Number crunch: why Britons ignore immigrant drop

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1:06The Economist

1:13Rosie Blau: Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor. And I'm Jason Palmer.

1:22Rosie Blau: Today on the show, aboard a US nuclear submarine, and which products actually fight wrinkles.

1:37Rosie Blau: First up, though.

1:45Immigration to Britain has gone through the most extraordinary boom and bust cycle. Joel Budd is our social affairs editor. After the COVID pandemic, when Britain started to allow people to move freely into the country, the number of immigrants rose very, very dramatically to the sort of levels that Britain has never seen. In the year to March 2023, more than one and a half million immigrants arrived in the country, intending to stay for more than a year or so at least. And many, many fewer left. So net migration, which is what Britain tends to obsess over, went above 900 ,000 per year. So it was as though a city the size of Birmingham had suddenly materialized in the country.

2:33Who were they? They were a mixture. Some were Hong Kongers and Ukrainians because the British government had favored people from those countries, recognizing that Hong Kongers were facing oppression and Ukrainians, of course, invasion. Some were students who were taking advantage of much more liberal rules about working after graduation, but quite a few of them were simply workers. Britain made it easier to get a work visa. So why was the British government at that time so welcoming to immigrants? It's slightly strange because in a sense it was welcoming to immigrants because it had become unwelcoming to Europeans specifically.

3:12Britain left the EU in 2020 and in early 2021, it cancelled free movement. So before then, it had been possible for a French person or a Polish person to simply move to Britain and take whatever job they wanted. And it became impossible. So the government thought, well, hang on a second, you know, many of our industries have really depended on Europeans. And the famous one was the hospitality industry. And we don't want to have nobody coming into the country to do those sorts of jobs in future. So what we will do is we'll make it easier for everybody to get a work visa. And what happened was very few Europeans took Britain up on that offer.

3:54So like Polish migration to Britain completely collapsed. But many people from Asia and Africa did. The number of work and study visas given to Indians tripled between 2019 and 2022. Indians were the big group. Nigerians were the second biggest. So that's the boom of the cycle that you described. Now, tell me about the bust since then. After the extraordinarily high figures that we saw in 2022, 2023, British government panicked and slammed on the brakes and then threw the car into reverse. British governments, beginning with the last conservative government and now the current Labour government, have made it harder to get into the country almost by any means.

4:38So they made it harder for workers to get in by moving the salary threshold upwards. In other words, you need to be earning more money in order to get a work visa. They've made it harder for spouses to come in. They've made it less attractive for universities to bring in lots of foreign students. They've made life harder for asylum seekers. And so in just about every way, they've tried to crush the numbers. Because it's politically expedient to do so? Yes. Most British people think that there is too much immigration. And most of the people who disagree with that think that the amount of immigration is about right.

5:18In other words, there are very few people in the country who think there should be more immigration. So it looks like a sort of one-way bet for a government to just suppress immigration. But what about the argument from before that basically Britain society needs those workers? One of the things I was looking at in my article is given that we had this enormous boom of people and then a bust, who were they? Because the government tends to describe them in pretty disparaging terms. It tends to say, well, they were unskilled. They were often doing jobs in care homes. They were bringing their children.

5:55They will quite rapidly become burdens on the state and so on and so forth. When I looked in more detail at this huge wave of immigrants, they turned out to be doing surprisingly well so far. They tend to come in and start working and in the first year they earn less than average. But quite quickly their wages exceed the British national average. So the question here is at this moment under these conditions, is this what the British people want? It looked as though the government could do no wrong in suppressing immigration. That was what people seemed to be telling pollsters they wanted. And then when Labour proceeded to do it, the response was a kind of resounding raspberry.

6:39So Labour's position in the polls has not improved. If anything, it became worse. And Keir Starmer gave a speech that became somewhat famous. And this is unusual because Keir Starmer is not a good speaker. He's remembered for one speech where he said, immigration is turning us into a nation of strangers. And as it happened, there was a large poll that was kind of in the field at exactly that time. And so we got to see how people responded to it. And the answer is that they moved away from the Labour Party. So the government slightly mysteriously seems to be not being thanked for its very tough line.

7:16And it may be that the explanation is that voters who really are obsessed with immigration and want very, very much less immigration were never Labour supporters. A question for you, Joel, about the soul of the average Britain. Why the anti-immigration stance in a general sense? Well, I think British people are odd in the sense that they don't hate immigrants. They tend to think that once somebody has arrived, that that person should have exactly the same rights as everybody else. They should be able to work and so on and so forth. They're not sort of viscerally opposed to immigrants. What they hate is disorder at the border.

7:51The type of immigration they really, really hate as a result is asylum and particularly people who float over the English Channel in large inflatable boats and then claim asylum. Now those folks are very small in numbers, about 40 ,000 a year, but they demonstrate the entire country is not controlling its borders. One of the slightly strange aspects of what the government is doing is that it's managing to crush the sort of immigration that's less unpopular, nurses, care home workers, engineers, students, while it hasn't so far managed to do very much about those really, really unpopular immigrants coming over the channel.

8:34Joel, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you.

9:03The End

9:11Overload of sea, dive, dive, tube blasted, dive alive, dive, dive, aye? Dive, dive.

9:19What exactly it's after on any given day is a secret. It could be trailing Russian ballistic missile submarines. Or it could be watching Chinese military exercises around Taiwan. I'm taking the answers, all the thirds. Many forward. All vents open. Dive for the third. I'm aboard the USS Annapolis, one of 49 attack submarines in the American fleet. Together, they embody America's supremacy of the underwater world, the last domain in which it has a clear military lead over China. But this advantage is under threat. Having built the world's largest surface navy, Xi Jinping is now transforming his country's submarine force to challenge American might.

10:09The essence of undersea operations is stealth. Above all, to hear and not to be heard. Submarines sense their surroundings mostly by sound, as Lieutenant Commander Asif Khan, the weapons officer, explains. We hear everything. Our hydrophones are incredibly sensitive. They pick up noises down to the individual shrimp that are making the little noises. We can hear fish eating coral. We can hear dolphins, whales. We can hear schools of fish. All of this noise comes to the hydrophones. On board the Annapolis, sound hygiene is constantly enforced. Wear tennis shoes. Don't slam doors. Listen for changes in mechanical noise.

11:04American submariners once joked that Chinese subs could be heard from America's west coast. But now China is closing that gap. To start with, it's making it easier to find American submarines with an underwater great wall of sensors, stretching from space to the seafloor. It's also making its own boats harder to find with a new generation of quieter nuclear submarines, probably built with Russian technology. And last, it's building submarines faster than American can manage. In the coming years, China's attacked submarines could roam across the Pacific and beyond, posing new dangers to American bases at Guam and the West Coast, and to aircraft carriers at sea.

11:52They will be threatened not just by ballistic missiles fired from the Chinese mainland, but also by cruise missiles fired from underwater. For now, though, Commander Clinton Enrich, the captain of the Annapolis, thinks American subs can still keep China at bay. I think what we bring is a deterrent force. The rest of our adversaries can account for our surface ships, they can account for our air force and our planes, but what they can never account for is how much combat power is ready and willing to be employed from beneath the ocean. As we sail out of Apra Harbour in Guam, the wartime shipwrecks that lie below are a reminder of the island's strategic importance.

12:39If you head straight from here, you would wind up right about just south of Taiwan, just north of the Philippines, due west from here. So you really are close to potential action. We're close to really anything that the country wants to accomplish here in the Western Pacific, we can get to in a very short period of time.

13:03Living underwater and working eight-hour shifts for months on end, Captain Emmerich's crew of about 150 sailors live in intimately close quarters, taking turns on sleeping bunks, for example. There are 84 racks in total on the submarine for the crew. And there are more than 84 people? Yes, there's 130 enlisted sailors on the submarine. So to get that split, it means that you have to hot rack. One sailor gets out, takes their linens, puts them away, and another sailor throws their linens onto the still-warm mattress, jumps in, goes to sleep.

13:44With nuclear fuel that lasts three decades or more, American submarines generate their own air and fresh water. The main limit on the duration of their patrols is food. The Annapolis gets underway not just with a full load of weapons, but with a full load of bananas hanging from the pipework and jars of peanut butter jammed between seats. Sailors on the Annapolis have to tell superiors whether they want to receive bad news from home while underway, assuming information reaches the boat. The crew did not hear the result of this year's Super Bowl until days after the event. All this makes for an unusual environment, not least for Lieutenant Maya Solis, the sole woman on board.

14:31I wanted to be tip of the spear, and I realized I didn't want to be in a desert in the middle of nowhere, waiting for war to happen. I wanted to be out there doing something where the things are already happening. You can feel the sense that what we're doing is important. Women have been stationed on attack boats in Guam only since last year, but the change has posed no real problems. It's really just simple. We're just adults. You just kind of knock twice on the door, see if anybody's in there changing. It's a pretty small area as it is. It's really a non-event, which has been great. Still, she's had to contend with men's habits.

15:06The boys here were peeing with the door open. Nope, like, I had to teach them how to shut the door when they went to pee. In years to come, Lieutenant Solis and her colleagues will be stretched increasingly thin.

15:22The American Navy needs two Virginia-class submarines every year to replace older Los Angeles-class boats like the Annapolis. Add the commitment to supply Australia with submarines, and the requirement rises to 2.33 attack boats a year. At present, America is managing little more than one. Making everything worse is a maintenance backlog that keeps a third of American attack boats idle. Underwater, as in other domains, drones could take up some of the tasks currently performed by submarines. They can dive deeper, surveil longer, and carry additional weapons. But they are hard to communicate with.

16:06For the foreseeable future, America will still rely on expensive, crude submarines like the Annapolis. Not least because actually using weapons still requires human control, as I learned when I was invited to take part in a torpedo drill. We're gonna lift it and then pull it towards you. You're gonna feel a click and you're gonna hear it as well. Yeah, I want to hear and feel that click let go of it. Okay, right and then it'll it'll go. So lift, pull, click, and then let go. And when you do it you should say, Shooting tube three. Okay, so I pull up. Lift up. Pull it back. Shooting! Let go. Did you hear it click?

16:48again? Did it go? No, you didn't bring it back on. It didn't click, it just went back. Try it again? One more time. There we go. Oh.

17:00There you go. That's on your ship. Pardon me, dude.

17:14That's it. There you go. That's it, sir. I can join your crew. Please, anytime. Happily, I know that. All right. Thank you very much.

17:46So I've brought in with me to the studio today a few bottles of serum and a skin cream. Ainsley Johnston is a science correspondent. They have pretty complicated names. We have emulsion of 0.2 ester of all transretinoic acid. We have vitamin C. We have salicylic acid. All very chemical. These names might be familiar to people who care a lot about skin care. But does anyone know what they actually do?

18:21Rosie Blau: Ainsley obviously I'm desperate to hear from you which ones actually work which ones have scientific backing but just before we get to that just explain to me what it is that happens to skin as we age and why we get wrinkles. Most skin aging really is caused by the breakdown of these very important proteins in our skin. So these are things like collagen and elastin that really form the structural scaffolding of our skin. And if they break down, that can lead to wrinkles and sagging. There are two main drivers of this breakdown. One is simply the passage of time, but the other is environmental damage.

19:05Your skin is the barrier to the outside world. Things like pollution can be harmful to your skin and also in particular ultraviolet light. Around 80 % of skin ageing in white skin is thought to be down to UV according to the University of Manchester. In darker skin where there's more melanin that actually provides some degree of protection but for white skin really UV is the biggest driver.

19:31Rosie Blau: And is it actually possible to reverse that aging or is it just possible to slow it down or change how it looks? There is some evidence that actually some of the damage is at least partially reversible. So the product that has the best backing is actually something called tritinoin. It's a drug that is a derivative of vitamin A and it was originally developed as a treatment for acne. But dermatologists began to realise that people who were using tritinoin on their skin not only had fewer spots, but also had fewer wrinkles. So they thought perhaps this would work as an anti-wrinkle treatment. And since then, there has been lots of research showing that it does affect the skin in ways that seem to at least partially reverse the ageing process.

20:19It thickens the epidermis, which is this very thin layer of the outside of your skin that seems to reduce fine lines. and it also stimulates collagen production in this structural part of the skin in the dermis, which is the deeper layer. The downside is that it's prescription only. And why is it prescription only if it works for other things? Well, it is just very irritating to your skin. It can cause redness and peeling and things like that. But there are options if you want to have the similar effects, but with an over-the-counter cream. Such as? So there are a whole host of milder retinoids.

20:57Retinoid is the class of chemicals that tritinoin is a part of. So these are things like retinol and retinal and they are available in lots of different over-the-counter creams. Both retinol and retinal, once they are in contact with the skin, are converted to tritinoin on the skin. But they are just generally a little bit milder. They don't cause so much irritation. There's a whole host of different varieties of these creams in a whole variety of different price points. Generally what you're paying for is something that's more stable, chemical that's less likely to break down in the bottle and also they maybe convert more easily to chitinuin once they're on the skin.

21:37Although they are a little bit milder than the drug itself they can still cause some irritation so generally it's advised if you want to start using them that you should begin with a lower concentration and work your way up. But even very low concentrations, so 0.04 % of retinol, still seems to be effective.

21:56Rosie Blau: So we've heard quite a lot about retinoids over the last few years. Are there things that we can also use? There are. As well as vitamin A retinoids, there is also vitamin C. It's an antioxidant. It works in a slightly different way, but it also seems to reduce wrinkles and hyperpigmentation, which is another sign of aging. The downside of vitamin C is that it is very unstable. It can break down very easily in creams. It can be quite expensive or it can be difficult to store. The other big ingredient that you'll see on a lot of creams are peptides. Generally, they are short chains of amino acids.

22:35They're often developed by cosmetics companies, which means that some of the research is funded and conducted by these companies. They tend not to have as much scientific backing as things like vitamin C or retinoids. But there is evidence that some of them encourage these structural proteins. Some of them slow the breakdown. There are some that even work like Botox to kind of relax facial muscles as well.

22:59Rosie Blau: Ainsley, I now know why you look so young. Do you have any other tips for us for looking after our skin? The dermatologist that I spoke to stressed that when you are trying out something new, you need to give it a bit of time. but definitely the most important thing is prevention rather than attempting to reverse the process of aging. As I said, UV is the biggest cause of skin aging so the best advice is just wear sunscreen. Ainsley, thank you very much. Thank you Rosie.

23:49Rosie Blau: That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.