Immigrants: less criminal than native borns and essential

In the last few days I have seen two solid pieces of evidence emerge for my views on immigration. The first is research showing that immigrants are more law abiding than the native born (found via Unintended Consequences). The other is the experience of American towns which cracked down on illegal immigrants, only to rethink after seeing how damaging this could be to their economies (thanks to Brad De Long). Continue reading

Abolish planning laws; solve housing “crisis”

Imagine that the UK had enough housing that every single household occupied a detached or semi-detached house (two thirds of them in detached houses) and all the country’s 12 million currently occupied terraced houses, maisonettes and flats were empty. You might think that to provide so much housing we would need to “concrete over the countryside”, in fact we would need to switch just 2.5% of the UK’s land area to urban residential use. Switching much less would provide a more than adequate supply. Continue reading