Comment on Home secretary to make some migrants wait 10 years or more for right to settle in UK
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 day agoYou’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.
mlcgdrhu@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
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.
scratchee@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
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.
mlcgdrhu@sopuli.xyz 21 hours ago
You should work in government with that logic. Cheaper now, kick the can down the road.
Reap what you sow.
scratchee@feddit.uk 18 hours ago
Cheaper now and forever as far as I can see, so yeah, some cans are better for kicking than others.