ERIC KAUFMANN OPINION Shifting demographics
How has the white British majority responded to immigration in local areas? By Professor Eric Kaufmann
T
HE RESULTS OF the 2011 census revealed striking ethnic changes which made headlines on their release in December 2012. The share of non-
European minorities in Britain rose from nine to 14 per cent in the 2000s even as the European immigrant population soared. In London, the White British share of the population fell from 58 to 45 per cent. How has the White British majority responded to these demographic shifts? This is the question Gareth Harris and I set out to answer in our ESRC Secondary Data Analysis project. Unlike many studies, we focus not on the British nation, but on the English ethnic majority. We consider three possible responses to ethnic change which we term ‘exit,’ ‘voice’ and ‘accommodation’. In other words, White British could choose to either ‘fight, flee or join’ ethnic outsiders. We find evidence for the first and third, but not the second, response. First, the ethnic majority is attempting to combat ethnic change by expressing disquiet to pollsters and politicians and voting for anti-immigration parties. The increase in concerns over immigration expressed in letters to MPs and in Ipsos-Mori polls broadly tracks the rise in actual net migration and became the most important issue for people for much of the 2000s until the economic crisis. As the crisis waned, immigration rose back to top spot. Meanwhile, in 2014, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) came first in the European elections, winning almost 30 per cent of the vote. Using 2012 local election data, we found that the
British National Party (BNP) vote was significantly higher in wards which experienced the largest increase in minority population during 2001-11 – even after controlling for other ward properties such as deprivation. In Barking and Dagenham, for instance, the White British share fell from 81 per cent in 2001 to 49 per cent in 2011. During this time, 12 BNP councillors were elected on the 51-person council, though these were later defeated due to a concerted, high-profile anti-BNP mobilisation. Analysis of the Home Office Citizenship survey confirms that White British individuals who lived in the fastest-shifting wards were more likely to favour lower levels of immigration.
On the other hand, we found that the effect of rapid ethnic change fades after a decade. Indeed, wards with a higher established share of minorities had less anti-immigration sentiment and lower far right voting than whiter wards. This suggests that accommodation takes place as white residents become habituated to minorities’ presence and experience direct contact with them.
Yet this local effect does not scale up. Quite
the opposite: though whites in diverse wards are relatively pro-immigration, whites living in white patches or fringes within diverse Local Authorities are more anti-immigration and more likely to vote for the populist right than whites living in heavily white LAs. This aligns with the literature on ethnic threat which suggests the presence of minorities in adjacent locales increases hostility to diversity in remaining white areas. The strength of both the BNP and UKIP in outer East London and Essex may be an example of what some scholars term the ‘halo effect’ of high ethnic threat in the white zones ringing diverse cities.
“ ” We found that the effect of
rapid ethnic change fades after a decade
Of course the bifurcated pattern of more liberal attitudes in diverse wards coexisting with less liberal views in adjacent zones may simply be the result of ‘white flight’, with less tolerant whites leaving diverse areas for whiter places nearby. Using data from Understanding Society – the world-leading longitudinal study – we refute this argument. We found that whites do choose whiter wards to move to than minorities originating from the same area. This helps explain dramatic shifts such as London’s loss of 600,000 White British and gain of 1.6m non-White British people in the 2000s, which was repeated in many other urban areas of England. On the other hand, whites who dislike immigration or vote for the BNP or UKIP were no more likely to move to a whiter area than other whites. Local diversity really does seem to soften white attitudes to immigration and this is not because of white flight. Does this mean that more diversity in the
future will lead to more tolerant attitudes and less populist right voting? Not necessarily. The growth in local diversity should lead to greater acceptance of immigration over a decade in some places, but the rise in diversity in neighbourhoods also affects the whiter areas ‘next door’ and fuels media and personal reports about the scale of change. This may well affect more people than those mollified by experiencing local diversity, which could spur further increases in anti-immigration sentiment. n
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Contact Professor Eric Kaufmann, Birkbeck College, University of London Email
e.kaufmann@bbk.ac.uk www.sneps.net/research-interests/whiteworkingclass
SUMMER 2015 SOCIETY NOW 13
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