Immigration and anti-semitism in Britain
Economists tend to be pro-immigration, and to think of people as following their self-interest. The two ideas are related: their picture of immigration involves people choosing to maximize their earnings by moving country, and thus contributing to efficient labour markets.
But here we are in 2025 and my Jewish friends do not feel safe in Britain. Their children are choosing universities based on which has the most tolerable level of antisemitism, with some being completely out of the question.
There is now a lot of antisemitism in Britain, and I think it is obvious that Muslims, who express antisemitic attitudes at about four times the rate of non-Muslims, are a cause of that. This is partly due to simple compositional effects — if you add more antisemites to a population, it will have more antisemites — and partly because Muslims have influenced the Left as a whole in an anti-Israel direction. (Maybe reasonably! It’s not wrong to be Muslim, or indeed Christian, and concerned about the fate of your co-religionists in Gaza:
Removing antisemitism won't change the Middle East debate much
Here is a silly and offensive anecdote told to me by a Thai guy I was skiing with.
But for sure the tails of the distribution have shifted too, and for example the Revolutionary Communist Party cannot find a bad word to say about Hamas.)
People are not purely rational choosers and especially in politics, they often express hatred and bigotry. And then sometimes they act on it. I do not know whether the long-run change in attitudes here will force Jews out of the country. I am much more confident that the British tradition of free speech and freedom to protest will be put under pressure by Jewish people’s very natural desire not to see hate mobs in their town centres. It is hard to sustain open debate when parts of your population want to murder other parts.
There is a well-known body of evidence that politics does not work very well in multicultural societies. Usually the mechanism is thought to be that different ethnic groups struggle to cooperate with one another. What we are seeing here is a more extreme version of that: ethnic groups may actively wish each other ill.
is an economist who has thought about the political consequences of mass migration and even wrote a book, Wretched Refuse, about it. He used the example of Russian immigration to Israel as a case study showing that mass immigration had no bad political effects. I don’t find it a convincing example. He specifically points out that Russian immigrants brought high human capital, and of course they shared deep religious ties with their destination country. Neither of these is true of most immigration to the UK or much of Europe.Jews have historically been liberal on immigration and asylum, both in the UK and the US, a position rooted in their own twentieth-century experience. I cannot imagine that they will not be re-evaluating those beliefs.
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Taste-based discrimination, which is how we usually think of hatred and bigotry, is not individually irrational.
To continue the discussion from your previous post, I tend to think about it in evolutionary terms. The rise of cooperative prospering culture is rooted in group/multilevel selection. Migration is bad for group selection. In terms of Intrademic group selection thought of as cultural evolution, the process should be that people change their type to mimic the type prevalent in the successful culture. That's assimilation. The economic thinking you refer to – people want to improve their condition, which improves society through the invisible hand – does not work for collective action.