Immigrants cost Britain £3,000 a day each, says report

[Mich the Tester]

I wonder if there was all this broohaha back in the 50's:

Probably, but perhaps not now, seeing as the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants own a lot of the businesses in Bedford employing people.

Bedford's not all that great, but it does have some good trattorias.

[sasguru]

What about displacement of existing workers? Yes I know 'all the benefit claimants are just lazy' but it seems to fly in the face of history and I suspect it has more to do with the benefits paid.
.

Does it fly in the face of history? Reading any history of Britain in the 20th century (especially post-war) shows until the 80s Britain had the most strike days and lowest productivity in Western Europe.
The latter is AFAIK still the case.

[darmstadt]

And it happened again if the 50's and 60's:

From the 1950s into the 1960s there was a mass migration of workers from all over the English-speaking Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, who settled in Britain. These immigrants were invited to fill labour requirements in London’s hospitals, transportation venues and railway development. They are widely viewed as having been a major contributing factor to the rebuilding of the post-war urban London economy.

But then people moaned about immigrants:

In 1962 the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed in Britain along with a succession of other laws in 1968, 1971, and 1981 that severely restricted the entry of Black immigrants into Britain. During this period it is widely argued that emergent blacks and Asians struggled in Britain against racism and prejudice

[Old Greg]

I wonder if there was all this broohaha back in the 50's:

As I Please

in Tribune
15 November 1946

George Orwell

AS the clouds, most of them much larger and dirtier than a man’s hand, come blowing up over the political horizon, there is one fact that obtrudes itself over and over again. This is that the Government’s troubles, present and future, arise quite largely from its failure to publicize itself properly.
People are not told with sufficient clarity what is happening, and why, and what may be expected to happen in the near future. As a result, every calamity, great or small, takes the mass of the public by surprise, and the Government incurs unpopularity by doing things which any government, of whatever colour, would have to do in the same circumstances.

Take one question which has been much in the news lately but has never been properly thrashed out, the immigration of foreign labour into this country. Recently we have seen a tremendous outcry at the T.U.C. conference against allowing Poles to work in the two places where labour is most urgently needed—in the mines and on the land.

It will not do to write this off as something ‘got up’ by Communist sympathizers, nor on the other hand to justify it by saying that the Polish refugees are all Fascists who ‘strut about’ wearing monocles and carrying brief-cases.

The question is, would the attitude of the British trade unions be any friendlier if it were a question, not of alleged Fascists but of the admitted victims of Fascism?

For example, hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews are now trying desperately to get to Palestine. No doubt many of them will ultimately succeed, but others will fail. How about inviting, say, 100,000 Jewish refugees to settle in this country? Or what about the Displaced Persons, numbering nearly a million, who are dotted in camps all over Germany, with no future and no place to go, the United States and the British Dominions having already refused to admit them in significant numbers? Why not solve their problems by offering them British citizenship?

It is easy to imagine what the average Briton’s answer would be. Even before the war, with the Nazi persecutions in full swing, there was no popular support for the idea of allowing large numbers of Jewish refugees into this country: nor was there any strong move to admit the hundreds of thousands of Spaniards who had fled from Franco to be penned up behind barbed wire in France.

For that matter, there was very little protest against the internment of the wretched German refugees in 1940. The comments I most often overheard at the time were ‘What did they want to come here for?’ and ‘They’re only after our jobs’.

The fact is that there is strong popular feeling in this country against foreign immigration. It arises from simple xenophobia, partly from fear of undercutting in wages, but above all from the out-of-date notion that Britain is overpopulated and that more population means more unemployment.

Actually, so far from having more workers than jobs, we have a serious labour shortage which will be accentuated by the continuance of conscription, and which will grow worse, not better, because of the ageing of the population.

Meanwhile our birthrate is still frighteningly low, and several hundred thousand women of marriageable age have no chance of getting husbands. But how widely are these facts known or understood?

In the end it is doubtful whether we can solve our problems without encouraging immigration from Europe. In a tentative way the Government has already tried to do this, only to be met by ignorant hostility, because the public has not been told the relevant facts beforehand. So also with countless other unpopular things that will have to be done from time to time.

But the most necessary step is not to prepare public opinion for particular emergencies, but to raise the general level of political understanding: above all, to drive home the fact, which has never been properly grasped, that British prosperity depends largely on factors outside Britain.

This business of publicizing and explaining itself is not easy for a Labour Government, faced by a press which at bottom is mostly hostile. Nevertheless, there are other ways of communicating with the public, and Mr Attlee and his colleagues might well pay more attention to the radio, a medium which very few politicians in this country have ever taken seriously.

[sasguru]

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"an editorial in the Manchester Evening Chronicle[4] wrote "that the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on our soil and rates simultaneously, shall be forbidden to land".!

Aliens Act 1905 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of course those dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigners turned out to be the most successful immigrants in British history - the Jews. bet that makes mos froth at the mouth.

[doodab]

Does it fly in the face of history? Reading any history of Britain in the 20th century (especially post-war) shows until the 80s Britain had the most strike days and lowest productivity in Western Europe.
The latter is AFAIK still the case.

I've often theorised that this is due to the selective slaughter of the productive in two world wars. The go getters went and got themselves blown up leaving a nation of back office busibodies and feckless skivers.

It's just a theory though....

[sasguru]

I've often theorised that this is due to the selective slaughter of the productive in two world wars. The go getters went and got themselves blown up leaving a nation of back office busibodies and feckless skivers.

It's just a theory though....

It's a theory I've often entertained myself.
But the Germans and French lost proportionately more both times, so it doesn't hold water.

[Old Greg]

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"an editorial in the Manchester Evening Chronicle[4] wrote "that the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on our soil and rates simultaneously, shall be forbidden to land".!

Aliens Act 1905 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of course those dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigners turned out to be the most successful immigrants in British history - the Jews. bet that makes mos froth at the mouth.

Is the Daily Mail bad for your health? - Telegraph

On Feb 2 1900, a British liner called the Cheshire moored at Southampton, carrying refugees from anti-semitic pogroms in Russia. "There were," the Daily Mail reported, "all kinds of Jews, all manner of Jews. They had breakfasted on board, but they rushed as though starving at the food. They helped themselves at will, they spilled coffee on the ground in wanton waste."
Perhaps they really were hungry and desperate? Of course not. "These were the penniless refugees," the Mail observed with heavy sarcasm, "and when the relief committee passed by they hid their gold, and fawned and whined, and in broken English asked for money for their train fare."
We may live in a changing world, but the Daily Mail doesn't change much. Although it wouldn't dare put the boot into Jewish refugees now, their modern counterparts get exactly the same treatment. A few years ago it reported on a plan by a Baptist charity to accommodate 70 asylum-seekers from the Balkans and Sierra Leone at an empty boarding school in Somerset. "These people would want to go to the pub," said the chairman of the parish council, who was presented as the hero of the struggle. "Would they be chatting up the local girls? I fear the worst. I have a 20-year-old daughter."

[mos]

Of course those dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigners turned out to be the most successful immigrants in British history - the Jews. bet that makes mos froth at the mouth.

You are disgusting. So now you accuse me of antisemitism?

[sasguru]

You are disgusting

?
No you are stupid. Really, fundamentally, thick.