I think this pretentious pose you have struck “I speak from empiricism, not theoretics” or the other similar lines is disingenuous at best. For a start, presumably you mean ‘empirical’ rather than ‘empiricism’, since the latter is itself a theory. And presumably you’re aware that in order to judge things ‘empirically’ you still have to formulate the question and raise priorities of judgment, which relies upon theory too, even if the theory is implicit.

The other thing is that you seemed to have misinterpreted what I was saying. I’m not blaming individuals or tax havens. You can’t shoot ducks for quacking, as they say. But there is a lack of an international approach to tax havens – this lack is in the interests of the UK and US, as the Tax Justice Network findings clearly outline. Or as Private Eye, if you read it at all, has been outlining for years.

With such an approach, the developed world could maintain a high tax environment without worrying about capital flight or talent flight, because states wouldn’t be using their tax regimes to compete against one another. Which then highlights the fallaciousness in your first point, that to have a high tax environment you need to restrict people’s movements. People could still move, the criteria would just not be one of tax regime.

Is the aim of managed migration to promote economic growth (or, as I say, to provide cheap labour to mobile international corporations without eroding the middle class tax base)?

The EU makes life very difficult for people who, as you write, “seek to do business in the country whilst living outside of it”.

That is not criminal. That is precisely the globalisation our governments espouse.

I spoke to an Irish public servant about this last week. Her response: we have to demand every bit of information about the activities of someone who works in two countries or across borders. “You can’t expect someone like me to understand their motives. I am a public servant. I sit behind a desk, 9 to 5, 5 days a week. I don’t go anywhere”.

Wow! That, my friend, is the public sector attitude to enlightened middle class, international, expatriate types.

Now I live in Russia. And I know first hand that if the bureaucracy takes that stance, it can regulate business out of existence.

That is with regards to private individuals. As for international mega corporations, EU governments can’t be helpful enough.

But I speak from empiricism, not theoretics.

As regards preventing things like tax avoidance, enterprising individuals are not the culprits! Nor are the tax havens those whom you might suspect:

The Tax Justice Network published findings just this weekend: “Leading economic centres including the US, UK and Singapore are among the countries most to blame for promoting international financial secrecy, according to a new index comparing the harm allegedly done by tax havens and rich nations.

The research – which comes ahead of the Group of 20 finance ministers’ meeting in Scotland next week – is an unusual attempt to measure whether powerful countries are as culpable over illicit fund flows as the offshore centres they have attacked since the financial crisis.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ea9f6964-c57a-11de-9b3b-00144feab49a.html

In other words the actual and potential effect of evident and impending political actions, rather than espoused policy.

I expressly reject the language of academic politics and write in democratic prose that anyone can understand or disagree with.

1) Mass migration controls roughly correlate with the welfare state/high taxation era – you cannot build a high-taxation environment if people are free to leave it

2) The preceding era of mass and individual migration is presented in the history books as a forced response to negatives (like the Irish famine) but the fact they were free to move also brought clear benefits to global growth and allowed for exceptional entrepreneurship

3) Intra-EU migration policy, by contrast, is designed to provide low skilled labour to the companies that benefit from the single European market.

There is a clear gap between the ease-of-business, free cross-border movement with which the EU facilitates corporate activities and the lock-down, regularatory approach to individual movement

4) The EU constitution, to which Britain signed up, is a continuation of this process, despite the use of the word constitution, now formally dropped, which must imply a contract between the individual and the state. Lisbon offers no such thing, nor did the EU constitution.

5) Given the funding crisis facing the British government, controls on migration will tighten but government and EU policy will continue to aim at attracting and facilitating mass labour while points systems restrict middle class room for manoeuvre.

http://moneycircus.blogspot.com/2009/10/wont-retire-cant-migrate.html

Regards,
Ringside

Thanks for picking up the commenting baton here. I do feel a bit guilty about my current lack of comments engagement, but times are busy, busy.

Tbh, John’s latest comment seemed so beyond the sensible, especially when I got to ‘East European elite’ that I thought I’d just give up. So feel free……

What concerns me most is that John is not a rightwing troll, and I respect his views on a number of things though they don’t accord with mine for the most part, but on the matter of immigration his views seem to reflect a wider malaise within the LP, whereby the embedding of ‘immigration must be enforced at all costs’ norms has meant any alternative angle, whether economic-focused or based on concepts of universal values (or both) is simply dismissed.

I do need to do another post exploring some of this stuff in depth, esp. as Alex Blach has just sent me a really interesting article about Spain’s ‘hospitability’ based approach to immigration, which seems to suggest a value/ideas driven approach is really quite feasible. I’ve not digested it all yet.

What has what they do with their money got to do with you? I’m sorry but that’s a bizarre argument with no firm basis in morality or economics.

What do you think happens to this money when it reaches Poland? Stored under mattresses?

No, it is spent, and some of it will be spent on British exports.

On top of that, money leaving this country will push down our exchange rate, making our exports more competitive, which we really need at the moment(admittedly this effect may be too small to detect).

So for one, its none of your business if they send money home and two, you seem a little confused about how economies work.

I do not believe these people are ‘needy’ – rather, they are greedy, coming here purely for economic gain (and sending a lot of the money home, hence not benefitting the economy). That’s not a valid cause for migration in my book (or if you do it, you shouldn’t expect free public services). And the notion that we are in some ways beyond the nation state is simply hyperglobalist nonsense perpetuated by companies to create an illusion of national helplessness – states have immense power, they just don’t have the balls to use it.

And of course we can speak of finite resources in a context where the average immigrant child requires a higher input to achieve the same levels in education, without paying increased tax to do so (and sending remittances home at the same time). And when they’re only here to feather their own nests I frankly can’t see why we have any obligation to further their education at our expense. Harsh that may seem, but it’s a social justice question, and it baffles me that so-called leftists would put the welfare of East European elites ahead of our own poor and needy. Bizzare.