Comment on Home secretary to make some migrants wait 10 years or more for right to settle in UK
Paddzr@lemmy.world 5 days agoIf 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 5 days 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.