UK needs +7 Million immigrants to keep debt down

CLAPTON

antrobus wrote: »

But it doesn't change the fact that the UK has an ageing population and the long term financial implications thereof.

What the collapse of communism and the break up of the Soviet Union has meant in those terms is that, to the extent that the UK requires immigrants, it can now get them from former Eastern Bloc countries rather than from somewhere else. .

It means we already have a few million more people here and so it has changed the demographics already.

It might be that in your opinion we still need 7 million more.

My view is formed by non financial issues as well as financial.

At the current time we need no immigration other than a trivial level.

In the future there may be financial pressure to encourage more immigration but that is a value judgement to be made at the time: hopefully by a more democratic progress than the current system.

antrobus

CLAPTON wrote: »

It means we already have a few million more people here and so it has changed the demographics already....

But there is no reason to suppose that the demographic change was driven by events in eastern Europe. Had Poland not joined the EU we'd have had to hire all those builders from somewhere else.

CLAPTON wrote: »

....It might be that in your opinion we still need 7 million more.

My view is formed by non financial issues as well as financial.

At the current time we need no immigration other than a trivial level.

In the future there may be financial pressure to encourage more immigration but that is a value judgement to be made at the time: hopefully by a more democratic progress than the current system.

The OBR is not offering an opinion. It's offering a conclusion. I understand that there are people who don't like the conclusion, but no one on this thread has so far managed to come up with any substantitive argument as to why the conclusion might be wrong.

CLAPTON

antrobus wrote: »

But there is no reason to suppose that the demographic change was driven by events in eastern Europe. Had Poland not joined the EU we'd have had to hire all those builders from somewhere else.



The OBR is not offering an opinion. It's offering a conclusion. I understand that there are people who don't like the conclusion, but no one on this thread has so far managed to come up with any substantitive argument as to why the conclusion might be wrong.

We didn't go out and 'hire' these Eastern Block immigrants.

They came of their own accord because they are now part of the EU.
Without the fall of the USSR they wouldn't have come and there is no evidence that similar numbers would have come from non - EU countries.

The basic arithmetic of the current demographic situation is reasonably well documented but of course is a projection based on many assumptions.

The OBR 'conclusion' that we need 7 million additional immigrants is an opinion based on a set of assumptions that may or may not be true.

e.g. suppose the older people choose to continue working much longer than the OBR projections?

maybe the society is willing to have a lower per capita gdp in exchange for a lower population

maybe gdp growth is significantly greater that the OBR assumptions (lets say that nuclear fusion works and gives us unlimited cheap power )

maybe our existing population decides to produce a lot more kids


in any event we don't need more immigrants at the moment

Graham_Devon

antrobus wrote: »

The OBR is not offering an opinion. It's offering a conclusion. I understand that there are people who don't like the conclusion, but no one on this thread has so far managed to come up with any substantitive argument as to why the conclusion might be wrong.

No, it's offering a conclusion based on it's opinion.

How can you conclude what will happen years ahead? if we could do that we wouldn't even be at this juncture.

John_Pierpoint

TruckerT wrote: »

Arguably, it would be as sensible to force our unemployed to emigrate, as to allow 7m foreigners to immigrate.

TruckerT

There is some smart money in USA that says the old folks are much better off, not migrating to Florida but, emigrating to Ecuador.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U95RyrqAtI0

There you have it:
Two pensioners freeing up a home in the mother country.
One Southern migrant (say) who does not have to ride "the beast" train in an effort to live a miserable life in an overcrowded northern city.
A basket case economy with foreign exchange to give it a chance of restructuring its society and economy.
[Ecuador should be a petro currency - but it was one of the first to throw in the towel in the global financial crisis.]

John_Pierpoint

As a member of the flower power generation, we failed on a lot of fronts, mainly in our attempts to get across the fact that we live on a finite planet.

Well here we are a couple of generations later and the Ipod Generation face a problem 3 times larger.

I certainly won't be able to help out much as we appear to regress to the mean.

Young people, your world:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0375p83

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalis_in_the_United_Kingdom

TruckerT

antrobus wrote: »

The OBR is not offering an opinion. It's offering a conclusion. I understand that there are people who don't like the conclusion, but no one on this thread has so far managed to come up with any substantitive argument as to why the conclusion might be wrong.

Graham_Devon wrote: »

No, it's offering a conclusion based on it's opinion.

How can you conclude what will happen years ahead? if we could do that we wouldn't even be at this juncture.

Of course there is no substantive argument as to why the OBR conclusion might be wrong.

Equally, there is no substantive argument as to why they might be right.

It's crystal-ball gazing. D.Cameron has apparently already decided that immigration needs to be kept under tight control, and no other party appears to be in any serious disagreement with him.

Governments only partly base their decisions upon statistical evidence, and long may it remain so.

I still don't understand why this story has not become a huge issue for UKIP to try to explain. It's probably because there is no-one at all, in any political party, who is willing to defend the conclusions of the report.

If, in 30 years time, the OBR prediction proves to be correct, then no doubt there will be lots of people crying 'I told you so'.

But if you divide up recent years into 30 year spans (1920-1950, 1950-1980, 1980-2010), the impossibility of predicting the future becomes clear.

TruckerT

antrobus

TruckerT wrote: »

Of course there is no substantive argument as to why the OBR conclusion might be wrong...

I'm glad you spotted that.

TruckerT wrote: »

...Equally, there is no substantive argument as to why they might be right...

Yes there is. They've produced a whole report on 'fiscal sustainability'. That's a "substantive argument". Do you want the link?

TruckerT

antrobus wrote: »

I'm glad you spotted that.



Yes there is. They've produced a whole report on 'fiscal sustainability'. That's a "substantive argument". Do you want the link?

You are clearly an economist/statistician, and therefore able to understand and accept the arithmetic which the OBR has used to arrive at its conclusions.

But you also have to consider the 'real world'. Most of us, including our political masters (it seems), can make no sense at all of the OBR report.

If there is nobody in the real world who can make sense of the OBR's report, then it might as well not exist.

I have seen the OBR spokespeople on the news, clearly relishing the fact that most people have no clue what they are talking about, therefore they are very unlikely to be challenged, and that they will never be expected to get into a situation where they have to defend their conclusions/opinions. Nice work if you can get it...

TruckerT

Thrugelmir

TruckerT wrote: »

It's crystal-ball gazing. D.Cameron has apparently already decided that immigration needs to be kept under tight control, and no other party appears to be in any serious disagreement with him.

Mass migration simply isn't feasible to cope with. Freedom of movement sounds a wonderful concept. However with it also comes social unrest, particularly at times of economic woe as is the case now.