Let them in

In City AM today I have a piece on the refugee crisis, arguing that the costs that many are (understandably) worried about may not actually be a problem:

A recent study looked at the impact of Yugoslav refugees on Danish workers in the 1990s and 2000s. Because Denmark’s resettlement policy distributed these refugees across the country without respect to local labour market conditions, this is a case study in how “exogenous” immigration affects natives. . .

Instead of starting a race to the bottom, as some feared, this influx of workers allowed the Danish economy to become more complex. Adam Smith’s “division of labour” increased, as jobs became more specialised and hence more productive. . .

Crime is on people’s minds too. And it’s true that asylum seekers do seem to increase property crime rates in the places in Britain they go to, though interestingly they seem to reduce violent crime rates.

But this seems to be a consequence of the tight restrictions that effectively prohibit asylum seekers from working for at least the first 12 months that they spend in Britain. If we liberalised those rules, we could solve that problem.

It's important to get the numbers right. The UK has accepted around 5,000 asylum applications from Syrians, not 216 as many people are claiming – that 216 is the number of Syrians we've actually evacuated from Syria directly. But I think there's a strong case for letting in many more than that.