Society Britain is the best place in Europe to be an immigrant

[Maciamo]

This is what the British newspaper The Economist says in its latest featured article. This may seem ironic considering that British people have voted for Brexit did it in great part to limit immigration.

Here are a few excerpts from the article.

Britain now has a larger share of foreign-born residents than America. One in six of its inhabitants began life in another country.

Britain excels at getting foreigners up to speed economically, socially and culturally. It is (in this respect, at least) a model for the rest of the world.

In many countries even skilled immigrants struggle to find jobs. In the eu foreign-born adults with degrees who are not still in education have an employment rate ten percentage points lower than natives with degrees. In Britain the gap is a trivial two points, and scantily educated foreign-born people are 12 points more likely to work than their British-born peers.

Even immigrants stuck in dull jobs know that their children tend to fare well in school. In England teenagers who do not speak English as their first language are more likely to obtain good grades in maths and English in national gcse exams than native English-speakers. The pisa tests run by the oecd, a rich-country club, show that immigrants and their children perform badly in much of Europe. In Germany immigrants’ children scored 436 points in the latest maths test, against 495 for natives. In Britain they did slightly better than natives.

One unusual thing about Britain is that immigrants with foreign qualifications have almost exactly the same employment rate as those with domestic qualifications. In most European countries the gap is large; in Greece it is an amazing 25 percentage points.

Britons are open-minded. Just 5% told the World Values Survey that they would object to living next to an immigrant (and migrants’ children report being bullied at school less often than natives’ children).

Britain also has more varied foreign population than most other European countries, or at least it did before Brexit. Thanks to the attraction of the English language, the world's de facto lingua franca, there were Europeans from every country studying or working in the UK. Many had to leave since Brexit but others remained.