mmgeorgi

do you ever hit your pro quota?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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