Benefits for immigrants from the EU

[NotAllThere]

Not all Romanians and Bulgarians are Roma. Not all Roma are Bulgarian or Romanian.

[SueEllen]

What is the beneift to the UK for allowing this?

No one seems to have answered that everyone seems to be arguing that it does/does not cost as much as you think.

The benefits in the case of the UK are mainly past benefits at the moment.

In the past people in the UK in different sectors did go and find jobs in different EU countries when the UK economy was bad but other EU economies were fine.

However none of the politicians making the agreements and treaties could predict that EU expansion with poorer countries would coincide with some of the supposedly wealthier EU countries having economic problems. The UK government also couldn't predict that their decades of bad policies would leave UK skills in a mess, housing and infrastructure problems.

[SueEllen]

Not all Romanians and Bulgarians are Roma. Not all Roma are Bulgarian or Romanian.

STOP - Their brains will explode.

[BlasterBates]

This discussion reminds of a debate in the US. It went like this.

US steel producers are being undercut by cheap foreign producers costing jobs in the US.

What's the simple answer easy! lets introduce tariffs and this protects steel jobs, oh why didn't we think of this before....we saved 50,000 jobs whoohoo

Oh hang on say US car manufacturers and everyone else using steel now we're using very expensive steel and we can't sell our goods abroad I'm afraid we' all be sacking 500,000 employees, hope you don't mind.

Basically to answer this question you have to look a little wider than the several thousand EU immigrants who are on job seekers allowance.

...and for those who think it's a no brainer you need to answer the question as to why the Swiss have signed up to this as recently as the early 2000's and they're not in the EU, and here's a hint.... Swiss businesses moving their business out of Switzerland.

[darmstadt]

...

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

...

This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to an inquisition as to his reasons and motives for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

...

For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

...

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

[wonderboy]

This discussion reminds of a debate in the US. It went like this.

US steel producers are being undercut by cheap foreign producers costing jobs in the US.

What's the simple answer easy! lets introduce tariffs and this protects steel jobs, oh why didn't we think of this before....we saved 50,000 jobs whoohoo

Oh hang on say US car manufacturers and everyone else using steel now we're using very expensive steel and we can't sell our goods abroad I'm afraid we' all be sacking 500,000 employees, hope you don't mind.

Basically to answer this question you have to look a little wider than the several thousand EU immigrants who are on job seekers allowance.

...and for those who think it's a no brainer you need to answer the question as to why the Swiss have signed up to this as recently as the early 2000's and they're not in the EU, and here's a hint.... Swiss businesses moving their business out of Switzerland.

Please do not mischaracterise this discussion. We are specifically talking about the *immediate* provision of *benefits* to foreign EU nationals. Protectionism is another debate entirely.

[SueEllen]

Please do not mischaracterise this discussion. We are specifically talking about the *immediate* provision of *benefits* to foreign EU nationals. Protectionism is another debate entirely.

What part of:

Basically to answer this question you have to look a little wider than the several thousand EU immigrants who are on job seekers allowance.

is it you don't understand? Or what you prefer another Europe wide war that starts with something people should fight about like the first world war?

[BlasterBates]

Please do not mischaracterise this discussion. We are specifically talking about the *immediate* provision of *benefits* to foreign EU nationals. Protectionism is another debate entirely.

In your view if the reason for signing up to this wasn't for expanding trade with the EU, what in your opinion was the rationale behind Margaret Thatcher's government to sign up to this ?

...and out of interest how many Germans, Swiss and Frenchman have come over to Britain to earn 56 pounds a week when they could get substantially more in their own country on their own unemployment schemes?

Just by the by, Poles can't claim JSA without paying UK NI, there is no agreement with Poland,that gives them instant access to JSA.

[SueEllen]

In your view if the reason for signing up to this wasn't for expanding trade with the EU, what in your opinion was the rationale behind Margaret Thatcher's government to sign up to this ?

...and out of interest how many Germans, Swiss and Frenchman have come over to Britain to earn 56 pounds a week when they could get substantially more in their own country on their own unemployment schemes?

Just by the by, Poles can't claim JSA without paying UK NI, there is no agreement with Poland,that gives them instant access to JSA.

JSA is only £56.80 if you are under 25 and £71.70 if you are over.

You get income based JSA if you haven't made enough national insurance contributions which is what the Polish etc can get. However they have to meet the habitual residence provision like UK citizens who are returning from abroad i.e. you have to prove your main home is in the UK.

The fact the DWP is sanctioning people who are UK habitually resident and have paid NI contributions it's unlikely they are going to let someone whose just come of the boat sign up immediately.

[darmstadt]

You get income based JSA if you haven't made enough national insurance contributions which is what the Polish etc can get. However they have to meet the habitual residence provision like UK citizens who are returning from abroad i.e. you have to prove your main home is in the UK.

The fact the DWP is sanctioning people who are UK habitually resident and have paid NI contributions it's unlikely they are going to let someone whose just come of the boat sign up immediately.

I have been looking at that, just out of interest, and even I would find it hard to get any benefits if I returned to the UK.