Critique of DHH's post "As I remember London" | Hacker News Reader

Critique of DHH's post "As I remember London"

paulbjensen.co.uk

28 pointsmmgeorgi13 comments

> Also, guess where Saint George the patron saint of England is believed to be from?

> Turkey.

That would only work as a gotcha if DHH was in fact xenophobic.

It wasn't aimed at DHH.

In the post I mentioned that there are people in the UK painting the St George cross on roundabouts, and some like the protester who was interviewed in one of the links talking about having the UK be for "white people".

> However, London is not just a capital city of England and the United Kingdom. It is a global city. It is the historical heart of the British Empire and the British commonwealth of 56 nations. [..] And because of all this, it is one of the most diverse cities in the world.

All those things (except the last) were true for London in 1961, when it was 97.7% white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_London#Ethnici...

Edit as reply because apparently 4 posts in 2 hours is "posting too fast":

> I don’t see a contradiction, causal impact can unfold over decades.

The British Empire was considerable as early as 1815, so it's more like centuries.

In any case, it was the author that made a claim that runs counter to the evidence - the more the British Empire shrunk, the more diverse London became. The only justification he gave was "because of all this". It seems to me those four words are carrying a lot of weight, and need some elaboration.

For example, what, exactly, is the causality here, and why does it lag so much? What is it that makes it impossible for England to say no to immigration now, but it was able to say no for the preceding ~200 years when its empire was at its peak?

I don’t see a contradiction, causal impact can unfold over decades.

Thanks to the 1948 British Nationality Act anyone from the Commonwealth, such as India or Pakistan, could migrate without visa. This caused the first wave of migrants as a response for the huge demand of doctors, nureses and workers (as in other European countries). Now, to explain the delayed effect, chain migration is the factor, the first generation brings their wifes and children, building communities, attracting the next generation to move abroad, and so on, taking place over decades. I've seen it with Turkish communities in Germany, the first generation came for the same reasons as in the UK, now they constitute 3% of the German population, but they deeply assimilated into German culture.

So we have our answer - it wasn't caused by "imperialism", but by specific laws passed by politicians, against the will of natives [1]. And we know how the economics worked out in countries that bothered to look [2].

[1] Between 1962 and 1971, as a result of popular opposition to immigration by Commonwealth citizens from Asia and Africa, the United Kingdom gradually tightened controls on immigration by British subjects from other parts of the Commonwealth. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Nationality_Act_1948

[2] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/02/fiscal-impact-of-immigr...

Those laws were themselves a direct consequence of imperialism. Without the empire there would have been no Commonwealth migration to legislate about. Public opinion might explain why the laws were tightened, but it’s irrelevant to the causal chain.

Speaking of causality, Kirkegaard did not perform any kind of causal inference, so his analysis is based on correlation only, not on identified causal effects. He compares group averages and finds correlations with outcomes like employment or fiscal contribution, but that’s descriptive statistics. There are no counterfactuals, no identification strategy, and no attempt to separate selection effects, institutional factors, or assimilation dynamics. In other words, it’s not causal evidence — just patterns that he interprets as if they were.

> direct consequence

Yet somehow the Ottoman and Japanese empires didn't "directly cause" such laws in Turkey or Japan, so obviously this is not "after rain, the streets are wet" type causality, but more like "the safe was unlocked, which caused me to steal the contents" "causality".

> Public opinion [..is] irrelevant to the causal chain.

Public opinion is irrelevant to what laws and policies are enacted in a "democracy". It would be hilarious if it wasn't so true.

The Ottoman empire caused tons of Muslim migrants to enter its core provinces. Empires always managed and reshaped migration. The Romans resettled conquered peoples across their empire to strengthen borders and repopulate cities. The Habsburgs moved ethnic groups into borderlands against the Ottomans. The Russian Empire orchestrated mass movements of Tatars, Circassians, and others. In all these cases, imperial expansion created migration streams that later fed into demographic and political conflicts.

> Empires always managed and reshaped migration

Nice moving of goalposts. Meanwhile despite the Russian and Japanese empires, Moscow and Tokyo are 90% [1] and 95.4% [2] native, respectively, and despite the Ottoman Empire, 93.2% of Turkey is either populations native to the region (Turks, Kurds, and Yoruks) or from immediately adjacent regions (Tatars and Azerbaijanis). 95% if we count "Arabs" as adjacent, or even more, depending on what "other" is [3].

That's equivalent to if the UK was 95% English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, with some French, Germans, Danes, and Swedes. But we're supposed to pretend India and Pakistan moving into England is the same as population exchange with neighbors.

And that's still not "direct causation". But you ignore that, because you want to make it seem inevitable, when it is anything but.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow#Demographics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Tokyo#Multicul...

[3] https://www.britannica.com/place/Turkey/The-central-massif

Those percentages are shaky (especially Tokyo and Turkey), and even if roughly true, they don’t negate the fact that empires like the Ottoman, Roman, and Russian actively engineered huge population movements. High present-day homogeneity doesn’t mean migration wasn’t empire-driven.

Blog post author here, and I’ll respond here.

I added the context of the British Empire and the Commonwealth to point at the fact that these historical activities have transformed the UK over a period of time.

These timing of British Empire runs on for a while, but around the time when it ended post-WW2, that is when citizens of the British commonwealth countries (an institution that exists as a result of the British Empire) were invited to come and help rebuild the UK.

A couple of generations later, and London becomes one of the most diverse cities in the world.

So that is the context in which I meant the phrase “because of all this”. It’s playing out over a long time as a casual link, not all things happening at the same time.

On the 2nd question of why it is impossible for England to say no to immigration now rather than the preceding 200 years. I would offer these points.

1 - Technically, we have always had immigration. It’s a question of how much did it matter to the people at the time?

I would argue that perhaps we aren’t as familiar with British history in the 1700s as we ought to be. For example, I had no idea until a few years ago that the first Black person to vote in the UK was a person named Ignatius Sancho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Sancho - https://www.boughtonhouse.co.uk/sancho/

A slavery abolitionist and a composer who lived in London. Who knew?

Secondly, the reason why I think immigration is such a hot topic in the UK’s public sphere is because:

1 - The tabloid press have dedicated so much time and attention to it - https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/press/migrants-in-the-...

2 - Multiple politicians have used it to position it as a problem that they are uniquely positioned to solve (Michael Howard under the Conservatives during the 2005 Election Campaign, Nigel Farage in the 2015 UKIP election campaign).

3 - It was promoted as a problematic issue during the EU Referendum - flyers were distributed suggesting that Turkey was about to join the EU, and that 80m Turkish citizens would have the right under freedom of movement to move to the UK. It wasn’t true but the flyers were distributed anyway: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-tu...

So over time, the UK’s public opinion has been shaped and steered in the direction of treating immigration in a negative context.

> Technically, we have always had immigration.

"If we ignore quantity, maybe we can trick people into thinking nothing has changed!"

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