Two civilisations, alike in dignity, in fair Beijing where we lay our scene.
Of the many takeaways from my recent trip to China, perhaps the most enduring is a single question, posed to me by a Chinese academic over dinner: “why does Europe prefer immigration to automation?”
Owing to my frankly incautious consumption of rice wine, I did not have a satisfying answer to that question. In truth, I still don’t. While Europe continues to use mass migration to fill gaps in the low-skilled job market, East Asia is taking a different path entirely. Increasingly, service roles and low-skilled manual jobs in East Asia’s developed economies are being carried out by robots — China alone has more than 1,500,000 operational robots, while Japan and South Korea each boast around 400,000 each.
Meanwhile in Britain, we have one of the least automated agricultural sectors in the developed world, and fewer operational robots than Thailand.
We often hear, from conservative intellectuals, about the risks associated with our falling birth rate, a challenge which we share with our East Asian counterparts. Chief among them is the challenge presented by a shrinking workforce — meaning fewer workers, paying less tax, to support more elderly people. The headache-inducingly unoriginal solution proposed by figures such as Fraser Nelson is to artificially prop up our working age population with an injection of migration from the Third World. Sounds simple enough, no?
In reality, this proposal is entirely self-defeating. On an individual level, it is obviously true that working-age migrants boost the number of working-age people in a society. However, over multiple generations, the birthrate of migrant groups generally converges towards the median. The only exception to this is in cases where migrants continue to marry people from their society of origin — a phenomenon seen in Britain’s Pakistani community. The continued importation of spouses from the home country can help to maintain a higher fertility rate, but is also associated with significant social and cultural costs.
In other words, using immigration to boost our working-age population requires us to commit to a permanent policy of high-migration, for the rest of time.
Note also the continued use of “working-age”, rather than “working”. Many of those who have come to this country in recent years are actually net fiscal liabilities; the lifetime cost of the 800,000 “Boriswave” migrants set to receive settled status over this Parliament is estimated at £234 billion. Even if these people are working, many are simply failing to contribute enough to cover their own costs.
We should not ruin our country in order to artificially sustain a workforce of a particular size
What’s more, even if the economic case made sense — which it does not — this approach has disastrous social and cultural consequences. Decades of high migration to Britain has created a society riven with division, and increasingly characterised by ethnic and religious strife — from sectarian candidates to grooming gangs, these negative externalities become more apparent by the day. We should not ruin our country in order to artificially sustain a workforce of a particular size.
East Asia’s experiment with automation offers an alternative path. While there may be other problems associated with a falling fertility rate, in pure economic terms, mass automation provides a convenient solution to our birth rate problem. Why fill these roles with people at all, if you don’t have to? Why not take serious steps to incentivise automation across the economy, providing favourable conditions to companies with serious plans to reduce our need for low-skilled work altogether — as is already happening in East Asia?
Of course, talk of automation always brings about fear of replacement — apocalyptic reports of mass lay-offs in response to automation are ten-a-penny. However, in the context of a falling birth rate, this is actually a good thing. If automation “steals” a job which might otherwise have been performed by a human being, that’s one more role that we no longer have to fill, at a time when our ability to fill that role is fast-diminishing.
Naturally, not all roles can, or should, be filled by artificial helpers. We must still consider carefully how we can fill gaps in various areas of the public sector, such as healthcare, social care, and education. Even the most enthusiastic proponent of mass automation will struggle to make the case for robotic teachers.
But when push comes to shove, and the impact of the global fertility crisis hits the developed world, I struggle to see how Europe’s model will come away looking more attractive. We may well save hundreds of hospitality businesses by shipping in low-skilled labour on their behalf, but in the process, we will have created both fiscal liabilities and social strife for our descendants.
Meanwhile, over in the Far East, our Asian counterparts will be sitting relatively pretty. Their societies will still suffer economic slowdown as a result of their shrinking populations, perhaps, but they will be far more resilient and cohesive.
This can be our future too, if we embrace automation. Broadsheet columnists exhuming failed Blairite policies might just be concerned that if robots can take routine low-skilled work, their jobs might be on the line.
