VICTORIA GILLICK has produced a lengthy and detailed report on the effects of immigration on Wisbech. You may not agree with her conclusions, but all her statistics have been collected via Freedom of Information requests. As stated in earlier blogs, I neither endorse nor refute anything in the report. It is up to you, the reader, to come to your own conclusions. I have been hosting her report in installments, but if you wish to downloaded a copy of the complete document, you can do so from this link. It is a Microsoft Word document.

The Gillick Report

THE GILLICK REPORT - PART SIX

                                       Unsocial housing

Wisbech had nothing like enough properties to house the thousands of migrant workers. Not decently anyway. Soon enough though, an unpleasant breed of gangmaster/landlord came crawling out of the woodwork to take advantage of the situation, buying up all the available housing stock and packing migrants into every nook and cranny. One had a portfolio of over 500 Wisbech properties.²⁹ In 2007 there were at least 500 Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs) in the Town, but within six years the numbers had doubled, housing at least 7,000 East Europeans.³⁰

Local people couldn't tolerate living like this, let alone afford the rack-rents being charged. Nor should they be expected to, even in extremis. After all, didn't we outlaw this kind of 'Rachmanism' back in the 1950s?

The whole nasty business was eventually investigated in 2012 by Operation Pheasant, a multi-agency task force comprising Police and Fire services, HM Revenue & Customs, the Gangmaster Licensing Authority, UK Border Agency, UK Human Trafficking Centre and Fenland Council.   

A year later, Operation Endeavour delved further into the racketeering activities of gangmaster-landlords. Since then, an inspection of 490 properties has unearthed 216 cases of illegal practices, eleven cases of human trafficking, including five sham marriages, and 159 benefit offences. So far a total of 205 migrants have received help and rehousing by the Council and the Salvation Army, while a total of 53 people have been voluntarily repatriated.  These ongoing police operations were assisted by a grant of £178,600 from the government's Rogue Landlord Fund.³⁰

                                             Housing problems

According to the Council's Index of Multiple Deprivation, the average price of a Fenland home at the turn of the Millennium was £89,954. The ongoing demand for foreign worker accommodation subsequently generated a growing market in 'buy-to-let' properties, especially in Wisbech where these could be easily financed by shoehorning high-rental migrants into them. This led to a general house price inflation, so that by 2011 the average price had risen 59% and a Fenland home now cost £152,465. 

Although this was still the lowest average price in Cambridgeshire, it was nearly six times the average gross income in Fenland.

Finding accommodation in Wisbech was made even more difficult for local people when private landlords began refusing them tenancy of any house, flat or bed-sit, preferring instead to have multiple foreign tenants whom they could charge extortionate 'per-person' rents. 

 

 

                                           Social housing

Renting or buying decent affordable homes in the private sector was soon well beyond the pockets of hard-pressed Fen families. More and more of them were therefore obliged to turn  to the Council for social housing, almost half of the applicants coming from Wisbech.

In November 2007 Fenland Council sold its stock of 3,779 social houses to Roddon Housing Association (Circle) for between £2,000 and £3,700 each. Although there were many other Associations offering such housing, Roddon remained the main provider for the Council overall.

Between 2008-12 the Fenland waiting list for Roddon homes had increased from 1,802 to 3,033.

Meanwhile in 2010 the Government had passed the Localism Act and the Equality Act, giving District Councils greater flexibility in deciding who should be accepted on the housing list and whom to prioritise.....irrespective of nationality. Three years later the waiting list had reduced to 1,315, with the proportion of foreign migrants being housed increasing substantially.

In 2010 there were 250 households allocated to Roddon's Housing, of which 31 (12.4%) were immigrants from Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. A further 54 East Europeans were housed the following year. In 2012 the number was 42 (14.7%), rising to 75 (22.1%) in 2013.³¹

In those four years alone a total of 202 migrant households were given priority over local families. Sounds reasonable, does it?

                                            Homeless

Between 2011-14 the Government poured £20 million into a Homelessness Transition Fund to "protect vital frontline services". Cambridgeshire got £586,863 of it, of which Fenland received £144,755 for its Eastern European Nationals Homelessness Project.

The Ferry Project's emergency night shelter in Wisbech received £274,000 from the Fund. ⁴¹   

13.

                                         The lowest wages

Fenland is by far and away the poorest area in Cambridgeshire. In 2011, when average gross weekly earnings across the region were £500, they were 20% lower in Fenland at £400.50.³²

Back in August 1998, a 19 year-old student working a 49-hour week in a Fenland food-processing factory was paid a basic day rate of £4.33 per hour, plus time-and-a-half for eleven hours night shift. After deducting £25.70 for his National Insurance, the student's take-home pay was £282.50.³³

The National Minimum Wage was introduced the following year at £3.68 an hour for 16-17 year-olds, £4.88 for 18-20s, and £6.08 for the over-21s. However, the chronic labour shortage at that time had obliged Fenland businesses to pay far more than this bare minimum. During the harvest months of the Millennium year for instance, 18 year-olds were earning a basic rate of over £8 per hour in many Fenland factories, rising to £13 per hour for the arduous night shifts.

Four years later, as thousands of East European workers began pouring into Fenland, factory bosses  immediately slashed wages by half, with no differential for day and night shifts. Long-standing local workers, still on the higher rates, were then given a bleak choice: take a pay cut, or go.

Those aged 18-21 were hit especially hard by the Minimum Wage, having to do an adult's work for a sub-adult's pay, which in 2013 still only amounted to £4.98 an hour.³⁴

Gangmasters, or 'recruitment agents' as the new breed now called themselves, quickly stepped in and took almost complete control of the local labour market, deducting punitive fees from the foreign workers for transport and a host of other spurious costs, while also taking rental for the unspeakable 'multi-lets' they kept them in. A large and permanent poster in the agencies' windows reminding migrants to 'Claim your TAX back here', was another source of gangmaster income: charging a percentage fee for presenting their worker's P60 tax rebate forms to the Inland Revenue.

In 2008 an adult Lithuanian was paid £5.52 an hour for a 40-hour week in a Wisbech food factory. After deducting £23.20 Tax and £12.70 National Insurance, his take-home pay was just £184.90.  Like so many migrants, this particular individual probably worked for part of the year, and then went back to his home country for two or three weeks before returning to start work again, thus allowing him to claim his tax back for the entire year. 

                                        Displaced altogether

Before long the Government had introduced the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), whereby local employers were able to import an entire foreign workforce for rock-bottom wages. In 2009 the saintly Co-op was given the go-ahead by Fenland Council to build 108 mobile homes and a communal centre on its farm at Coldham near March, to house 430 newly imported and minimally paid migrants.³⁵ As it happened the scheme never actually went ahead, and by 2014 the Co-op's dire national finances led to the sale of all its farms businesses to the Wellcome Trust.

                                                 

In 2013 Peter Kendall, president of the National Farmers' Union, told sugar beet growers at the East of England Show that farming had created 11,000 more jobs since 2009.³⁶

Well maybe so, Mr Kendall, but since most gangmaster/agencies operated an unofficial policy of hiring 'migrants only', very few of those jobs went to Fenland folk. If a job-hunter wasn't East European they were unlikely even to get on an agency's books. Or if they did, they had to be bilingual since most of their fellow workers either couldn't, or wouldn't, speak English.

Fenland Council's Migration Population Strategy stated the obvious in 2007 when it observed:

'...The total labour market is increasing, so is unemployment, and the rise in part time work has levelled off. This may be a sign that, to some extent, migrant labour has replaced local labour.

TO BE CONTINUED

WE CONTINUE with Victoria Gillick's report into the effects of immigration on Wisbech.

Once again, I neither endorse or refute Mrs Gillick's personal conclusions, and the statistics have all been gathered through Freedom Of Information Requests.

Although it has not always been possible to separate the two, factual statistics are usually in blue font, while personal views are in light grey.

PART FIVE

                                              Growing migrants

Naturally enough, an increasing number of East Europeans have decided to become parents since settling in Wisbech. It's certainly more financially prudent to have a child in Britain than in Latvia, Lithuania or Poland, where child benefits range between £9.30 and £54 per month. Providing the migrant mother has a UK National Insurance number, she can apply for a £500 Sure Start Maternity Grant for the first baby, plus Child Tax Credit, and will automatically receive £81.20 per month in Child Benefit, even when her kiddie lives overseas in the care of its grandparents.

How many migrant children are we talking about here? Local birth statistics give a clue. Most expectant mums in and around Wisbech give birth at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn. Between 2000-05 the average number of births at the hospital was 1,961 per year. In the five years since then the average has been 2,315.  The numbers born in 2012 were 2,534.¹⁹

As noted, the baby-slump in the 1970s and '80s has led nowadays to significantly fewer local men and women aged 25-35, and consequently to fewer babies as well. Between 2006-12, births to British women living in this neck of the woods fell 5%, but rose 85% to non-British mothers: from 257 to almost 500 a year. Today, over one-fifth of local newborns have foreign mothers.  

On a sadder note, there has also been a big increase in abortions at the Lynn Hospital. In the countries of the former Soviet Union, disposing of unwanted babies has been a commonplace fact of life for most of the Twentieth century. Some East Europeans may well have carried this throw-away culture with them to Britain. Up until 2005 an average of around 280 pregnancy terminations took place annually in King's Lynn, rising to an average of over 460 a year by 2012.

An even clearer insight into Wisbech's dramatic baby-bounce can be seen in the Town's pre-school population. In 2001 the number of kiddies aged 0-4 yrs was 1,692, and by 2012 it was 2,462. 

The increase was greatest (55%) among babies under one, where numbers rose from 324 to 502.²⁰  It almost goes without saying that this burgeoning child population is East European in heritage. At Wisbech's Antenatal Clinic a total of thirty-five newborn babies were recorded in just one week in December 2011, all of them with East European mothers.

10

Schooling the migrants

Wisbech and its villages have 15 Primary/Infant Schools lying within the catchment area of the Town's secondary school, the Thomas Clarkson Academy. 

Between 2006-14 their pupil numbers had increased by only 203 from 2,768 to 2,971, which seems  implausible until one notes the pupils' nationality. This reveals that at the end of that nine-year period there were 405 fewer British pupils and 608 more East Europeans, although latterly around 38 local children now attend primary schools elsewhere in Fenland.

Nine out of ten migrant children are concentrated in the seven Primaries within the Town itself, where they currently represent over 35% of all pupils.²¹ Between 2014-15 the newly enlarged Orchards Infants (56% migrants) has increased from 472 to 630 pupils. It is situated in the Waterlees area, currently ranked top of Fenland's wards with 'multiple deprivations', having 29% of children on free school meals, and one-in-five adults on unemployment benefits. Three Wisbech wards are in fact amongst the 10% most deprived in the UK.²²

                                                Locals migrating

Since 2006 the same ethnic shift has also occurred at Secondary level, with 24% fewer English children attending the Thomas Clarkson Academy, and a ten-fold rise in foreign ones, who now represent almost a quarter of the students. Nineteen different languages are currently spoken there.

However, this big fall-off in local pupils is entirely due to Wisbech parents choosing secondary education outside the Academy's catchment area.²⁴ In January 2013 an astonishing 56% (813) of local 11-15 year-olds were being schooled elsewhere: 385 at schools in Lincolnshire, 210 in Norfolk, and 218 to other Fenland schools, mostly the Neale-Wade in March. Wisbech now has the largest out-of-county migration of secondary-aged pupils of any town in Fenland, and subsequently also suffers the greatest loss of qualified school leavers as well. 

                                              Healthcare

As far as medical treatment goes, East Europeans are on to good thing when they come to Britain. Not only is GP and hospital treatment free at the point of need, but the World Health Organisation ranked the UK's healthcare system 15th out of 45 European nations: France was tops, Poland was 27, Lithuania 33, Romania 37, Latvia 41.  Russia came bottom.²⁵

Any EU migrant seeking a job in the UK, or needing hospital treatment, must register with a GP. Many of them never attend the surgery again and are known in the trade as "ghost patients", although some GPs still claim the full whack of NHS payments for these ghostly non-attenders.

                                                                General Practitioners

In 2005 a 'healthcare needs assessment' in Wisbech estimated that around 60% of local migrants were registered with a GP, and identified sexual health/family planning as priority needs, as also mental health care, noting that East Europeans came from countries with high levels of suicide.  Wisbech has the highest level of car accidents in Cambridgeshire, but by 2010 the Fenland rates for road injuries/deaths, and hospital stays for alcohol related harm were above the national average.²⁶ 

That particular year the three Wisbech surgeries employed 22 doctors (including locums) and 11 nurses/healthcare assistants.  By 2012 their medical staff had increased to 24 and 14 respectively. Not a whole lot of extra personnel really, given that the three GP Lists had grown by over five thousand during that time, from 34,860 patients to 39,977.  One surgery had lost 900 patients, while another had gained 2,000. But the patient list at the surgery situated next to the Hospital and adjoining the Family Planning Clinic, had increased by four thousand, from 6,360 to 10,377.²⁷

                                             North Cambridgeshire Minor Injuries Unit

Between 2010-12 the Unit employed an average of 20 nurses, but no permanent doctors. For after-hours treatment, patients must travel to either King's Lynn or Peterborough hospitals. During those three years the Unit saw an average of 9,454 patients. In 2011 the proportion of East European patients was 5.6%, increasing to 9% the following year.²⁸ 

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, one of Wisbech's most ardent campaigners has been Victoria Gillick. Here is PART FOUR of her report on the effects of immigration on Wisbech.
I make no claim over the accuracy of the statistics, and I neither endorse or refute her personal conclusions. The report is long and detailed, so it will be published in sections over the next week or so. I have put statistical information in blue font. The remainder are Mrs Gillick's own views. YOUR VIEWS ARE WELCOME, both for and against, and you can make them known via the contact form at the bottom of the blog, or via Twitter - https://twitter.com/wisbechevenmore

WISBECH

A dozen or so miles down the road from King's Lynn, and sitting astride the banks of the tidal River Nene on the borders of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, is the old market town of Wisbech. Rightly designated the 'Capital of the Fens', the Town rose to prominence and architectural glory during its wealthy Mediaeval and later Georgian eras, due (it should be noted) entirely to the land skills, money know-how and dogged hard work of Fenland people. Radical to the core and with nary an aristocrat in sight, the Townsfolk stand proudly by their local reputation: Wisbech do different!

Peoplewise, Wisbech has grown huge in recent years. Today it's practically bursting at the seams, with ugly stretch marks beginning to show up all over the place. Hardly surprising really, considering the population has increased more in the last ten years than in the whole of the previous forty. But how huge is it exactly, and what's it costing the Town? And does anybody care anyway?

Well local people probably care quite a bit, the more so since no one in the citadels of Cambridge and Fenland seems very keen to discuss the subject with them. Leastways not in public. Yet backstage the bureaucrats must know what's going on here? The busy little bees must have accurate facts & figures to hand, and a host of joined-up policies in place to help Wisbechians cope with the Town's mushrooming foreign population......surely?   Errrm......no, seemingly not.

                                      The background story

Wisbech Urban Area consists of the Town itself and the nearby villages of Emneth, Friday Bridge, Elm, Parson Drove, Wisbech St Mary, Gorefield and Leverington.  Forty years ago this rural area was blessed with an unusually homogeneous population of 17,015 which grew steadily during the 1970s to reach 22,930 by 1981, fruitfully replenished by a third more 20-35 year-olds than two decades earlier.¹³

During the early 1980s Wisbech was indeed humming in grand style, with a busy working Port, an Industrial Area and several large food processing factories. It had a Town Hall & Registry Office, plus a large District Council Office. Also a Police Station and Magistrates Court, a Main Post Office & Sorting Office, a Driving Test Centre and two local Newspaper offices. There was a General Hospital, a small Maternity Hospital and two GP surgeries. It had two Comprehensive Schools, ten Primaries, and a Special Needs school; also a free Grammar School, a Catholic Convent and a College of Further Education & Horticulture. There were four supermarkets in the Town, several chain stores, scores of independent shops and 40-50 stalls on the twice-weekly Market; also daily auctions both on and off-street, for furniture and local produce. The Town also boasted a Museum, a Library, two cinemas, two theatres, over 30 pubs and a twice-yearly Statute Fair.

                                                          

                                 A developing community

By 1991 the population of Wisbech and its villages had risen by a further two thousand to 24,981, the Town's schools, shops and rural economy having been boosted during the 1980s by hosts of incoming young families, drawn to the area's affordable homes and plentiful jobs, and also by older folk seeking a blissful haven from the rat race of the big cities. A year after the Millennium festivities, the population had reached 28,380, and the age balance was looking pretty healthy.     

                                               WISBECH : 2001                                       

                                               0- 5 ................ 6%

                                               5-17 ............... 16%

                                              18-29 .............. 13% 

                                              30-49 .............. 14%

                                              50-64 .............. 25%

                                              65+ ................. 26%                                       

8.

                                   Uncounted migrants

With the passing of the Millennium the whole social landscape of Wisbech altered, as it found itself the epicentre of an unprecedented wave of foreign settlers, though how many had come here was anybody's guess. The 2011 Census had the population of Wisbech Built Up Area (the Town and its villages) rising by 4,109 over the decade, up from 28,380 to 32,489. This figure included all the East European migrants, whose total was said to be a mere 3,289, with the main age group of working migrants, 25-34 year-olds, numbering only 1,241. Utter nonsense of course; there were obviously many thousands more than this. Nevertheless this seriously flawed Census continues to be quoted by public authorities and lazy university academics even today. 

Cambridgeshire County Council compiled its Fenland population statistics from the ONS 'annual estimates of population growth' based on the 2011 Census. Consequently it believes that the population of Wisbech Town by itself has grown by only 2,630  from 20,200 to just 22,830.¹⁵                                                     

Fenland District Council's Migrant Population Strategy (2007-10) guessed that East Europeans in Wisbech numbered "about 2,000".  In 2014 it was still quoting from its 2010 'Index of Multiple Deprivation in Fenland' which had stated that "....Fenland is becoming increasingly ethnically diverse, however a greater proportion of the population (than the national average) are White British (96.9%). (Please note: figures are from 2001 Census - no update available)....." ¹⁶    

Cambridge University researchers evidently made no effort to visit the Town before compiling their £20,000 report for the County Council in March 2014 ('Economic analysis of the Wisbech travel to work area'). Instead they simply quoted the nonsensical 2011 Census statistics on employment in Wisbech, which had just 718 residents working in agriculture, and 1,758 in food manufacturing.
   

                                         One-in-Three

Meanwhile, take a walk through Wisbech any day of the week and the real state of affairs becomes only too glaringly apparent. As long ago as 2005 a local Estate Agent reported the cheerful news that a quarter of the Town was now made up of East Europeans.¹⁷ In other words, the Town's former population of around 20,200 had been swelled by almost 7,000 foreigners.                                                     

No wonder the Estate Agent sounded so chipper. A year earlier they had only two or three rental properties on their books, and now already had between 15 and 20. By that time, of course, speculating landlords had begun buying up every otherwise unsaleable property in the Town, kitting them out as 'multi-lets' and charging the foreign newcomers £50 - £60 per person/per room.

The future was indeed looking jolly rosy......for those in the letting business. 

Then in March 2014 a railway study, undertaken for the County Council by engineering firm Mott MacDonald, disputed the 2011 Census total of 22,830 for Wisbech Town, as their own research suggested it "....could be significantly higher -around 35%- due to the substantial migrant labour population serving the agri-food industry, which are not captured in the official figures."¹⁸ 

The truth was out at last: the Town's migrant workers had numbered around 8,000 in 2011. On top of that figure, however, one must add the many non-working migrants (children, pensioners and unemployed) plus all those arriving here since the Census. Taken all together, the current population of the Town is therefore nearer 33,000, a third of whom are foreign migrants.

Wisbech has thus grown by 63% in the last 13 years, with the proportion of East Europeans rising inexorably year on year.

9.

                                      Vanishing locals

The 2011 Census could at least be trusted on its figures for the indigenous population. These revealed that since 2001 the number of local people in Wisbech and its villages had actually fallen by 580, to 27,791. The decrease was largely due to a thousand fewer 25-34 year-olds (those born in the 'baby-bust' years of the mid-1970s and 80s). At the same time there has also been a steady exodus of skilled and unskilled young adults quitting the Fens in search of jobs and homes elsewhere. The loss of so many local men and women in their 'parenthood' years has inevitably meant less Wisbechian babies too, hence almost 500 fewer under-16s than a decade earlier.                                       

                                WISBECH & Villages (Built up Area)  :  2001 - 2011¹⁴ 

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, one of Wisbech's most ardent campaigners has been Victoria Gillick. Here is PART THREE of her report on the effects of immigration on Wisbech.
I make no claim over the accuracy of the statistics, and I neither endorse or refute her personal conclusions. The report is long and detailed, so it will be published in sections over the next week or so. I have put statistical information in blue font. The remainder are Mrs Gillick's own views. YOUR VIEWS ARE WELCOME, both for and against, and you can make them known via the contact form at the bottom of the blog, or via Twitter - https://twitter.com/wisbechevenmore

                                           FUNDING THE IMPACT

In March 2009 Hazel Blears, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, set up the Migration Impacts Fund (MIF)⁹ to help public bodies cope with the mass immigration insisted on by the Government. A total of £70m was made available, financed (so they said) by a compulsory £50 levy on immigration application fees. Funding was allocated to local projects which "....would bring benefits to the settled community as well as the migrants".  The MIF was axed in October 2010 by the incoming Coalition Government on the grounds that "....local authorities themselves are in the best position to decide how to address the impacts of migration on their communities". 

Three years later, in 2012, the Coalition opened up its own pot of gold, the Rogue Landlords Fund,¹⁰ this time presumably to assist public services cope with the additional 200,000 migrants from Romania and Bulgaria discovered already living here, and whose inflow rose by a further 61,000 during 2013-14.

6.

                                      MIGRATION IMPACTS FUND

But what a generous honey-pot the MIF was, with any number of bureaucratic fingers dipping into taxpayer's pockets for projects in Cambridgeshire and Fenland, none of which incidentally brought any "benefits to the settled community". Here's how £1.343 million was spent from the Fund. ¹¹  

                              CAMBRIDGESHIRE  COUNTY  COUNCIL  (2009-10)

To help Police/Health services with emergency accommodation and casework support.......£370,025                           

To combat migrant overcrowding and exploitation...£140,000              

CAMBRIDGESHIRE  POLICE  (2009-10)

Three multilingual PCSOs, to reduce police interpretation and translation costs.....£213,714          

The production of a DVD  training aid to assist staff who use interpreters....£30,000

Enhanced road safety education to migrant road users.....£20,000   

Specialist police for domestic abuse and sexual violence in migrant communities...£139,514

FENLAND  COUNCIL  (2009/11)  

To employ an additional Private Sector Housing Officer......£57,383

Rogue Landlord's Fund to tackle exploitation of migrant workers (20013/14).......£179,000

                                           THOMAS  CLARKSON  ACADEMY (2009-10)

To recruit multi-disciplinary staff to address pressures on services and families...£193,500     

                                                           SLAV'S LABOURS LOST

                                            

But what of the migrants' home countries? Will the mass exodus of their young people, mostly to the UK, create prosperity and social justice in Eastern Europe? Poland, for instance, is a large country with a low birth rate. Since it joined the EU in 2004 its population of around 38 million has been deprived not only of 2,300 doctors, but three million able-bodied young workers, dealing a major body-blow to its construction and heavy industries. And even though its economy is being scaffolded by massive subsidies from Brussels, and benefits to some extent from the remittances sent home by its expatriate workers, this cannot compensate Poland in the long-run for the loss of so much of its skilled manpower. Meanwhile the importation of masses of unskilled labour from neighbouring countries even poorer than itself, has depressed Polish wage levels still further.

Now consider the Baltic states, with Lithuania losing at least a million of its young men and women (they already make up the bulk of migrants in Fenland), and this from a country smaller than Ireland, with a population of less than 4 million and one of the lowest birthrates in the  world. Little Latvia is half as small again. How can any of these ex-Soviet nations feasibly survive such a devastating depletion of their own 'prime seed corn' ?

Did Fenland Council ever consider this bigger European picture in its Migrant Population Strategy? Well, yes it did; but only insofar as the future of Eastern European economies might impact on the success of Fenland businesses:

'The extent to which (attracting migrant workers) can be sustained will invariably depend on conditions and circumstances prevailing in labour exporting countries.....A significant determinant of future patterns of labour migration to the UK will be the economic fortunes of labour exporting countries, especially the European Economic Area countries. In this context, a major unknown is the future economic conditions that are likely to prevail in the newest EU member States' ¹² 

In other words, we'll be all right Jack........just so long as their economies aren't.

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