Comment on Home secretary to make some migrants wait 10 years or more for right to settle in UK
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 day agoWe are desperately dependent on immigrants to keep our nation functioning. Then leaving them living in uncertainty for almost half their lives potentially seems like scumbag behaviour.
If we actually wanted to reduce immigration all we need to do is give migrants more rights, require generous pay and suddenly there wouldn’t be so much demand for them because they wouldn’t be worth the price, but we won’t do that because we need them too badly to fill the hole in our economy, all the bad jobs that there aren’t enough uk nationals to fill. Treating them as equals who can earn their right to live here simply by doing the work we cannot do ourselves anymore feels like the least we can do, a minimum of the respect they are due. Dragging it out as long as possible is the action of a dodgy boss, not a nation worthy of respect.
It may be a bad policy, but is it actually morally evil? And if so, how?
It could be beneficial to keep people here for less than 15 years, then replace their positions when there is a UK national to fill the job. There are people who would be happy to work abroad to send money back home, I knew a professional who followed the money and had been to several countries before.
I never said evil, but I do think immoral, as I outlined in my previous comment, we’re talking about benefitting from people dedicating a significant amount of their working lives to this country doing jobs we are failing to do ourselves. Leaving those people in limbo for so long isn’t fair to them. This is just statistics to us, but it’s their lives getting uprooted.
If people are bouncing between different countries and jobs, good for them, and this policy won’t change things for them one bit, because they already wouldn’t be eligible, and if they’re bouncing around they really wouldn’t be interested either.
Eh fair tbh
No we’re not. This level of immigration is for wage supreasion. It’s big business using these people, and it’s sad.We don’t need more people when there aren’t enough jobs to go around, especially for going people.
You’re not wrong that it suppresses wages. And if we “just” wanted to fix that we could (by increasing the minimum wage for immigrants perhaps). Interesting that all our anti-immigration policies are less about doing that and more about bullying people.
But on the flip side, we do need immigration. Wage suppression is only a part of it, at some point wages can’t go up because the money doesn’t exist (especially for the kind of roles we need, the kind of person who needs a carer doesn’t have unlimited funds), and we’ll need it more and more as time goes on too. We genuinely need a growing pool of workers whilst we have an aging population. We’re not making enough young workers ourselves to care for our aging population.
So… You agree, we don’t need so much immigration, we should fix, or try harder to fix, the issues at hand before throwing exploitative cheap labour at the economy. You’re just too scared to say you agree.
I do support policies that make immigration less exploiitative, but I don’t support curtailing immigration much, the alternatives suck.
I do accept other options exist (eg encouraging more people to have kids), but they are much more expensive, like multiple percentage points of gdp more expensive. Like we’d have to curtail pensions to afford them, or set a tax increase larger than any in living memory.
We could solve this without immigration eventually if we had the willingness to spend that much money. It’d take 20 years to start working (people take a long time to grow up) and in the meantime we’d need a lot of political will (nobody would enjoy the kind of tax rises we’re talking about), but yeah it could be done.
We’ll have to do it one day, we can’t benefit from immigration indefinitely, but doing it early does mean spending vast amounts more money. It’s not like this gets cheaper over time, we’ll have to keep spending every year. So rushing into it before we need to gives few benefits that I can see. Especially since we’re competing with other countries that aren’t doing it, and therefore can spend their money in ways that encourage investment (ie outcompete the uk for investment) instead. Once immigration settles down (as it inevitably will, unless there’s enough destabilising wars to undo all the progress around the world, hopefully not), all the countries currently depending on immigration will be forced to solve the birth rate problem at once, then at least we’re competing on a level playing field and might not suffer so badly for adjusting our spending.
So no, I don’t agree with doing it now, because there’s a cheaper option and cheaper means we can afford to spend the money on other things. We’re struggling already, think how much harder it would be if we were throwing all our welfare spending into convincing people to have kids instead of into pensions or the nhs. Some issues get worse when you kick the can down the road, but this one just sits and waits for us to confront it, so delaying that as long as possible is the optimal choice.
Paddzr@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If someone doesn’t work for 20 years? No, we don’t rely on them.
Unpopular opinion here… but that’s a leech. I’m not from here either but I got to work for it. People native here? Also got to work to get unemployment money.
We don’t live in dystopia. Lemmy has some insane takes and this is top of the list. People expect to get stuff for free with literally zero contribution on claim.
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 day ago
If someone doesn’t work for 20 years? Other than any Brits who go to university, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant here.
This is discussing people who do work, and how long they need to work before we trust them enough to treat them like citizens.
If someone comes here at 18 and works for 5 years… this may shock you, but they’ve been a net benefit to the country to the tune of 5 man-years of work (minus their salary, which presumably is less than the labour, or nobody would be throwing money at them). They are already better for the economy than an equivalent Brit since they didn’t spent 18 years being a drag on the economy (instead they were a drag of whatever poor country wasted the resources prepping them for us!).
Hypothetically the absolutely most untrusting and stingy position we could take would be to require someone to work long enough to pay off the cost of caring for them for the rest of their life. That would mean assuming they immediately stop working the moment they earn leave to remain. But that would be like a life insurance company saying “we’ll insure you for £100000 but you need to pay us £100000 to cover the risk”.
Thankfully we can very easily predict how people behave in aggregate. We could pick a number where we’re near guaranteed to come out ahead, I bet it’d be embarrassingly short (most people work to just before pension age). But that’s not what’s driving this policy. This policy exists to look “tough on immigration”, but not too tough because we are actually dependent on immigration. Enough to ruin lives without you know… accidentally having any real effect on immigration numbers, since they would be a disaster.