one calculates the migration ‘requirement' on an annual basis, the numbers needed vary greatly from year to year. This would require a stop-go immigration policy which would be very difficult to implement (9) .

(D) How can we arrest or mitigate the fall in the support ratio?

Coleman in various papers shows what suite of measures could be employed (4, 6, 8, and 9).

Before we go any further it is worthwhile to say a little more about the support ratio to the elderly. Recall that the support ratio is the ratio of the working age population to the elderly population. But for support of the elderly, what matters is not the size of the working age population, but rather the size of the actual workforce . Now the actual UK workforce is only about 78% of the working age population. So the real support ratio (RSR) is lower than the PSR.

Decline in the RSR could be mitigated by

(i) Making use of the large ‘hidden workforce' – that is people who are not debarred from work through disability but are not seeking work. The largest component here is women. We could make it easier for women to combine work with childcare as has already been achieved in Scandinavian countries.

(ii) Putting much more effort into training and retraining the unemployed.

(iii) Remove remaining employment barriers imposed solely on the grounds of age. Increase the average age of retirement by discouraging early retirement and move the pension entitlement age upwards. This would be easier now than formerly because people now remain active much later in life. To preserve today's potential support ratio would require formal retirement age (now 65/60) to increase to 72.

One word of caution is needed here. Increased workforce participation is obviously needed. But this would be a ‘one-off' response, and its effects would not last beyond about 2025 (6, 9) .

Other measures which would help mitigate the effects of increased ageing of the population include:

(i) Training and retraining of those in employment as well as the unemployed.

(ii) Increasing capital investment to improve worker productivity. The productivity growth per caput required to cover all increased old-age dependency would be about 5% by 2020.

(iii) Reducing obstacles to labour mobility. One of the obstacles here is the type of homes that are available. The UK has a high percentage of home ownership. Now selling and buying homes is expensive, making homeowners less mobile than renters (15) .

(iv) Further reforms of pension policy, for example by encouraging alternative sources of old-age support through ‘second and third pillar' occupational and private-funded pension schemes

Coleman (8) makes the following general points about the European Union (EU) as a whole. In the EU, only 62% of the nominal ‘active ‘population aged 15-64 is economically active – the lowest of any major industrial area of the world. If work force participation rate could be raised to the level of that occurring in Denmark , this would go a long way to mitigate adverse effects of population ageing. But the most effective way would be measures related to retirement age. While formal retirement age is 65 in most EU states, actual retirement age is about 58 or 59. If actual retirement age rose to between 65 and 66, we could preserve today's actual support ratio.

Finally, perhaps the most important point to be made is this. Adopting a policy of using immigration as a major tool for ameliorating decline in support ratio or for meeting skill needs (next section), directly inhibits the development and implementation of any policy which seeks to solve our own problems with our own existing population, something which will have to be done eventually anyway.

(E) Could we meet the demand for labour in certain sectors without immigration?

Let us concede that at the moment, the domestic supply of labour is insufficient to meet demand. The question to be asked is – how do we solve the problem?

To begin with, a word of caution. Claims that there are recruitment difficulties which impede output or productivity should not be taken at face value if the demand is for low paid labour to carry out what are underpaid jobs in unprofitable, obsolescent and undercapitalized industries. Alleged worker shortages are often overstated. The reason why a firm is unable to recruit workers is sometimes not an absolute shortage, but rather that the firm lacks the essential labour market competitiveness, being unable or unwilling to offer high enough pay or good enough conditions. And the firm's problems may be partly caused by its acceptance of under qualified applicants in the past. There is also a global tendency for the rate of technical advance to outstrip the rate at which people can be trained or retrained to deal with it (4) .

Some of the measures advocated in the previous section of this essay would certainly ease the situation, if not in the immediate future. And in most economic and policy literature on unemployment and skill shortages, the favoured solution is not immigration, but training and retraining, both of the unemployed and of the existing workforce (4) .

(F) What about the question of the average age of the work force rising?

If younger people are more productive and innovative then it is argued, we need to import working age immigrants. However, a recent study casts some doubt on the premise just stated: Ageing does not seem to have a negative effect on production or economic growth. Labour productivity, although difficult to measure, does not appear to decline significantly with age, at least not within the normal working age range. This might be because older workers feel more closely connected with their company, and have greater experience; despite being on average slightly less healthy, they are less often absent from work, and on average, do not perform worse than their younger colleagues. Ageing could have a negative effect if some young people are unable to work because they must provide the support for elderly relatives who are in poor health. But empirical evidence does not support this fear (11) .

Another point is made somewhat brutally by Virginia Abernethy. As people age they become less fit. But, says Abernethy “ knowledge workers, in particular, do not wear out so quickly as people who do heavy manual labour”. We are living in the information age which rewards mental skills and learning-related work that is not physically taxing. Such work can profitably be continued up to and beyond present-day normal retirement age (1).

(G) Increasing fertility rate

If the objective is to protect the potential support ratio, demographers know that increasing fertility is a more efficient way to do this than immigration. And for those who like us are worried about continued population growth, it is worth noting that increase in fertility with reduction in immigration could minimise population growth while producing a more favourable potential support ratio. If we combine this assertion with the fact that women are the largest component of the hidden work force, and many would like to work, we can readily understand why Coleman concludes “Look after the interests of women and the population will look after itself” (6) .

We would like at this point to draw attention to one interesting study that has been made of the situation in Italy , which has experienced fertility even further below replacement level than in the UK , for quite a long time. If fertility there was raised gradually to replacement level by 2020 and then remained constant, the population would decline gradually but would level off late in the present century at about 40% of the present level. This is not much different from what the population was like at the beginning of the 20 th century. So an appreciable population reduction would be achieved .As for the dependency ratio, calculations were made using a more comprehensive dependency ratio which included young dependents as well as the aged (the young impose educational costs and hidden costs of job opportunities lost because some parents are not working). This more comprehensive ratio gets appreciably worse for a short period, but would then begin to improve (although it would not return to the present level) (13) .

(H) Changes in the ethnic composition of the UK population

So far in our analysis we have not dealt with the changing ethnic composition of the UK population resulting from immigration and fertility differences between different ethnic groups, so we turn to this now. At the outset it should be pointed out that statistical data is rather scanty, making analysis difficult. Nevertheless, careful research does allow some conclusions to be reached.

A word first about terminology. In official publications, immigrant citizenship and origins are often divided up into the following categories: European Union, Old Commonwealth , New Commonwealth , and Other Foreign Countries. The Old Commonwealth consists of Australia , Canada , New Zealand , and the Republic of South Africa . The New Commonwealth includes all the other Commonwealth Countries and British overseas territories. “Other Foreign” consists of remaining countries, so now includes Hong Kong as part of China .

Immigrant populations are increasing much faster than the host populations in the UK . The causes of this are threefold. First, higher fertility of most ethnic minority groups, second, the youthful age structure of immigrant groups and third, the extent and composition of net immigration. New Commonwealth population growth overall was about 5 per cent per year equivalent to a population doubling every 14 years. The growth rate varied from 1.5 per cent per year (West Indian group), to 6 percent (Bangladeshi group). This compares with 0.1 per cent for the whole population (data from J.C Haskey ). In the late 1980s, foreign populations in other European countries were growing at comparable annual rates Coleman (5) .

There is another cause of the change in proportion between ethnic minorities and the people of original host stock, not mentioned by Coleman, but which was revealed by the Home Office Study on International Migration we have referred to earlier. This study drew attention to something which has been often overlooked in discussions about migration –the out migration of British people. The study showed that for the period 1975-1999, the migration pattern has been a net outflow of British citizens and a larger net inflow of non-British. Of course, “British” does not consist solely of original native stock (Anglo-Saxons etc). And “non-British” does not equate with ethnic minorities. However, when the non-British component is broken down into categories (EU, Old Commonwealth , New Commonwealth and Other Foreign) it was clear that the New Commonwealth component was one of the most significant components. So we conclude that another cause of the changing proportion of host to immigrant populations is the outflow of native British stock.

We now look at fertility differences. Most ethnic minority immigrant groups have a higher fertility than the national average. While it is generally thought that the fertility of immigrant populations will eventually converge with those of the host population so far, in the UK , only a few groups from developing countries have completed this process. And in the case of Bangladeshis in the UK , the period fertility rate that was reported in the mid-1990s seems to be higher than in Bangladesh itself (9) . There are considerations that make this convergence, or at least its speed, uncertain for some ethnic groups. In the first place, there are features of society in the countries of origin which carried over into England , may at least slow convergence in some groups. Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations are predominantly Muslim. The limited role of women outside the home, which is associated with Islam, may keep the fertility of these groups above the average. Also, Asians tend more than West Indians to have extended families, and there is with them a high occurrence of family enterprises. In such circumstances high fertility may seem less disadvantageous with Asians than with West Indians (10) .

Now Scenario 3 in the United Nations Replacement migration report mentioned earlier investigates how total population decline could be averted, once the population has grown to its expected maximum, by net immigration. But Coleman concluded that “populations can only adopt this solution to stabilise the numbers at the risk of the loss of their original identity”: any population with sub-replacement fertility attempting to maintain a given population size through immigration would acquire a population of predominantly, eventually entirely immigrant origin (9).

More generally, in the long run, the minority will become the majority in any country if there remains even one region where the proportion of the minority continues to increase through immigration and/or higher birth rates - Coleman (9) referring to the conclusion of Steinmann and Jäger . Unfortunately, only a few projections have been made to explore these prospects. But in the US the displacement of the white non-Hispanic population from its majority position is officially projected to occur around 2050. Coleman comments that no European population projection is so decisive. However, the trends all point in the same direction as that in the US , although the pace of change is slower. He give the example of the Netherlands where the total population is thought to stabilise at about 2030 at 18 million people. By 2050 the population of foreign origin (immigrants and their children) will have risen to 6 million (33%) and would still be increasing. Another author, writing in the context of low fertility rates concluded that Europeans must decide to have more children again if their nations are not to disappear (13) .

It is not surprising then that there has been speculation in the UK that ethnic replacement will continue to the point where the present ethnic minorities will collectively become the majority population, reducing the native British stock to a minority.

(I) Unemployment

Unemployment rate is low in the UK in recent times. Yet many of the jobs are short-term, often poorly paid, and offer little or no security. We frequently hear of job losses through companies closing down or being taken over and restructured. At the same time, a major component of the immigrant stream is women and children, so immigration contributes as much to a foreign breeding pool as it does to the work force.

Now since the 1970s, the flow of immigrants to most European countries has not been driven mainly by regular labour demand, not primarily geared to Europe 's economic needs. Rather, immigrants have comprised mainly spouses, dependants, students, asylum seekers and others. It is not surprising then that unemployment among foreign populations as a whole is up to 40% compared with 9% generally in the Euro-zone populations, and at the same time, workforce participation rates of immigrants, especially of females, are often low.

The reliance on the apparently easy option of importing labour from overseas, and the employment of illegal immigrants for low wages, lessens the drive to retrain the workforce; these effects can have an effect on Europe 's central economic problem – low productivity (productivity levels in Europe are still substantially below those of major competitors). There is little merit, Coleman argues, in perpetuating low-wage low-output domestic enterprises that can only survive with marginal labour, and the goods or services of which can be imported instead. This impedes modernisation and capitalization of the domestic economy (4) .

This suggests that thought this low productivity competition situation, the result may in the long run be more unemployment than if efforts were concentrated on upgrading our own work force rather than importing labour.

If we look now at the situation in the UK , the recent Home Office study on International Migration tells us about immigration flows and unemployment rates. The total inflows of economically non-active persons increased steadily over the period 1975- 1999. Not surprisingly, the study concludes that within the UK , a lower proportion of the foreign borne is economically active than the UK–born, and their unemployment rates are consistently higher.

Finally we speculate about possible consequences of the continuation of the recent high net flows of immigrants into the UK , by referring to work done in the USA , a country which has experienced mass immigration. Here Abernethy (1) puts forwards the argument that immigrants depress wages of the native peoples and tend to depress fertility rate:

(i) Competition from immigrants depresses both wages and the quality of jobs available to many Americans. The American working poor and the lower middle class bear the greatest brunt of a labour pool artificially inflated by immigration.

(ii) If wages of primary bread-winners (mainly men) are depressed, a mother might have to join the labour force so as to maintain the family's standard of living, resulting in a small family or no children.

(iii) People try to have the number of children that they think they can raise well according to their own expectations for their children's education and time devoted to child-rearing.

(iv) So if a country wishes to raise the fertility rate of the native-born population, it needs to have a tight labour market, so that wages rise, sending a signal to entrants into the labour force that the extra chills is affordable.

We realise that this is a very controversial field of study, and we are not competent to evaluate the argument fully. We also note that Coleman (5) seems to consider that at that time, the evidence on the effect of immigrant streams on wages of native Americans is not clear cut. In Europe it has been suggested that in Germany at least, immigration might reduce the wages of blue-collar native workers, yet at the same time it is widely thought that the guest worker labour migration contributed significantly to economic growth. Nevertheless, thinking in terms of the idea mentioned earlier that it might be advantageous to raise fertility rate, we wonder if continued high net immigration flows might militate against such a policy.

(J) Ethical issues

There are ethical issues involved in developing immigration policy. We briefly mention some of these now, but will return to such issues at a later date, as this essay develops.

(i) Depriving developing nations of skilled workers . The UK imports many skilled workers – nurses, doctors, etc. Many of these come from developing countries. But if there is one thing these countries themselves need, it is skilled workers. These workers come here primarily because they can secure a higher standard of living here than in their own country. We are depriving donor countries of their skilled manpower. The recent UK Home Office report on International Migration and the United Kingdom , acknowledges this point when it comments there is a major concern about the current drain of highly skilled and qualified people from developing to developed countries; policies to attract more skilled migrants to the UK may be in conflict with national objectives on overseas development (12) . The same report gives the most obvious example – recruitment of nurses. Outside the European Economic area, the Philippines stands out clearly as the main source of nurses, with South Africa , Zimbabwe , India and Nigeria also being important. Now David Coleman in his letter to The Daily Telegraph of 7th Aug. 2001 says that in 2001 there were more than 100,000 trained nurses in Britain no longer nursing, making it shameful and pointless to depend on poorer countries.

(ii) Aggravating environmental decline . We know that the general standard of living in the UK and other developed countries is much higher than in developing countries. This results , for example, in far higher carbon dioxide emissions per capita in developed countries compared with developing countries. Every immigrant hopes to adopt the host country's standard of living. So immigrants coming from developing countries, and especially those coming from low income backgrounds, will tend to cause higher levels of emissions in the host country than in the country from which they came, raising the global total emissions. This effect might be comparatively small from the UK at the moment , but the effect is not so small if we consider all migration from developing nations to developed nations. And it would be a highly significant feature of any attempt to maintain the potential UK support ratio, bearing in mind the vast numbers of people involved (the UN scenario 5). Consequences of immigration into the USA in relation to emissions are discussed by Abernethy (1) .

(iii) Ethnic replacement . We saw earlier that continued immigration leads to an increase in the relative size of ethnic minority populations compared to native host populations, and could eventually lead to these minorities collectively becoming the majority. This raises important issues. There is a danger to social cohesion. The hypothesis here is that increasing ethnic diversity and reducing the predominance of original host populations, might lead to conflict between ethnic groups. This raises the whole question of “multiculturalism” and there is a vast literature in the specialist journals and elsewhere on this subject. Then again, if fertility of immigrant groups does not decline rapidly to host population levels, what can and should be done about this? Perhaps however the most important point under the heading of ethnic replacement is the following

(iv) Democracy . The prime duty of any government must be to its own citizens. We assert this and will not let this be twisted to imply that we think we should not be concerned about peoples elsewhere. It is in our view, a very serious laps from democracy that the Government does not ask British peoples of ancestral native stocks (Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Scottish) whether they want immigrants or not, whether they are prepared to see the proportion of ethnic groups increase, whether or not they are prepared to face the possibility of eventual total ethnic replacement.

(v) Distinguishing personal from national responses . Many people wish, on moral grounds, to assist people in distress that come to Britain , and would even favour a more open door immigration policy. On the other hand, if net immigration continues at the present rate or increases, we consider that the UK must largely close its doors, on carrying capacity and social cohesion grounds. We need then to clearly distinguish individual response to need from national response to immigration pressure. We think that the most useful analogy here is North Atlantic convoys during the Second World War: German submarines lurk beneath the surface and sink one or more merchantmen. The captains of escorting destroyers would like to pick up our own men from the sunken ships that are in the water. But this would take time. Every second counts. At any moment submarines may sink more ships, and the destroyer captains' prime responsibility is to get food and other supplies to the UK . So they drop depth charges to deal with the submarines, knowing it will kill all our men in the water.

Finally, we conclude this section with a warning:

Theoretical biology predicts that individuals or societies that practice pure altruism will be out-competed and eventually replaced by others who are not guided by this self-denying idea, according to Abernethy (1) .

(K) What policy should the UK Government adopt?

We suggest that in working out the strategy, it would be best to start with a very radical “first draft” policy which would then be modified as it was studied from all angles. We tentatively suggest some elements in this policy:

(i) Introduce measures to maximise employment in the existing UK population by introducing a radical programme of training and retraining, pensions reform and facilitating increased participation in the work force by women.

(ii) Introduce such measure as will encourage moderate increase in fertility in the native British population. We see no necessary conflict between this and the previous point about increasing female participation in the work force.

(iii) Drastically curtail or end net immigration. This will require abrogation of some laws and treaties (2) .

(iv) Take steps to counteract current ‘political correctness' which both uncritically favours immigration and makes it very difficult for people to freely express their concerns on the subject.

References

1. Abernethy, V. (2001). Comments on Bermingham's summary of the UNs year 2000

Replacement migration, is it a solution to declining population and aging? Population and Environment 22, 4: 365-375.

2. Barker, J.F. (2000). England in the New Millennium. Are we prepared to save our

Countryside? Gaia Watch.

3. Bouvier , L.F. (2001). Replacement migration: is it a solution to declining and aging populations? Population and Environment 22, 4: 377-381.

4. Coleman, D.A. (1992). Does Europe need immigrants? Population and work force projections. International migration Review 26, 2: 413-461.

5. Coleman, D.A. (1995). International migration: demographic and socioeconomic consequences in the United Kingdom and Europe . International Migration review: 29, 1: 155-206.

6. Coleman, D.A. (2000). Who's afraid of low support ratios? A UK response to the UN population division report on ‘Replacement migration'. Paper prepared for the United Nations Expert Group meeting, New York , 2000.

7. Coleman, D.A. (2000). Uses and abuses of immigration. National Post, Toronto , 31 st March 2000 .

8. Coleman, D.A. (2001). Population ageing: an unavoidable future. Working Paper no.7, August 2001, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Oxford University . To be published in Social Biology and Human Affairs.

9. Coleman, D. A. (2001). Replacement migration, or why everyone is going to have to live in Korea : a fable for our times from the United Nations. http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/phil_bio/news/migration.html

Which is now published in: Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences (The Royal Society) volume 357 number 1420 (2002).

10. Coleman, D.A & J. Salt. (1992). The British population. Patterns, trends and processes. Oxford University Press.

11. De Santis , G. (2001). Population ageing in industrialized countries: challenges and issues. International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. Policy and research paper no.19.

12. Dobson, J. et al. (2001). International migration and the United Kingdom : recent patterns and trends. Home Office , UK Government.

13. Grant, L. (2001). “Replacement migration”. The UN Population Division on European population decline. Population and Environment 22, 4: 391-399.

14. Meyerson , F.A.B. (2001). Replacement migration: a questionable tactic for delaying the inevitable effects of fertility transition. Population and Environment 22, 4: 401-409.

15. Oswald, A.J. (1999). The housing market and Europe 's unemployment: a

non-technical paper. Warwick University .

16. Shaw, C. (2001). United Kingdom population trends in the 21st century. Population Trends 103: 37-46.

17. United Nations Population Division, (2000). Replacement migration: is it a solution to declining and ageing population? United Nations.

Future essay topics.

We will probably produce an essay on the new UK Government White Paper

“Secure borders, safe haven” (Feb 2002).

Note. Since this essay was completed, the UK Home Office has produced a report which concludes amongst other things that in 1999/2000 migrants in the UK made a net fiscal contribution equivalent to about 1p on the basic rate of income tax:

Gott, C and Johnston, K. (2002). The migrant population in the UK : fiscal effects. RDS Occasional Paper No. 77.

©copyright J.F Barker, Febuary 2002

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