Net immigration to UK up "significantly"

Running_Horse

Can this country accommodate a new Medway Towns every year forever, plus the continuing offspring? I doubt it is sustainable.

armour

Hamish's ugly post has been taken down. Thank you mods.
Heres an extract from Carswells resignation speech;

'On the subject of immigration, let me make it absolutely clear; I'm not against immigration. The one thing more ugly that nativism is angry nativism.

Just like Australia or Switzerland, we should welcome those that want to come here to contribute. We need those with skills and drive. There's hardly a hospital, GP surgery or supermarket in the country that could run without that skill and drive. Real leadership would make this clear.

We should speak with pride and respect about first generation Britons.

But like Australia, we ought to have the right to decide who comes.'

Seems reasonable to me.

CLAPTON

The basic issue is that New Labour, LibDems, Hamish, BBC, WC1, the Guardian plus loads of the Conservatives, most leaders of industry, all believe in unlimited immigration.


Some simply want more immigrant to keep wages down, some because they believe that we live in one world, some because it was PC and considered racist to restrict immigration, some because they see it a solution to the problem of funding the aging population and some like foreign food.
Cultural diversity was considered a major plus but for various reasons this is less considered a plus.

All of these see only benefits and no significant downsides.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

armour wrote: »

Hamish's ugly post has been taken down.

The image substituting Farage for Hitler is all over facebook and twitter precisely because it's funny, but makes the point rather well that right wing charismatic leaders with little in the way of real policy, but a knack for blaming all our troubles on immigrants, don't have a very good track record....

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

armour wrote: »

like Australia, we ought to have the right to decide who comes.'

Free movement and open borders agreements are common throughout the World, and Australia belongs to one.

Australia allow unlimited migration from New Zealand and vice versa.

Seems reasonable to me.

We have the right to live and work freely in Europe and that right is reciprocal.

There are roughly the same number of Brits in Europe as there are Europeans in Britain.

This is a complete and utter non-issue....

Britain is desperately in need of millions more migrants. We need more open borders, not closed ones.

kabayiri

armour wrote: »

...
But like Australia, we ought to have the right to decide who comes.'

Seems reasonable to me.

Stands to reason.

We need production engineers. We don't need more people with window cleaning skills.

We need database designers; games designers; infrastructure specialists.

We don't need more fruit pickers.

We could force our unemployed indigenous to do these low value jobs.

GDP per capita is not improving despite a period of sustained mass immigration. In an age of such intense technological development, that is a depressing assessment.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

kabayiri wrote: »

GDP per capita is not improving despite a period of sustained mass immigration..

False.

GDP per capita in the UK rose to record highs until 2007, when the global financial crisis caused the worst recession in 100 years.

Like GDP, it then fell.... But has been rising on an upwards trend since Q2 2012.

So it consistently rose even during the years of mass immigration form 97 onwards, and fell in the financial crisis, and is now rising again.

mayonnaise

armour wrote: »

Hamish's ugly post has been taken down.

Quite worrying to see the MSE thought police taking this action.
Hamish's post was - as usual - spot on.
I guess we don't learn from history after all.

CLAPTON

GDP is a poor measure of effective income as it counts loads of things that are really 'costs' as 'income'.
So new infrastructure to meet the needs of an increase in population, fuel spend in a long traffic jam etc are counted as increases in GDP whereas in reality they don't increase our well being at all.
Bizarrely the increase in prices of houses due to the increase population shows up as an increase in wealth although people's actual housing standards have fallen.
It takes no account of non-monetary but real things like queuing time, overcrowded housing, pressure on beaches and beauty spots.
It also takes no account of our need to increase imports of essential foods, fuel etc with the associated future risks of failure to supply.


On average there is no shortage of labour in the UK:
In fact the over supply has the effect of reducing investment in new equipment etc which shows itself clearly in falling productivity, part-time working etc.
In the future we may need more labour (unlikely) but until then we should slow the rate of growth of our population.

Bantex_2

I believe that many types of crime which involve theft or damage actually show as an increase in GDP.