Lyman Stone has a post up about population growth in the Caribbean. It’s interesting stuff; worth reading. But it suffers from a historical mistake.
I am hesitant to point out this mistake because Lyman has recently been beaten up by a bunch of rather rude people who appear to be deliberately distorting his argument about the recent American (and French!) fertility decline. So I will endeavor to be neither rude nor deliberately distorting.
As part of a broader discussion of Caribbean population trends, Lyman uses British migration restrictions to test the effect of migration controls on West Indian population growth rates. He identifies two points where migration was restricted: the date of independence and the Nationality Act of 1981.*
The problem is that neither independence nor the 1981 act had any effect on the ability of West Indians to migrate to Great Britain.
The U.K. first imposed migration restrictions on the West Indies in 1962. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act said that only U.K. citizens with passports issued in Great Britain or Ireland could freely enter the U.K. If you were a “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” but your passport had been issued by a Commonwealth government, even one still part of the British Empire, you were subject to restrictions. And those restrictions were pretty draconian: you needed either a work permit or the ability to show that you could support yourself without working.
The U.K. migration data is a mess, but taking the Home Office statistics for annual net migration (in thousands) at face value (page 10) indicates that it was pretty effective. The below chart puts a vertical line at 1962. Net migration from the West Indies surged in ‘61, as people rushed to beat the new law. It then collapsed in ‘62 and ‘63 and remained low thereafter.
Moreover, the Nationality Act of 1981 had no effect on the ability of West Indians to migrate to the United Kingdom! That freedom had been removed in 1962. Rather, all the 1981 act did was take the class of U.K. citizens who were not allowed to live in the U.K. and rename them British Dependent Territories citizens. They could not freely move to the U.K. before and they could not freely move after. (In 2002, the Blair government finally granted all Dependent Territories citizens full British citizenship.)
If you really want to see if migration restrictions affected population growth rates, then you want to use 1962 for your test, not independence or 1981.
* The post refers to 1983 as the date of immigration restriction, but I assume it’s referring to the 1981 act. The 1983 act extended full British citizenship to the Falkland Islands, but that did not affect the West Indies. There was also an administrative change that year to make it harder for British citizens to bring in their foreign spouses, but that also seems like small beans.
Comments