Shocking immigration hysteria

[NotAllThere]

What about all the British expats sending their money abroad?

I'm taking money out of the UK - it's where one of my clients is based. I do send some of it back, but that's only to help my nieces get through university. Certainly more flows out than in.

[NickFitz]

which good points?

Romanian average wages are a <1/4 of ours?
Unemployment there is high? Which is why there are 2 million in Italy & Spain?

To be honest If I could earn £100K in France for cleaning tables I might be tempted.

Would have helped if I'd posted the link, I suppose

'Waiting for Godot': Or, for Romanians to Come to the UK | Dr Ion Jinga

[Wanderer]

Can't we let them in on 5 year visas?

Hmmm, didn't Italy offer something like that at some stage? They allowed a number of people to live and work for 5 years and then they had to leave. There was some sort of incentive in the form of a bond or tax rebate for the people who did actually leave on good terms after the 5 years. Can't remember the details so that could all be wrong... It might work for the UK though under current law you can apply for indefinite leave to remain if you are here for 5 years and I'm sure that a number of people would end up with quite strong ties after that time and not want to leave.

[Zero Liability]

Well them staying here wouldn't be an issue provided they continued being self-reliant and in productive work.

[SpontaneousOrder]

But higher wages for the British will increase incentive for our own people to try and work,

You mean they'll be incentivised to work for those jobs that no longer exist because you've just blown their marginal productivity out of the water?

[SpontaneousOrder]

If you want to curb immigration, pay workers a living wage | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian

Erm... but the whole reason those guys travel all this way to work is because the pay here is higher. Higher minimum wage will only encourage them even more.

And -if- higher minimum wages (apart from destroying what jobs there currently are) meant that brits then decided to work (although in my experience employers often prefer the immigrants because they work harder), where do those increased labour costs go? To the consumer, meaning that benefits would have to rise afterwards anyway in order for claimants to maintain the same standard of living. At which point those brits lacking self-respect will just sign on again.

Think her and Bob Crow are among the only prominent real socialists we have in the UK. Too many white collar armchair socialists, like some others on here, have a palpable contempt for the ordinary man.

Socialist are pure scum, so that's a good thing!

[Zero Liability]

Which is why you have things like apprenticeships (one of the few current government policies I have much liking for) and levels of credit expansion generating price inflation (not necessarily captured by the headline CPI) that in effect circumvent the MW, because if they didn't do that, some people would simply not possess the skills to be employable at the MW, and this isn't something university education is necessarily going to change. It might even do the opposite.

Forget the MW - it'd be better to simply increase people's productivity to the point that they earn at or above the MW, and that may imply gaining skills on the job and ending the denigration of people who choose not to go to university and instead undertake blue collar roles or alternative routes into white collar roles like accountancy or the very much over-subscribed field of law.

Then there's also the prospect of reducing the tax burden people face, increasing the amount of disposable income they have to allocate as they wish and streamlining the way taxation works, particularly to encourage businesses to form and hire. Part of the appeal of contracting, for instance, both to employers and contractors is the fact that you can avoid NI, which is a horrible tax in almost all respects and does little good to anyone's prospects of being hired.

[DodgyAgent]

Apart from the fact that this article is all "hypothetical" i.e. made up numbers, look at the comments section

New migrants could hypothetically cost the UK billions | UK | News | Daily Express

Mere bigotry? There's some pretty nasty bile in there that would make even a bigot blush.

At least they use the word "might". Why do you people insist on calling any discussion about immigration racist or bigoted? If you like them so much may I suggest you open the doors of your house and invite them to stay.

I hardly call an argument supported by facts bigoted or racist: The Government has no real idea how many will come or which benefits they will claim. When similar restrictions were lifted on Poland in 2004, experts said only a few thousand would arrive in Britain.

In the event more than 500,000 turned up.

With the latest influx it has been left to observers to provide a panicked British public with a calculation of the potential impact on stretched public services like schools and the NHS.

Of the 150,000 Romanians already here,15 per cent don’t have a job.

Instead of being lazy stupid or bigoted perhaps you might like to argue and evidence your counter point.

[VectraMan]

At least they use the word "might". Why do you people insist on calling any discussion about immigration racist or bigoted?

Because the arguments against tend to be about bigotry. The current wave of hysteria has been about Romanians and Bulgarians turning up for no reason other than to claim our generous benefits, not to work or contribute, but why do you think Romanians and Bulgarians in particular are more likely to do that than British people?

And we've heard how immigrants cause more crime. But why do you think people from foreign countries are more likely to commit crime? Even if statistics show that it's true, then denying all because of the actions of a small number of people that happen to have come from the same country as them is the very definition of an -ism.

The argument that public services would suffer if there's a large increase in population is certainly a valid one; nobody would pretend that it isn't. But it's already happened. A million or so Poles turned up over the last 10 years, and we all coped. And indeed the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish etc. have had the right to live and work here for 20 years. Why is there so much hysteria right now about Romanians and Bulgarians?

[darmstadt]

The argument that public services would suffer if there's a large increase in population is certainly a valid one; nobody would pretend that it isn't. But it's already happened. A million or so Poles turned up over the last 10 years, and we all coped. And indeed the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish etc. have had the right to live and work here for 20 years. Why is there so much hysteria right now about Romanians and Bulgarians?

I would have thought that public services shouldn't suffer as a lot of the immigrants tend to work in them and by paying their taxes they're contributing towards them...

One other thing, people go on about only allowing skilled professional people in but if you do, and they become employed, then what happens to all the young British people studying to enter these professions? When they leave higher education there will be no jobs for them due to this shortsighted thinking and if you don't let those in who will do the menial tasks then **** all will get done....Its either all or none but there needs to be rules and safeguards, i.e. you must already have a job lined up, somewhere to live, have money in a bank account sufficient to live on for a minimum period of time, etc.