UKIP poster boy is a racist immigrant, film at 11

[Agelastus]

You didn't. But it is a very personal matter to me, and puzzling as well, as this whole thing must be very hidden in society, since I just don't encounter it at all in my daily life (kudos for Britain on that by the way).

But I guess my point is sort of: those Poles you liked, me, etc: we ARE the immigrants you think are hurting the UK. You are entitled to your opinion and ultimately it is your country and I am just a guest here. But you and the rest of the UKIP voters should be aware of this.

And that's where you have an issue; you assume all UKIP voters are against all immigration. Or even most of it. What we want is a sense that it can be controlled. That our government can control it.

I want out of the EU for many reasons, some rational, some more irrational (I'm aware that my patriotism and sense of national pride is somewhat out-of-date.) On the issue of immigration I want out so we can rebalance it. I don't want us to have to excessively discriminate against the rest of the world (particularly our Commonwealth) because we have a completely unpredictable number coming in from Europe - which is what we are doing now.

Our country needs immigration. We need it for the economy. We need it because of the birth rate and the aging population. We need it because in some ways it's a zero sum game; the world economy has expanded, at the moment, past the number of qualified people to man it. We need it because we can't stick our head in the sands. We need it because it makes us stronger.

What we don't need is immigration that swamps local services (there are other examples than the town Sheilbh mentioned) because we have no clue about how many people are going to arrive. And if we are to have immigration it damn well needs to be of the sort that adds more value to the economy than £5 billion over seven years from hundreds of thousands of people.

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My examples for wage deflation are like Sheilbh's; I've worked for a company that employed a trained, qualified welder of Polish origin for not much more than the minimum wage. That's not base level outsourced factory work.

[Tamas]

You didn't. But it is a very personal matter to me, and puzzling as well, as this whole thing must be very hidden in society, since I just don't encounter it at all in my daily life (kudos for Britain on that by the way).

But I guess my point is sort of: those Poles you liked, me, etc: we ARE the immigrants you think are hurting the UK. You are entitled to your opinion and ultimately it is your country and I am just a guest here. But you and the rest of the UKIP voters should be aware of this.

And that's where you have an issue; you assume all UKIP voters are against all immigration. Or even most of it. What we want is a sense that it can be controlled. That our government can control it.

I want out of the EU for many reasons, some rational, some more irrational (I'm aware that my patriotism and sense of national pride is somewhat out-of-date.) On the issue of immigration I want out so we can rebalance it. I don't want us to have to excessively discriminate against the rest of the world (particularly our Commonwealth) because we have a completely unpredictable number coming in from Europe - which is what we are doing now.

Our country needs immigration. We need it for the economy. We need it because of the birth rate and the aging population. We need it because in some ways it's a zero sum game; the world economy has expanded, at the moment, past the number of qualified people to man it. We need it because we can't stick our head in the sands. We need it because it makes us stronger.

What we don't need is immigration that swamps local services (there are other examples than the town Sheilbh mentioned) because we have no clue about how many people are going to arrive. And if we are to have immigration it damn well needs to be of the sort that adds more value to the economy than £5 billion over seven years from hundreds of thousands of people.

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My examples for wage deflation are like Sheilbh's; I've worked for a company that employed a trained, qualified welder of Polish origin for not much more than the minimum wage. That's not base level outsourced factory work.

Well, those are fair points, actually.

On the second part. These are short term issues. Such guys are desperate or clueless or both and they are in a massive disadvantage when competing with native prospective employees. Their only edge is asking less money and dealing with it. That should gradually cease to be once immigration slows down.

[Agelastus]

And especially in the service industry, if there is an immigrant who is willing to take the job with X conditions for Y salary, and there is a native British person who is willing to take it as well with  X and Y while showing the same level of skill and experience as the immigrant, there is no way on Earth it is not the native guy being hired. Not here, not anywhere.

You would not always be right.

Stereotypes would then apply - and the immigrant (unless he was Romanian or Bulgarian...which embarasses me a little) could very well get hired.

It's not even particularly irrational. The immigrant, without local contacts, probably not as fluent in the language, will likely stay in the job longer if they are dissatisfied with it simply because the employer would perceive that it would be harder for them to find another.

I still fail to understand why a number of the previously mentioned Poles worked where they did for nearly 3 years before everything went belly up. Particularly said qualified welder.

[Sheilbh]

How would raising the minimum wage help? Already what you are saying is that immigrants are more willing to take minimum wage jobs than natives. If you raise the minimum wage, it will also raise prices accross the board, promote the grey economy, etc. Hardly a surefire way to improve living standards.

What I'm saying is that employers are offering immigrants below minimum wage jobs and not being pursued. I know people who'd just moved here and took the job because they didn't know or just to tide them over for a while, which is understandable. But the employers are breaking the law and creating a class of job that ordinary residents - from wherever - don't know about and can't apply for. They should be and prosecuted vigorously. Ensuring that employers are following the law on wages, but also conditions is a part of immigration policy.

Raising the minimum wage is unrelated.

And especially in the service industry, if there is an immigrant who is willing to take the job with X conditions for Y salary, and there is a native British person who is willing to take it as well with  X and Y while showing the same level of skill and experience as the immigrant, there is no way on Earth it is not the native guy being hired. Not here, not anywhere.

This isn't true in the service industry. I promise you when I worked in a bar (and I helped choose new members of staff) we generally only hired Europeans. I was literally the only British person working there for most of the time I was there.

[Sheilbh]

Well, those are fair points, actually.

The other point I'd add to Age's point is that I think the European free movement is a huge waste of talent in this country and Europe.

You're an exception. But look at the people, almost all from Spain, I worked with in a bar - lawyers, engineers, teachers, dentists. They're not generally here to make a new life, most didn't really want to be here and many hated London. They're here because of how bad the situation is in Spain and maybe to improve their English - one of the most depressing things I heard was someone talking about his 40-something parents learning English to move to the UK. But the other consequence for local people applying for unskilled jobs is that they're going up against highly qualified, educated people - though obviously not always.

If I'm honest my ideal system wouldn't have free movement like this but something like we have with Australia or Canada where you can easily get a two year working holiday visa and if, at the end of that, your employer says they need your skills you get a permanent visa. But aside from that people come here because of their skills and education and have jobs using those skills and education.

[Josquius]

How could these super qualified Spanish people get the bar jobs though I wonder?
Its usually a problem for graduates that they're over-qualified for such work but under-experienced for graduate level stuff.
Surely lawyers are a bit over-qualified for bar work?
Or does London have a different approach to being overqualified to elsewhere?

[Agelastus]

I would suspect that London has a disproportionately high level of turnover among its bar and pub staff, partly due to the large number of students in the capital.

I also suspect that bar work is a traditional job for the overqualified (again, see students.)

I also suspect that their qualifications are working for them as it proves them to be hardworkers compared to others (again, see students.)

[Sheilbh]

I would suspect that London has a disproportionately high level of turnover among its bar and pub staff, partly due to the large number of students in the capital.

I also suspect that bar work is a traditional job for the overqualified (again, see students.)

I also suspect that their qualifications are working for them as it proves them to be hardworkers compared to others (again, see students.)

Basically yep plus lots of jobs and like students they may be working for free somewhere part-time in their field to build up their experience in the UK.

Also they may not have very good English, but they're clearly bright and hard-working so they can't work in their field but are perfect for service jobs.

[Martinus]

I don't think the UK is suffering from a particular shortage of lawyers. The benefit of free movement of workers (besides creating a single market) is movement at all levels, not just super-qualified professionals. I think it works best not with lawyers, doctors and the like, but with people who perform jobs that the locals do not want to do for various cultural or social reasons (the famous "Polish plumber" comes to mind).

[Martinus]

To be honest, the more I read most British posters on this board, the more I am convinced: you guys should leave. I think you guys just don't get the EU, to be honest. The point of the EU is not that you can look at every single freedom or privilege in isolation and wonder whether it helps you or not - the point is that you get a package, with some of the elements of it helping some countries and other elements helping other countries (for example, Poland mainly benefits from free movement of workers and services, and from structural funds at the moment; the UK is not meant to benefit from these freedoms but it benefits significantly from free movement of capital and, to a lesser extent, free movement of goods).

Just know that, contrary to what UKIP says, the British economy will sink as a result because the City will dwindle. Right now, you can open a bank in the UK, start an insurance company in the UK or list your stock at the London Stock Exchange - and then have it "passported", without much ado, into every single EU member state. This is thanks to the EU and this will go away. You can get a judgement in an English court and have it enforced throughout the EU without having to go through an onerous foreign judgement recognition procedure - this will go away. You can freely invest from the UK into every single EU member state, without any special permits or consents (other than those locals would also need to obtain) - this will go away.

So London will lose out to New York on the one hand (because on equal footing now, New York will be more attractive) and Frankfurt on the other (because it will not become the largest unchallenged financial centre giving one an access to the entire EU common market). And there is no chance in hell, for this very reason, that Germans will not let you keep any of these privileges.

[Warspite]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29910497

New EU migrants add £5bn to UK, report says

It says exactly the same thing as the report from a couple of years ago (heck, given the dates involved, it may even be the same report, only this time the final, not the preliminary version.) EU migrants add more to the economy than they take - but when you take the headline figure and break it down by number of migrants and number of years the value added per migrant per year is ridiculously low. Low enough to make one wonder if the costs (such as the deflationary pressure they've placed on wages at the lower end of the market) is worth it.

£5 billion over a 7 year period is frankly pathetic.

That £5bn is just for the 2004+ entrants. Why is it 'frankly pathetic'?  This is purely an examination of fiscal contribution. On this limited basis, the report suggests that migrants are a net benefit to the public purse. (Which is important, particularly in a time of austerity, to keeping the spending on services for the rest of the population going.) If you start factoring in things like consumption (which creates jobs) and skills provided to the economy, then the benefit would be even higher. And the skills thing is important: as the report says, we get a huge inflow of £££ by not having to have paid for the education that migrant workers bring.

[PJL]

Honestly, I think even losing the pre-eminance of the City of London wouldn't be a bad thing. The UK is too reliant on it to sustain the economy, which needs to be rebalanced back towards manufacturing and the north. Sure there'd be a short term decline, but in the areas that don't really need the extra jobs anyway, but it would benefit in the long term.

[Tamas]

To be honest, the more I read most British posters on this board, the more I am convinced: you guys should leave. I think you guys just don't get the EU, to be honest. The point of the EU is not that you can look at every single freedom or privilege in isolation and wonder whether it helps you or not - the point is that you get a package, with some of the elements of it helping some countries and other elements helping other countries (for example, Poland mainly benefits from free movement of workers and services, and from structural funds at the moment; the UK is not meant to benefit from these freedoms but it benefits significantly from free movement of capital and, to a lesser extent, free movement of goods).

Just know that, contrary to what UKIP says, the British economy will sink as a result because the City will dwindle. Right now, you can open a bank in the UK, start an insurance company in the UK or list your stock at the London Stock Exchange - and then have it "passported", without much ado, into every single EU member state. This is thanks to the EU and this will go away. You can get a judgement in an English court and have it enforced throughout the EU without having to go through an onerous foreign judgement recognition procedure - this will go away. You can freely invest from the UK into every single EU member state, without any special permits or consents (other than those locals would also need to obtain) - this will go away.

So London will lose out to New York on the one hand (because on equal footing now, New York will be more attractive) and Frankfurt on the other (because it will not become the largest unchallenged financial centre giving one an access to the entire EU common market). And there is no chance in hell, for this very reason, that Germans will not let you keep any of these privileges.

Yeah. I think the assumption that the UK can leave the EU while keeping all the benefits beneficial for her, is delusional at best. That would equal to cherry-picking the things you want from the EU and the things you give in return, and if the UK is let to do that, EVERYONE ELSE will do the same. No way the EU is going to let that happen. Just no way.

[Warspite]

Honestly, I think even losing the pre-eminance of the City of London wouldn't be a bad thing. The UK is too reliant on it to sustain the economy, which needs to be rebalanced back towards manufacturing and the north. Sure there'd be a short term decline, but in the areas that don't really need the extra jobs anyway, but it would benefit in the long term.

Someone please explain this fetish with manufacturing that so many people have? As if the value of a good is somehow conceptually different to the value of a service? Only in Britain do people actually want to destro- sorry, "rebalance" away from the most productive sector of the economy.

Presumably, this would require reviving the UK's glorious history of state planning and industrial policy which led to the remarkable economic successes of the twentieth-century.

By the way, the UK has a lot of high-value manufacturing that is considered world-leading. Unfortunately, it's mostly in the Midlands and the south.

[Agelastus]

That £5bn is just for the 2004+ entrants. Why is it 'frankly pathetic'?  This is purely an examination of fiscal contribution. On this limited basis, the report suggests that migrants are a net benefit to the public purse. (Which is important, particularly in a time of austerity, to keeping the spending on services for the rest of the population going.) If you start factoring in things like consumption (which creates jobs) and skills provided to the economy, then the benefit would be even higher. And the skills thing is important: as the report says, we get a huge inflow of £££ by not having to have paid for the education that migrant workers bring.

Studies show that the net benefit of migrants is concentrated in the first few years of their stay in their new country - before they have children and place a burden on the educational system, grow older and place a burden on the Social care and medical system etc. Hence they need to make a large positive contribution early to compensate for later costs.

Now, a large number of eastern European immigrants came with their families instead of settling down and later marrying here so the social costs of their children are already in the figures (hopefully) making them artificially low. On the other hand £20.00 a week (see below) doesn't seem a very impressive net benefit when you factor in the later healthcare costs of the large number who seem to be migrating permanently rather than returning to Poland, Hungary etc. after a few years.

A more detailed story in the Telegraph today says the following -

2001-2011 £25 billion more into the economy from immigration (not specified as to general or European.)
2.5 million immigrants in that period.
Roughly £20.00 per week contribution from each immigrant.

However,

1995-2011, those originally from Europe (whether they have arrived under "Heath, Thatcher, Blair or Cameron" - Telegraph wording, not mine!) have added just £4 billion to the economy.

So that's a negative £21 billion influence from those who arrived before 2001 but post 1973. Of course, overseas immigrants and British nationals produced even more horrific figures.

Anyway, the above is why I called the figures "frankly pathetic" as the net benefit is so small given that a chunk of the long term costs have not yet kicked in.

I do need to read the report though to see if they factored in long term medical costs; there's no evidence from the stories in the press that they have, but absence of evidence is not, of course, evidence of absence. This would, of course, make a major difference to whether the figure was truly pathetic or not. Plus, of course, the different time periods and figures being bandied around in the press are not particularly helpful.

Still, one thing I think the report does show is that either taxes need to rise or tax credits need to fall.

Actually, the really interesting thing about the Telegraph article is a graph that shows the British born net contribution went negative around 2003 and then dropped catastrophically around 2008 or so. Now, the cause of the 2008 drop is fairly obvious I would think. But the early drop that took the British-born into negative territory but at a level that remained stable for about 5 years...I can't explain that unless it has something to do with Brown's taxation policies.

Oh, and that graph also shows the European contribution going into negative territory around 2008-9 as well, right around the time you've argued they've been of the most benefit. And while we do, indisputably, get a huge benefit from not having to educate engineers etc. if a lot of them are spending months or years doing bar work we're not actually exactly utilising them in an economically beneficial fashion.

Edit:

Link to the article.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11210687/Immigration-the-real-cost-to-Britain.html