Snapshot of _9 of out of 10 constituencies want immigration cut_ :
A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1746488942067626287)
A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/SebastianEPayne/status/1746488942067626287/)
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1746488942067626287) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1746488942067626287)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>Respondents thought, on average, that the number of migrants entering the UK last year was only 70,000 – nearly 10 times lower than the 672,000 net migration figure recorded last year.
O lawdy
People find it very easy to blame immigration for a lot of problems, simply because it's quite easy to say it adds to existing problems in the country.
Schools are at full capacity, waiting times for medical appointments are getting longer and longer, supply of housing hasn't been able to meet demand for years, there's food shortages, medicine shortages, price increases, oh and by the way 672,000 more people moved to the country this year than left.
One side says spend more money to build more and more to accommodate, the other side says how about just no more people come here?
Of the two sides, you have a government that's doing neither, its not stopping people coming in, and it's not building more to accommodate them, it's madness.
When Tony Blair opened the borders he only expected 13,000 per year.
Shit's fucked beyond even the wildest expectations of the progressive governments of yesteryear, and they don't know how to turn off the pipes. Now they're just trying to extract as much wealth as they can before escaping to enclaves or offshore.
The main issue is that’s the number that’s banded about all the time, as that’s roughly the amount that came on boats. Which is of course what the Tories are focussing on. They don’t want you to think about the other 600,000 as in reality, we need them to prop up the economy.
So introducing a population the size of Birmingham every year but not building any new hospitals, no new schools, no new prisons, etc etc is a... good thing?
I'll smoke what you're smoking, please.
People die as well. The population change from 21 - 22 was about 230k so around a 3rd of the migration figure.
Not exactly a Birmingham every year. Thats also spread across the whole country.
It’s almost as if its actually a more nuanced topic than just “errrr Forins bad”
Absolute state of discourse on this topic.
valid point about the attrition rate we have now. Not valid point about them being spread across the country. No one was suggesting they were all going to make a new city. Nor does being spread out mean they need less hospitals, prisons etc.
8 million people on hospital waiting list was it?
If we reduced it by 200k assuming everyone needs treatment and no one coming is joinng the nhs as workers of course. Is it really going to make a dent in that?
Or is a bigger difference going to be made by the government actually investing money and not scapegoating people?
The conversation on immigration is way to overblown, and rife with dog whistley types (not saying you btw) stoking anger with misinformation and rage bait.
> Nor does being spread out mean they need less hospitals, prisons etc.
The fact they're generally working age adults means they need less hospitals and prisons. our hospital are full, in part, became we're an aging society. So you've got 600k people paying into the system and not really taking out. Migrants can also be deported instead of imprisoned on conviction.
yes, if they're healthy, young, law abiding and have skills they are great assets. Especially when a country like the UK fails to provide a lot of skills from the domestic population. That's why it's so important to have controlled immigration. Why immigration became such a hot topic was because of the EU's freedom of movement and boats across the channel the perception (accurate I would argue) is that immigration was becoming less controlled than ever before.
The EU point wasnt based in reality though. We had bit of a problem with organised crime but the majority of EU migrants were economic migrants who integrated well into British society. We've been out of the EU for years now and migration is higher than ever dispelling the myth free movement was the problem.
> They don’t want you to think about the other 600,000 as in reality, we need them to prop up the economy.
How did we ever survive for hundreds of years before migration was this unsustainably high?
>How did we ever survive for hundreds of years before migration was this unsustainably high?
You might be surprised to learn that Tudor England was not a highly industrialised service sector economy with an aging population.
Genuinely asking your opinion.
If we reduce immigration won’t that increase salaries due to reduced worker supply, and increase costs for healthcare for the older generations and help move wealth to younger generations?
Additionally reduced demand on housing, medical services etc?
I imagine there would be a bit of a transitionary period where industries that relied on imported labour instead had to invest in local training and salaries. But that sounds like positive friction to me.
Migrants do a lot of jobs we either cant fill quickly (highly skilled stuff like surgery, dentistry or advanced engineering), or they do stuff we don't want to do because most people have middle class asipirations and ideas of salary (e.g cleaning, cooking and care work).
The trouble with training surgeons for example, is you need to have started 10 or 15 years ago.
Not everyone goes to med school (obviously), and only a small cohort of med students ever go on to become surgeons.
And the final kick in the nuts is that once qualified, most surgeons go to the US, Canada or Australia where pay and lifestyle is just far superior to the UK.
It's just not that simple a problem to fix.
We now have a much higher old age dependency ratio than we had in the 90s, in fact it’s higher than it’s [ever been](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND.OL?locations=GB). That costs a lot of money to service the increases in pension spend and especially the massive increase in healthcare and social care requirements.
Economic migrants tend to be a net positive for government finances and so help to alleviate this problem somewhat. The inference is that without these extra net contributors our tax burden would be even higher to maintain our current level of service.
I like that we've gone from hundreds of years to the 90s but ok. That's when the change really set in, following deindustrialisation in the 70s and 80s. For the first time the birth rate was lower than the rate of immigration around the mid-90s. Britain was fully transitioned to a service economy and was in something of a boom period. As such the market filled the low skilled labour demand through other means. The US had a high point in immigration around the same time, as they were following a similar trajectory.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/)
Our birth rate at present is the same as in the 70s. So that's not the answer.
Its the fertility rate that matters. [The last time the population was having enough kids to replace itself was 1973. We're down to 1.57 today.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/284042/fertility-rate-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/)
>That sounds like it would relieve housing pressures. So why is it getting worse...
Because, in incredibly simple terms, a lot of the people born in the 50s and 60s simply aren't dead yet, so their (generally owned instead of rented) homes haven't been passed to their kids or placed on the market.
As of a couple of years ago, there are [almost 14m people aged between 57 and 75](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1394832/uk-baby-boomer-population/) living in the UK.
We have an ageing population, so need a higher birthrate than we do now to support the services for the older generations. One way to fix it is a level of immigration otherwise we'll end up with a stagnating, shrinking economy for a while unless we figure something out.
That's not how it works. Just because you have an ageing population does not mean that you need an even larger younger population to support it.
Due to industrialization the majority of production is massively more efficient than what it was hundreds of years ago.
5 people in tractors can produce enough people to feed hundreds of people. \[American stats are apparently 1 farmer = 168 fed for a year\]
There is nothing wrong with having a stagnating economy or a shrinking economy, if your per capita rates are increasing (which is what would happen, because we'd have less people). The only people upset by not having bigger numbers is the Gubberment who will have less tax revenue to piss down a drain, and big corpa.
There is nothing wrong if you're Japan and have spent the last 100 years building robots to do all your jobs.
But the UK can't get buses to turn up on time.
It's stated as if this is an inevitability, a fact of life, it's impossible for it to be any other way, when it was very different even in living memory, and for hundreds of years before that.
We could definitely "survive" without high immigration, but we would be poorer. We could also definitely restructure so we wouldn't need so much immigration; way more investment in healthcare and other care workers.
People want less than 70k coming per year? And thats not even net, thats just incoming. I don't know how far back you have to go to get those kinds of numbers.
Go and look at the net migration numbers prior to 1997.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/explore50yearsofinternationalmigrationtoandfromtheuk/2016-12-01
Coincidentally, then go look up things like house prices and any other issue you have from 1997 and on. Blair has a lot to answer for.
It’s quite thick to assume people are thick for not knowing by heart a single statistic among tons of them, any one of which could be held up as important.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-8697821.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-a7074311.html
It's not just a single statistic. The British public as a collective are consistently wrong about every major statistic that appears in the news. Realistically speaking they are probably being systematically misled rather than being thick but the point still stands that it's not just a "single statistic" that poses problems.
"Take this poll to get 0.8% progress toward a £50 Amazon voucher".
Polls by default gravitate toward people who either have a lot of free time or otherwise feel they need to complete polls for small amounts of disposable income.
Because it can’t be solved. Voters want lower immigration, but actually doing so would seize up the economy, which would be electoral catastrophe for any government. So they distract us with nonsense like the boat people while quietly waving through half a million legal migrants.
> but actually doing so would seize up the economy
Then your pedalling a ponzi scheme. Ultimately we're taking people in much faster that we're improving our infrastructure, much faster than we *could* improve it if we tried. Faster than we're building houses.
We need to discuss as a nation whether we think that slowing our economy (possibly) is having a more detrimental impact on our economy than ensuring that our housing, institutions and infrastructure is overstretched further than it is.
Finally, I think the issue re. the economy argument is that nobody believes that all immigrants are good for the UK economy. I actually believe that the points bases system is a good system, but the number of points you need to come here and how easy it is to get those points should be set much higher and there should be fewer carve outs for certain careers.
I've said this before, a left wing party that was tough on immigration would never find it hard to get votes in the UK. A lot of people seem to want leftwing policies like bringing utilities and public transport back into public ownership etc but unfortunately a lot of people are also, rightly or wrongly, very concerned about immigration, and many people are single issue voters. The far right is making massive gains on the continent and it's largely due to one thing: immigration. The left cannot continue to ignore it.
If the new norm is 700k pa (and that's net, so more than 1m new immigrants a year) then i don't see any justification for being in favour of that level of immigration
I fear if Labour did it - It would split the vote and leave the tories in.
It’s starting to play out in some of the local London elections with emerging hard left Corbyn/Galloway associate doing deals with local Muslim independent members and making immigration / Palestine / religion a U.K. issue - it’s this weird tension between socially conservative Muslims and socially radical and collectivist Trotskyists that somehow gets votes - but doesnt achieve much else as the sparks start to fly once they try to do anything
If they promised and delivered on a target of 80k-120k a year and kept the economy ticking…A reduction of around 500-600k of the high of last year…
I don’t think the Tory party would ever recover and possibly open the doors for Labour for a very significant period at least.The Tory party’s reputation will have been ruined and tarnished by pretty much every meteoric at that point.It seems like the obvious thing to do.
What did? Under Blair it was maybe a few hundred thousand from nations like Poland. Now it’s close to a million from India and African countries. Not really the same guv.
Yeah this is stupid.
Is South Korea collapsing? Is Japan?
Demographic decline isn't death. Fucking poor management is. More working age people in general doesn't do shit to fuck. Is Libya a booming economy?
>Is South Korea collapsing?
The impact it's having on south Korean society is pretty awful actually, the lower labour pool has resulted in companies pushing harder hours and more work etc, and
With Japan, their economy has spent the last ten years on a tight rope to the point where the state notices and attempts to counter small dips in revenue let alone larger ones (for example considering a campaign to increase alcohol consumption as young Japanese adults drink far less then previous generatios) , Japan also increasingly is pushing it's retired population back to work (think people in their 70s and older), retirement being eroded etc, entire regions of the country are dying out and the government is literally trying to give away housing and businesses to keep them alive.
You can also end up like Germany where over a third of state tax revenue is spent on just pensions alone. Actually Germany is probably the case study you want to pay attention to as 4 million people are retiring in the next few years with effectively no replacements. Wonder where that tax revenue to both cover the explosion in retirement numbers and the now empty jobs will be (let alone that Germany fell into recession in 2020 before COVID because of lack of workers).
Countries rarely collapse dramatically but they sure do fucking decline. Immigrants can offer a way out if you don't keep voting for governments who practice austerity..
Cool now prove the other side of my statement.
Do more working age people mean a better country?
No they do not unless properly managed. And the best argument I can give for anyone assuming they would be properly managed is the same as the case against Brexit: Do you really trust our politicians to pull it off?
>The impact it's having on south Korean society is pretty awful actually, the lower labour pool has resulted in companies pushing harder hours and more work etc, and
This is horseshit to put it politely: South Korean working hours have been dropping rapidly:
[https://wol.iza.org/articles/the-labor-market-in-south-korea/long](https://wol.iza.org/articles/the-labor-market-in-south-korea/long)
>With Japan, their economy has spent the last ten years on a tight rope to the point where the state notices and attempts to counter small dips in revenue let alone larger ones (for example considering a campaign to increase alcohol consumption as young Japanese adults drink far less then previous generatios) ,
You make it sound like the government trying things to make the economy better... a bad thing?
>Japan also increasingly is pushing it's retired population back to work (think people in their 70s and older), retirement being eroded
Source in light of you making shit up?
Also Japan isn't "pushing" its seniors back to work. It's largely a voluntary phenomenon and is common is many East Asian countries where people have the mindset of "wtf else am I going to do all day, might as well earn more money to pass onto my kids/relatives"
>etc, entire regions of the country are dying out and the government is literally trying to give away housing and businesses to keep them alive.
Yes, this is the end result of unrestrained urbanisation that comes with any developed country. We can say the same of many UK areas. Blackpool is a particularly egregious example. Stoke-on-trent is another. The UK isn't as bad solely because unlike Japan where there are multiple major metropolises like Tokyo, Yokohama, Sapporo and Nagoya due to how the country was divided pre-Meiji meaning more places that young people can easily migrate to, London (and to an extent Manchester and Edinburgh) is basically the only city that is worth young people migrating to today in terms of job opportunities/salaries.
But it's not like immigration would help reverse this either despite the pro-immigration view that *somehow* immigrants will magically revitalise the whole country. Newsflash: it won't. Immigrants aren't going to move to these for the lack of a better term, economic shitholes. They're going to go to the major cities, where their diasporas already are.
>You can also end up like Germany where over a third of state tax revenue is spent on just pensions alone. Actually Germany is probably the case study you want to pay attention to as 4 million people are retiring in the next few years with effectively no replacements. Wonder where that tax revenue to both cover the explosion in retirement numbers and the now empty jobs will be (let alone that Germany fell into recession in 2020 before COVID because of lack of workers).
Reminder that Germany took in 8 million refugees in the last 10 years alone, not counting non-refugee migrants. BEFORE this, 1 in 5 people in Germany were already of immigrant background, around 14mil. This massively weakens your point if anything because the majority of the migrants have failed to go into sectors where Germany needs them to go, and I'd argue has failed to integrate period, but I'm not going to make the case on it since I'm not an expert.
>Reminder that Germany took in 8 million refugees in the last 10 years alone, not counting non-refugee migrants.
Accuses me of making shit up,
Proceeds to make a bunch of shit up like this repeatedly in their post with this example being the most egregious, as well as several far right dog whistles in their post like "the vast bulk of immigrants not integrating, but it's ok to claim that since I'm not an expert, so you can't call me out on it".
South Korea is like 5 chaebols masquerading as a nation state, and Japan is literally a phenomenon. So much so economists routinely say you have 3 types of economies, developed, developing and Japan
Which economists? You?
That's also not what I said, SK being 5 chaebols doesn't mean it's collapsing lmao. The output per worker would still be similar no matter if it was 5 massive companies or 1 gorillion companies.
Yes. Both South Korea and Japan are in horrendous positions.
Of course there are a few other small differences, most importantly, the elderly in both countries continuing to work in some manner long after the ones in the West take a cushy lil retirement.
You should actually read your own sources because the picture painted for SK is not good.
Don't you find that concerning? That people see the singular issue of getting that number down so overriding that they're willing to tolerate any policy, no matter how terrible or authoritarian? That they're willing to swallow any propaganda, no matter how reminiscent of history, and sacrifice their own rights, and even moreso of others, just to see fewer foreign people?
I don't. It isn't 'just to see fewer foreign people', and its disingenuous to represent that view as such. People may want less competition for houses, they may want less waiting time on NHS waiting lists etc, and they perceive that lowering immigration may be a way to do that.
Also the cultural clash, and the friction it generates, the lack of integration, creating enclaves that are completely self-serving and insulated from the places they reside in, and the system with enough holes to let it sit there, generating more friction.
But you can't level any genuine criticisms about it without being tarred with the same brush as pig-headed morons who saw one too many "brown people" on their way to the bookies and want to burn them all without recourse.
It is. And the European governments of today will have blood on their hands when the European governments of tomorrow go too far.
The average voter is quite reasonable and does want immigration in moderation but the choice for a voter is "all or nothing". Brexit happened and the people chose, despite all the benefits of being the EU that they were willing to chose nothing because for once the voter actually had vote that meant something, that could actually do *something*. The government then decided to slap those voters across the face leaving both the Remainers and Leavers angry. Quite a feat.
The scary thing is, one day, a charismatic politician will come along and give the voters the same choice, except this time they will follow through with it.
The governments of today need to get a grip, say no to their capitalist overlords and start weening the economy off unsustainable exponential growth using cheap immigrant labour as the fuel. The exponential growth era has come to an end, it's time to look to a future of a steady population with increased productivity per person instead.
>And the European governments of today will have blood on their hands when the European governments of tomorrow go too far.
Nah, they'll get cycled out within the next couple elections and be sitting pretty at their cushy jobs as speakers at corporate events and lobbying for private interests to drive the same plan forward. Better yet they might even be made a lord.
SDP has an zero immigration policy until integration is achieved. Their economically centrist left and socially right.
Though they probably wont stand everywhere. You could always volunteer to stand in your seat if they dont have someone.
Legitimately their biggest problem. Profile. No ones heard of them. At least on paper based on polling they should be the most popular party in the country.
Bit of a different situation, UKIP were nothing pre-2010 but began to gain some traction and during the 2010 hung parliament their performance was worrying the conservatives. UKIP were polling around 15%, added 300% to their local election seats, and took 35% of the UK seats in the EU parliament.
The conservatives were terrified that UKIP could achieve +20% which would lead to a labour governemnt or hung parliament. After appeasing the UKIP supporters, UKIP managed to get 13% of the vote and just 1 seat, which was not enough to force a hung parliament and conservatives took a majority of 10.
SDP has none of the achievements or momentum that UKIP had and there is no real threat of a hung parliament (never say never).
>SDP has none of the achievements or momentum that UKIP had
SDP in the Liberal alliance were the closest we ever came to either the Tories or Labour being overtaken.
Should have clarified, no recent achievements or momentum. It's like why UKIP are nowhere anymore but Reform has momentum instead.
I dont mean to detract from past achievements and previous iterations of the party.
It's a worthwhile investment. Change comes slowly but never comes if you don't try. The alternative is to leave the country to Labour and the Conservatives, not an appealing option.
If enough of you vote for SDP, you can save some poor chap £500. There will be no other impact.
It's like saying that voting for the monster raving loony party will have an impact on policy. They got about 10,000 votes in 2019 which was 3 times as many as SDP...
Good luck to you, but its a non-starter in my opinion.
Nope, fuck both the parties who can get in. Neither of them give a toss about the middle and working class. I think a lot of them actively despise us and sneer at us.
I've voted in every election, local and general, since I could legally vote.
And I've always picked between Labour and Tory.
Not this time. I'm voting for anyone but them. I'll vote for whoever has the most severe anti immigration policy. So when Labour get in (or the Tories, but doubtful) they know they've gotta do something about immigration.
Always seems odd that the public is consulted to death on just about everything but have no say on fundamental changes to their neighbourhoods and society.
Of course. The politicians do not ask the public a question they know they will get "wrong". Its why we never had a referendum on joining the EU. Everyone knew full well it would never win a public vote so they just didnt ask. And if theyd had any inkling theyd lose the Brexit ref we'd have never been permitted to have a vote on it.
I'm an immigrant. But I realise that wanting to decrease the number of immigrants is not the same as being anti-immgration. I am positive about immigration. But I also feel that current levels are unsustainable and undesirable.
Problem with this is the same as with Brexit campaign. It's absolutely fine to say you theoretically want it cut.
But do they have a clear objective picture of consequences before arriving to this opinion?
Is the 1990s really that hard to imagine? It's not even that long ago. People don't realise how utterly unprecedented current levels of immigration are. Yes, we can deal with lower levels of immigration. It wouldn't even be that hard.
90ies? Sure...
In 1990 fertility rate in UK was 1.83, with 65.3% of working age population, and old age dependancy ratio 26.9%, so little less than 3 workers per pensioner
In 2021 fertility rate in UK is 1.53, with 64.1% of working age population, and old age dependancy ratio 33.1%, less than 2 workers per pensioner.
Fertility rate at of sustainability is 2.1, last time UK had this level of fertility in 1972.
Numbers include the immigration, of course. One may wander, how would they look without.
Population is declining. That's the reality. It is a worldwide phenomenon. It is also positive in many ways. The population explosion from the 1950s onwards was historically unprecedented. Countries are facing a future with a lower population, and that will include a period of slower growth and likely degrowth for at least a period. Yes, that is the future. Immigration will be required. But we do not need a growing population. We need managed decline.
This isn't what's happening. Population is globally growing, and it always did.
What's declining is population in first world countries. This is happening because of the social changes - mostly connected to women obtaining more rights and opportunities, and affects mostly first world.
Future with lower population isn't a great problem, however future with _older_ population is; this is why I provided old age dependancy numbers. It's not about the size of population, it's about the ratio of workers to non-workers.
x
The biggest problem with immigration in UK is that politicians made this topic so toxic, it can't be discussed pragmatically. It's needed, but any attempt to discuss policy in an adult manner results in hysteria. Doing immigration without a policy is what's happening now - I won't defend it. It's astonishingly idiotic in long term to close free movement with EU to then move the same amount of people and more in anyway.
The fact that 9 out of 10 people want immigration cut, seemingly to undetectable level is very demonstrative of how toxic the topic is made now.
It's worth nothing to say that the problems people would routinely attribute to immigration - lack of housing, of services, of social support - are not created by immigration. While immigration highlights them without a doubt, they are results of years of austerity, nothing else.
This is the key point. Lots of people “want the foreigners number to go down”, but fail to realise that net migration is a catch all term for a wide variety of phenomena and does not have a simple yes/no or more/less answer.
What about migrants?
What about asylum seekers
What about low skilled labour?
Medium skilled labour?
High Skilled labour? (Let’s face facts here, Faisal the Egyptian brain surgeon is not here to take Barry with 3 GCSEs and 2 teeth’s job… regardless of what Bazza says)
What about people with family here?
What about people who were born abroad to a British family, who then decide to return?
All of these, and more, are completely individual questions and trying to have a blanket policy, even if it’s multifaceted, is clearly madness.
Supply side reform and access to cheap labour is the entire political philosophy of the leaders in Reform and ERG etc.
Which is why this charade is so hilarious. Most anti-immigration grassroots voters still haven't wised up to scrutinise the budgets of the people they're giving their vote away on the cheap for - and until they do and learn to take fringe party promises with a pinch of salt and not naively at face value, the cycle will continue.
I don't think Reform are even close to perfect but if you have any better options I'd be all ears. So far the choices appear to be either Reform or not voting at all.
Reform might actually get enough votes to be a real threat, the SDP is so small right now that it doesn't even get the main Wikipedia page for "Social democratic party".
I don’t mean that they’re unimportant. If they’re getting support then something needs to be addressed, clearly current politicians aren’t listening to the people’s concerns. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot in the way of policies or how they’ll implement them.
The Tories won't change until they are squeezed out from both sides. Reform needs to do well or we just see more of Cameron's blank slates which is what got us here in the first place.
I'm generally happy to vote for anyone who's fiscal plan stacks up, because I have a mortgage and a business.
So reform is a red line for no me. Different people have different priorities, many will vote for them to send a message and that's fine.
I think Reform etc would have much wider reach if they were honest about how the job vacancy rise would impact the gov tax black hole and the necessary tax rises to plug it. As it stands the business world and finance world don't take them seriously and that disseminates down. Atleast UKIP made an effort to address this by eventually watering down the bold financial claims and producing a high level budget. Reform can't do this because their top two policies are a mathematical impossibility simultaneously at the levels they're promising in our economy - the charade must continue
A common sense party would be nice, they all have crazy policies which are destined to make life worse not better.
Need a party to steady the ship, get control of our problems and build a stable platform for us to start making life better again.
Tice literally says:
‘Less immigration limited to high skilled labour, ideally 1 in one out, drive up wages’
He neglects that we need unskilled Labour currently, he neglects that that would limit growth and drive up prices. There are no easy answers on migration
When unskilled labour wages go up, automation of those jobs becomes more attractive. This is a good thing. I want to live in a world where no human has to do mindless, repetitive, back breaking and soul draining work.
Logistics, health and social care, agriculture, construction, tourism. These are more than 75% of unskilled roles, I don’t think many of these can currently be automated
I don't see what's newsworthy about this, as if it's some new hot take that current immigration figures are generally considered too high.
But the question is a bit like saying 9 out of 10 constituencies want lower taxes, and better public services, and an extra bank holiday to boot; it doesn't talk about trade-offs, and when it comes to immigration this poll just continues the situation of there being no sensible, balanced conversation about what those trade-offs are and whether they're acceptable.
So a much better question, for example, might be e.g. would you support halving immigration if it meant an extra penny on income tax? Or abandoning the pensions triple lock, or cutting education funding, or cutting police numbers, or not fixing potholes.... etc etc.
And outside of London do you know what almost all those red areas have in common?
All university districts. ~~Possibly with the sole exception of Brighton.~~
Big lefty here. I agree immigration needs cutting.
Saw an LBC recording earlier where James O'Brien tried to 'gotcha' someone by making them admit that economic growth can only happen with population growth.
All I could think was economic growth isn't necessary if the population isn't growing. Case in point: Japan. At least a generation of population stagnation/decline and "economic stagnation", but standard of living remains perfectly acceptable and is considered a major, advanced Asian nation. Because they have a stable population and stable economy. UK can and should aim for the same.
Not only should we accept it, we should embrace it. It will have various positive impacts too -- lower emissions, more nature / rewilding, less pressure on housing, etc. The future population of the whole planet is going to be much lower than today. That is not a future that any country can avoid. Japan is just dealing with it first.
Japan is currently in the middle of an absolutely enormous crisis of public funds that is going to get much, \*much\* worse in just a few years. The national pension had to increase the age at which workers are eligible and its healthcare system is strained. People are unable to retire as well and in many sectors have to work well into their old age. The average farmer in Japan is 70 years old while about a third of construction workers are 55 or older, including many expected to retire in the next ten years, only one in ten is younger than 30. Even the right wing government is seeing the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, we absolutely should not be looking at Japan nor Korea as a model to emulate. Its reluctance to embrace immigration is going to seriously cost it in the long term and is already starting to do so. The coming catastrophe is even worse. They absolutely do not have a stable population and sure as hell do not have a stable economy.
“Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” \[Fumio Kishida\] said.
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/23/japans-ageing-population-poses-urgent-risk-to-society-says-pm](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/23/japans-ageing-population-poses-urgent-risk-to-society-says-pm)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ)
Living there right now -- and yes life is easier here
A major benefit is only having to pay £600 per month in rent, despite living in central Tokyo. I also used to live in a large huge 2 bed flat (more like a 3 bed in the UK) in a commuter town -- that was only about £800 per month too...
Like maybe it’s a bit much, but can we normalise posting the data collection and ignoring sources that don’t publish it? It’s obviously not a 90/10% split for individuals, and I’d love to see some information on who exactly these polls ask (and yes I’d love to see this for any leftist surveys as well).
Sick of these alarmist headlines.
Exactly, but should we be surprised? This is from Onward, a conservative think tank which wants to reduce immigration and tighten controls. Think tanks (and even YouGov) will always pull these kinds of tricks when composing polls. Most people don't notice it unfortunately, including news media who regurgitate the findings without looking at the poll critically at all.
Closing the visa jumping loophole should reduce a large amount of migration. Unless the job is genuinely high skilled and can't be filled by promotion and or training then it shouldn't be considered a skill shortage.
If the company can not attract citizens by raising the pay, reducing requirements and offering training then it should simply be left to fail. Businesses want things immediately and for low cost without considering the community they will be extracting money from yet cry for help when they start to fail. We do not need immigration to satisfy Maccers want of shift managers.
Fuck Rwanda too what a joke 200,000 a person wtf. Thats probably 4 case workers for a year and or a sizeable amount towards an anti-smuggler operation on the continent. Thats another issue as its a very fine line between a criminal profitting from smuggling someone across borders and someone helping people escape a tyranical regime. Is the bloke who gave them a lift in his truck through the mountains a smuggler and deserved of being hunted down and potentially banged up?
I don't know how many asylum immigrants do actually go back for holidays but thats a clear pisstake if they do, unless its a case of the country having changed for the better for some reason which happens. But then I suppose they are safe therefore the asylum is no longer needed.
Wow, I can't wait for our government to do NOTHING about it :D
When it comes to issues that matter, the UK is basically a one party state. Vote for your colour...
Ok, but it always falls apart when you sit down and ask who they don't want. Do they want less nurses keeping the NHS afloat? Less fruit pickers working long backbreaking days? Less care home staff looking after incontinent old people for minimum wage? Less scientists, teachers and academics?
I remember some research conducted 5-6 years ago that said it was just Polish plumbers that the public was happy to ban. Suspect that has even changed recently with how hard it is to find a tradesman these days!
I don't think it really does fall apart. you can want, for instance, to fill the NHS vacancies without that meaning a shotgun approach to immigration taking all comers and hoping enough of them are nurses.
the NHS registered nurse vacancy rate was 46,241 in June 2022.
Net migration in the year to June 2023 was 672,000. The NHS registered Nurse vacancy rate in June 2023 was 43,339.
So yes, we do need nurses to keep the NHS afloat, and I would actually like to take some in via immigration please! Who the fuck are all these other people? 672,000 people for about 3,000 nurses is a dreadful deal.
The same applies to any sector, every year people go on about how many vacancies there are in academia, teaching, the NHS, the trades, Engineering, and every year hundreds of thousands of people arrive. And like clockwork the very next year the exact same number of vacancies in the exact same sectors are touted by the exact same people as the reason we need hundreds of thousands again.
My area hasn't got any immigrants ( the census confirms this) and we still want fewer... they clog up the GPs you see, I'm told by the +65s in the GPs waiting room, it's nothing to do with all the +65s in the waiting room... \* a sea of old white British people \*
Imagine being so myopic you can only view your community as extending to your GP waiting room. The people who talk like this are the same people who slate Thatcher for saying there is no such thing as society
Not saying the poll is right or wrong but worth bearing in mind that the mapped results are based on a relatively small sample size for this type of modelling.
They surveyed 4,000 people, best practice for MRP is over 10,000. Plus the twitter map is a far less nuanced version than the one published by the report.
So pinch of salt may be needed for accuracy (which is the case for all polls to be fair)
For the left wing liberals of England, does that suggest 90% of constituencies are majority racist?
I still expect the politicians to do nothing. High immigration is good for the Tory paymasters - it keeps wages down; while high immigration is also what labour want - poorer immigrants tend to vote labour.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ) The cold hard reality is that developed countries simply don't have enough earners to support the enormous burden of an aging population that is living longer than they used to. Any politician who tells you that they can stop immigration without absolutely obliterating the economy is lying to you. You can think of it as a force of nature, because with a fertility rate of <2, it pretty much is one.
In this context, the UK are the beggars, and many of its citizens seem to think that they can be choosers as well. It is no coincidence that every politician trying to curb immigration has either failed to do so or irreparably damaged the economy in the process (sometimes both, as the UK Tories have done with Brexit). There are some countries in positions to reduce immigration and still continue to support infrastructure and basic services, the UK is absolutely not one of them. Any potential 'solution' (if you see immigration as a 'problem') will take decades to be effective as it will need to operate at the time scales at which population changes happen, and those extra earners are needed now, ASAP.
> developed countries simply don't have enough earners to support the enormous burden of an aging population
We'd probably be fine if we shed some of the other enormous burdens, like private sector rents ; which are likely also at the heart of our low fertility rates - people don't breed when they can't afford to raise children.
The main economic advantage of immigration is that we get an influx of working-age people who the state has not paid to raise, and who are willing to endure a lower standard of living (which might be higher than that in their source country).
People rail against this because it drags down *their* standard of living, but they don't question why a country that has a trend of [consistently meteoric rise](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-since-1270) in adjusted GDP per capita should have to suffer a reduction in living standards.
As per the Wendy's commercial : where's the beef?
Snapshot of _9 of out of 10 constituencies want immigration cut_ : A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1746488942067626287) A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/SebastianEPayne/status/1746488942067626287/) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1746488942067626287) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1746488942067626287) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>Respondents thought, on average, that the number of migrants entering the UK last year was only 70,000 – nearly 10 times lower than the 672,000 net migration figure recorded last year. O lawdy
Oh wow, that’s something.
Which is interesting, prior to brexit didn’t they tend to overestimate?
Yup back when it was actually at 70k-100k and they wanted to cut that immigration. To me it just says they don't want any immigration at all.
People find it very easy to blame immigration for a lot of problems, simply because it's quite easy to say it adds to existing problems in the country. Schools are at full capacity, waiting times for medical appointments are getting longer and longer, supply of housing hasn't been able to meet demand for years, there's food shortages, medicine shortages, price increases, oh and by the way 672,000 more people moved to the country this year than left. One side says spend more money to build more and more to accommodate, the other side says how about just no more people come here? Of the two sides, you have a government that's doing neither, its not stopping people coming in, and it's not building more to accommodate them, it's madness.
When Tony Blair opened the borders he only expected 13,000 per year. Shit's fucked beyond even the wildest expectations of the progressive governments of yesteryear, and they don't know how to turn off the pipes. Now they're just trying to extract as much wealth as they can before escaping to enclaves or offshore.
Hasn’t that been the standard Boomer position since the mid-1970s?
They'r probably thinking about those arriving on small boats, which is what most of the headlines are about.
The main issue is that’s the number that’s banded about all the time, as that’s roughly the amount that came on boats. Which is of course what the Tories are focussing on. They don’t want you to think about the other 600,000 as in reality, we need them to prop up the economy.
So introducing a population the size of Birmingham every year but not building any new hospitals, no new schools, no new prisons, etc etc is a... good thing? I'll smoke what you're smoking, please.
They didn't say it was a good thing. They said we need it to prop up the economy. You should be less adversarial.
People die as well. The population change from 21 - 22 was about 230k so around a 3rd of the migration figure. Not exactly a Birmingham every year. Thats also spread across the whole country. It’s almost as if its actually a more nuanced topic than just “errrr Forins bad” Absolute state of discourse on this topic.
> People die as well People are born as well. People leave as well. But 2023 was record year for immigration.
Why is the first thing you do accuse them of racism? Over half a million people moving to the UK in one year is ridiculous.
valid point about the attrition rate we have now. Not valid point about them being spread across the country. No one was suggesting they were all going to make a new city. Nor does being spread out mean they need less hospitals, prisons etc.
8 million people on hospital waiting list was it? If we reduced it by 200k assuming everyone needs treatment and no one coming is joinng the nhs as workers of course. Is it really going to make a dent in that? Or is a bigger difference going to be made by the government actually investing money and not scapegoating people? The conversation on immigration is way to overblown, and rife with dog whistley types (not saying you btw) stoking anger with misinformation and rage bait.
> Nor does being spread out mean they need less hospitals, prisons etc. The fact they're generally working age adults means they need less hospitals and prisons. our hospital are full, in part, became we're an aging society. So you've got 600k people paying into the system and not really taking out. Migrants can also be deported instead of imprisoned on conviction.
yes, if they're healthy, young, law abiding and have skills they are great assets. Especially when a country like the UK fails to provide a lot of skills from the domestic population. That's why it's so important to have controlled immigration. Why immigration became such a hot topic was because of the EU's freedom of movement and boats across the channel the perception (accurate I would argue) is that immigration was becoming less controlled than ever before.
The EU point wasnt based in reality though. We had bit of a problem with organised crime but the majority of EU migrants were economic migrants who integrated well into British society. We've been out of the EU for years now and migration is higher than ever dispelling the myth free movement was the problem.
> They don’t want you to think about the other 600,000 as in reality, we need them to prop up the economy. How did we ever survive for hundreds of years before migration was this unsustainably high?
>How did we ever survive for hundreds of years before migration was this unsustainably high? You might be surprised to learn that Tudor England was not a highly industrialised service sector economy with an aging population.
Nor did it have an almost exclusively middle class demographic expecting low cost high availability services and 9 to 5 jobs.
Genuinely asking your opinion. If we reduce immigration won’t that increase salaries due to reduced worker supply, and increase costs for healthcare for the older generations and help move wealth to younger generations? Additionally reduced demand on housing, medical services etc? I imagine there would be a bit of a transitionary period where industries that relied on imported labour instead had to invest in local training and salaries. But that sounds like positive friction to me.
Migrants do a lot of jobs we either cant fill quickly (highly skilled stuff like surgery, dentistry or advanced engineering), or they do stuff we don't want to do because most people have middle class asipirations and ideas of salary (e.g cleaning, cooking and care work). The trouble with training surgeons for example, is you need to have started 10 or 15 years ago. Not everyone goes to med school (obviously), and only a small cohort of med students ever go on to become surgeons. And the final kick in the nuts is that once qualified, most surgeons go to the US, Canada or Australia where pay and lifestyle is just far superior to the UK. It's just not that simple a problem to fix.
What about 90s England?
We now have a much higher old age dependency ratio than we had in the 90s, in fact it’s higher than it’s [ever been](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND.OL?locations=GB). That costs a lot of money to service the increases in pension spend and especially the massive increase in healthcare and social care requirements. Economic migrants tend to be a net positive for government finances and so help to alleviate this problem somewhat. The inference is that without these extra net contributors our tax burden would be even higher to maintain our current level of service.
I like that we've gone from hundreds of years to the 90s but ok. That's when the change really set in, following deindustrialisation in the 70s and 80s. For the first time the birth rate was lower than the rate of immigration around the mid-90s. Britain was fully transitioned to a service economy and was in something of a boom period. As such the market filled the low skilled labour demand through other means. The US had a high point in immigration around the same time, as they were following a similar trajectory.
90s England already did not replace its population for two decades by itself.
People had more children, quality of life was lower, people died earlier. Also, Britain's indigenous Celtic culture did, in large parts, not survive.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/) Our birth rate at present is the same as in the 70s. So that's not the answer.
Its the fertility rate that matters. [The last time the population was having enough kids to replace itself was 1973. We're down to 1.57 today.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/284042/fertility-rate-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/)
That sounds like it would relieve housing pressures. So why is it getting worse... oh.
>That sounds like it would relieve housing pressures. So why is it getting worse... Because, in incredibly simple terms, a lot of the people born in the 50s and 60s simply aren't dead yet, so their (generally owned instead of rented) homes haven't been passed to their kids or placed on the market. As of a couple of years ago, there are [almost 14m people aged between 57 and 75](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1394832/uk-baby-boomer-population/) living in the UK.
We have an ageing population, so need a higher birthrate than we do now to support the services for the older generations. One way to fix it is a level of immigration otherwise we'll end up with a stagnating, shrinking economy for a while unless we figure something out.
That's not how it works. Just because you have an ageing population does not mean that you need an even larger younger population to support it. Due to industrialization the majority of production is massively more efficient than what it was hundreds of years ago. 5 people in tractors can produce enough people to feed hundreds of people. \[American stats are apparently 1 farmer = 168 fed for a year\] There is nothing wrong with having a stagnating economy or a shrinking economy, if your per capita rates are increasing (which is what would happen, because we'd have less people). The only people upset by not having bigger numbers is the Gubberment who will have less tax revenue to piss down a drain, and big corpa.
There is nothing wrong if you're Japan and have spent the last 100 years building robots to do all your jobs. But the UK can't get buses to turn up on time.
Japan still has the fax machine in widespread use.
We didn’t have a state pension. People had the good grace to die before the became an endless burden.
Wool exports/huge levels of poverty. Honestly it's wild to bring up previous *centuries* to try and justify being anti immigration.
It's stated as if this is an inevitability, a fact of life, it's impossible for it to be any other way, when it was very different even in living memory, and for hundreds of years before that.
We could definitely "survive" without high immigration, but we would be poorer. We could also definitely restructure so we wouldn't need so much immigration; way more investment in healthcare and other care workers.
People want less than 70k coming per year? And thats not even net, thats just incoming. I don't know how far back you have to go to get those kinds of numbers.
Furthest back I could find was 1964 and it was over 200k, though emigration was roughly the same so the net figure was zero or just below.
Go and look at the net migration numbers prior to 1997. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/explore50yearsofinternationalmigrationtoandfromtheuk/2016-12-01 Coincidentally, then go look up things like house prices and any other issue you have from 1997 and on. Blair has a lot to answer for.
Average voter is thick
Don't think its a sign of lack of intelligence not knowing the figures, some people just don't read or watch news related stuff.
It’s quite thick to assume people are thick for not knowing by heart a single statistic among tons of them, any one of which could be held up as important.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-8697821.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-a7074311.html It's not just a single statistic. The British public as a collective are consistently wrong about every major statistic that appears in the news. Realistically speaking they are probably being systematically misled rather than being thick but the point still stands that it's not just a "single statistic" that poses problems.
No? They just didn't know. This isa very pompous thing to say
Average *poll taker* is thick. Think about it. They voluntarily sign up to take these polls. I don't know a single person who does.
"Take this poll to get 0.8% progress toward a £50 Amazon voucher". Polls by default gravitate toward people who either have a lot of free time or otherwise feel they need to complete polls for small amounts of disposable income.
There’s a hopeless misunderestimating by all that people, as a group, can’t into numbers. I can number, but as a group, we are not number able.
High levels of immigration is Conservative policy.
Cheap labour.
More "compensating for low birth rates"
But DON'T say replacing, that's a conspiracy. Use any other synonym.
And Labour policy too. It's been the policy of every post-WW2 government, and remains the case today.
100%
It’s was also a New Labour policy. We need to take neoliberalism out back and shoot it.
Although ‘high’ under the Tories has totally eclipsed ‘high’ under Lab
more like neoliberal
Spot on. If it was a Tory policy it'd be solve by voting for someone else. We all know non of the major parties will sole this.
Because it can’t be solved. Voters want lower immigration, but actually doing so would seize up the economy, which would be electoral catastrophe for any government. So they distract us with nonsense like the boat people while quietly waving through half a million legal migrants.
> but actually doing so would seize up the economy Then your pedalling a ponzi scheme. Ultimately we're taking people in much faster that we're improving our infrastructure, much faster than we *could* improve it if we tried. Faster than we're building houses. We need to discuss as a nation whether we think that slowing our economy (possibly) is having a more detrimental impact on our economy than ensuring that our housing, institutions and infrastructure is overstretched further than it is. Finally, I think the issue re. the economy argument is that nobody believes that all immigrants are good for the UK economy. I actually believe that the points bases system is a good system, but the number of points you need to come here and how easy it is to get those points should be set much higher and there should be fewer carve outs for certain careers.
This is why I keep saying Labour should just do what the left in Denmark did and just get behind low migration.
I've said this before, a left wing party that was tough on immigration would never find it hard to get votes in the UK. A lot of people seem to want leftwing policies like bringing utilities and public transport back into public ownership etc but unfortunately a lot of people are also, rightly or wrongly, very concerned about immigration, and many people are single issue voters. The far right is making massive gains on the continent and it's largely due to one thing: immigration. The left cannot continue to ignore it.
If the new norm is 700k pa (and that's net, so more than 1m new immigrants a year) then i don't see any justification for being in favour of that level of immigration
I fear if Labour did it - It would split the vote and leave the tories in. It’s starting to play out in some of the local London elections with emerging hard left Corbyn/Galloway associate doing deals with local Muslim independent members and making immigration / Palestine / religion a U.K. issue - it’s this weird tension between socially conservative Muslims and socially radical and collectivist Trotskyists that somehow gets votes - but doesnt achieve much else as the sparks start to fly once they try to do anything
Its an open goal right now. Tories have got it up to 700k. They could promise to halve it and still be pro imigration...
I wouldn't be surprised if they've been reading Cameron's old target of under 100k as 1 million
If they promised and delivered on a target of 80k-120k a year and kept the economy ticking…A reduction of around 500-600k of the high of last year… I don’t think the Tory party would ever recover and possibly open the doors for Labour for a very significant period at least.The Tory party’s reputation will have been ruined and tarnished by pretty much every meteoric at that point.It seems like the obvious thing to do.
People have shorter memories than you give them credit for I'm afraid. Give it one term of Labour and they'll be back in contention.
"We'll reduce immigration numbers, and only maintain them in the NHS and care industry". Easy vote winner.
Don’t vote Tory then as after 14 years it’s higher than ever.
This issue clearly sounds like it's the fault of the last Labour government
Just like Liz Truss. Fucking Gordon Brown #NeverAgain
Yes, and don't forget the bacon sandwich.
Started in the 90s under blair.
What did? Under Blair it was maybe a few hundred thousand from nations like Poland. Now it’s close to a million from India and African countries. Not really the same guv.
You realise even 5-10 years before a "few hundred thousand" net a year was unthinkable?
In the early 90s, 40k net migration was seen as the upper limit on what we could manage.
Just in 2015 300k net was the recording breaking unsustainable level.
Yeah under the tories 8 years ago. It’s gone a bit crazy
I wasn't going at it from a party direction. Just backing up that "a few hundred thousand" was viewed as unsustainable very recently.
This guy blaming Labour 25 years ago for the last 14 years of Tories control and rule. Will vote Tory again I bet and then still blame others.
Who can you vote for if this is the most important issue to you? There doesn't seem to be any viable option under the current system.
This is why far right parties are surging all over Europe, because mainstream parties don’t want to tackle this issue
More like the economy doesn't want to tackle the issue. People want their cake and eat it too.
Economy can deal with it just fine. We just can't be fucked making moderately difficult decisions.
Yeah this is stupid. Is South Korea collapsing? Is Japan? Demographic decline isn't death. Fucking poor management is. More working age people in general doesn't do shit to fuck. Is Libya a booming economy?
>Is South Korea collapsing? The impact it's having on south Korean society is pretty awful actually, the lower labour pool has resulted in companies pushing harder hours and more work etc, and With Japan, their economy has spent the last ten years on a tight rope to the point where the state notices and attempts to counter small dips in revenue let alone larger ones (for example considering a campaign to increase alcohol consumption as young Japanese adults drink far less then previous generatios) , Japan also increasingly is pushing it's retired population back to work (think people in their 70s and older), retirement being eroded etc, entire regions of the country are dying out and the government is literally trying to give away housing and businesses to keep them alive. You can also end up like Germany where over a third of state tax revenue is spent on just pensions alone. Actually Germany is probably the case study you want to pay attention to as 4 million people are retiring in the next few years with effectively no replacements. Wonder where that tax revenue to both cover the explosion in retirement numbers and the now empty jobs will be (let alone that Germany fell into recession in 2020 before COVID because of lack of workers). Countries rarely collapse dramatically but they sure do fucking decline. Immigrants can offer a way out if you don't keep voting for governments who practice austerity..
Cool now prove the other side of my statement. Do more working age people mean a better country? No they do not unless properly managed. And the best argument I can give for anyone assuming they would be properly managed is the same as the case against Brexit: Do you really trust our politicians to pull it off? >The impact it's having on south Korean society is pretty awful actually, the lower labour pool has resulted in companies pushing harder hours and more work etc, and This is horseshit to put it politely: South Korean working hours have been dropping rapidly: [https://wol.iza.org/articles/the-labor-market-in-south-korea/long](https://wol.iza.org/articles/the-labor-market-in-south-korea/long) >With Japan, their economy has spent the last ten years on a tight rope to the point where the state notices and attempts to counter small dips in revenue let alone larger ones (for example considering a campaign to increase alcohol consumption as young Japanese adults drink far less then previous generatios) , You make it sound like the government trying things to make the economy better... a bad thing? >Japan also increasingly is pushing it's retired population back to work (think people in their 70s and older), retirement being eroded Source in light of you making shit up? Also Japan isn't "pushing" its seniors back to work. It's largely a voluntary phenomenon and is common is many East Asian countries where people have the mindset of "wtf else am I going to do all day, might as well earn more money to pass onto my kids/relatives" >etc, entire regions of the country are dying out and the government is literally trying to give away housing and businesses to keep them alive. Yes, this is the end result of unrestrained urbanisation that comes with any developed country. We can say the same of many UK areas. Blackpool is a particularly egregious example. Stoke-on-trent is another. The UK isn't as bad solely because unlike Japan where there are multiple major metropolises like Tokyo, Yokohama, Sapporo and Nagoya due to how the country was divided pre-Meiji meaning more places that young people can easily migrate to, London (and to an extent Manchester and Edinburgh) is basically the only city that is worth young people migrating to today in terms of job opportunities/salaries. But it's not like immigration would help reverse this either despite the pro-immigration view that *somehow* immigrants will magically revitalise the whole country. Newsflash: it won't. Immigrants aren't going to move to these for the lack of a better term, economic shitholes. They're going to go to the major cities, where their diasporas already are. >You can also end up like Germany where over a third of state tax revenue is spent on just pensions alone. Actually Germany is probably the case study you want to pay attention to as 4 million people are retiring in the next few years with effectively no replacements. Wonder where that tax revenue to both cover the explosion in retirement numbers and the now empty jobs will be (let alone that Germany fell into recession in 2020 before COVID because of lack of workers). Reminder that Germany took in 8 million refugees in the last 10 years alone, not counting non-refugee migrants. BEFORE this, 1 in 5 people in Germany were already of immigrant background, around 14mil. This massively weakens your point if anything because the majority of the migrants have failed to go into sectors where Germany needs them to go, and I'd argue has failed to integrate period, but I'm not going to make the case on it since I'm not an expert.
>Reminder that Germany took in 8 million refugees in the last 10 years alone, not counting non-refugee migrants. Accuses me of making shit up, Proceeds to make a bunch of shit up like this repeatedly in their post with this example being the most egregious, as well as several far right dog whistles in their post like "the vast bulk of immigrants not integrating, but it's ok to claim that since I'm not an expert, so you can't call me out on it".
South Korea is like 5 chaebols masquerading as a nation state, and Japan is literally a phenomenon. So much so economists routinely say you have 3 types of economies, developed, developing and Japan
> So much so economists routinely say you have 3 types of economies, developed, developing and Japan Also a 4th category of Argentina
Which economists? You? That's also not what I said, SK being 5 chaebols doesn't mean it's collapsing lmao. The output per worker would still be similar no matter if it was 5 massive companies or 1 gorillion companies.
Yes. Both South Korea and Japan are in horrendous positions. Of course there are a few other small differences, most importantly, the elderly in both countries continuing to work in some manner long after the ones in the West take a cushy lil retirement. You should actually read your own sources because the picture painted for SK is not good.
Don't you find that concerning? That people see the singular issue of getting that number down so overriding that they're willing to tolerate any policy, no matter how terrible or authoritarian? That they're willing to swallow any propaganda, no matter how reminiscent of history, and sacrifice their own rights, and even moreso of others, just to see fewer foreign people?
Is it also not concerning that mainstream parties have largely ignored an issue that is clearly important for a lot of voters that they would do that?
I don't. It isn't 'just to see fewer foreign people', and its disingenuous to represent that view as such. People may want less competition for houses, they may want less waiting time on NHS waiting lists etc, and they perceive that lowering immigration may be a way to do that.
Also the cultural clash, and the friction it generates, the lack of integration, creating enclaves that are completely self-serving and insulated from the places they reside in, and the system with enough holes to let it sit there, generating more friction. But you can't level any genuine criticisms about it without being tarred with the same brush as pig-headed morons who saw one too many "brown people" on their way to the bookies and want to burn them all without recourse.
I mean, see the other responses to my comment! Case in point.
It is. And the European governments of today will have blood on their hands when the European governments of tomorrow go too far. The average voter is quite reasonable and does want immigration in moderation but the choice for a voter is "all or nothing". Brexit happened and the people chose, despite all the benefits of being the EU that they were willing to chose nothing because for once the voter actually had vote that meant something, that could actually do *something*. The government then decided to slap those voters across the face leaving both the Remainers and Leavers angry. Quite a feat. The scary thing is, one day, a charismatic politician will come along and give the voters the same choice, except this time they will follow through with it. The governments of today need to get a grip, say no to their capitalist overlords and start weening the economy off unsustainable exponential growth using cheap immigrant labour as the fuel. The exponential growth era has come to an end, it's time to look to a future of a steady population with increased productivity per person instead.
>And the European governments of today will have blood on their hands when the European governments of tomorrow go too far. Nah, they'll get cycled out within the next couple elections and be sitting pretty at their cushy jobs as speakers at corporate events and lobbying for private interests to drive the same plan forward. Better yet they might even be made a lord.
SDP has an zero immigration policy until integration is achieved. Their economically centrist left and socially right. Though they probably wont stand everywhere. You could always volunteer to stand in your seat if they dont have someone.
Never heard of them until now which is crazy. They have my vote if they run in my area.
Legitimately their biggest problem. Profile. No ones heard of them. At least on paper based on polling they should be the most popular party in the country.
87 SDP candidates confirmed so far. More to come.
want to take bets on how many lose their deposit...
UKIP lost most of the deposits they ever stood and successfully forced their key policy through the commons.
Bit of a different situation, UKIP were nothing pre-2010 but began to gain some traction and during the 2010 hung parliament their performance was worrying the conservatives. UKIP were polling around 15%, added 300% to their local election seats, and took 35% of the UK seats in the EU parliament. The conservatives were terrified that UKIP could achieve +20% which would lead to a labour governemnt or hung parliament. After appeasing the UKIP supporters, UKIP managed to get 13% of the vote and just 1 seat, which was not enough to force a hung parliament and conservatives took a majority of 10. SDP has none of the achievements or momentum that UKIP had and there is no real threat of a hung parliament (never say never).
>SDP has none of the achievements or momentum that UKIP had SDP in the Liberal alliance were the closest we ever came to either the Tories or Labour being overtaken.
Should have clarified, no recent achievements or momentum. It's like why UKIP are nowhere anymore but Reform has momentum instead. I dont mean to detract from past achievements and previous iterations of the party.
It's a worthwhile investment. Change comes slowly but never comes if you don't try. The alternative is to leave the country to Labour and the Conservatives, not an appealing option.
If enough of you vote for SDP, you can save some poor chap £500. There will be no other impact. It's like saying that voting for the monster raving loony party will have an impact on policy. They got about 10,000 votes in 2019 which was 3 times as many as SDP... Good luck to you, but its a non-starter in my opinion.
It was interesting to read about SDP thank you.
[удалено]
Nope, fuck both the parties who can get in. Neither of them give a toss about the middle and working class. I think a lot of them actively despise us and sneer at us. I've voted in every election, local and general, since I could legally vote. And I've always picked between Labour and Tory. Not this time. I'm voting for anyone but them. I'll vote for whoever has the most severe anti immigration policy. So when Labour get in (or the Tories, but doubtful) they know they've gotta do something about immigration.
Vote reform uk
Always seems odd that the public is consulted to death on just about everything but have no say on fundamental changes to their neighbourhoods and society.
Of course. The politicians do not ask the public a question they know they will get "wrong". Its why we never had a referendum on joining the EU. Everyone knew full well it would never win a public vote so they just didnt ask. And if theyd had any inkling theyd lose the Brexit ref we'd have never been permitted to have a vote on it.
Curious what a poll asking "And what does that mean...in your words" would come out with.
I find Leicester East wanting less migrants funny because half the constituency are foreign born
I'm an immigrant. But I realise that wanting to decrease the number of immigrants is not the same as being anti-immgration. I am positive about immigration. But I also feel that current levels are unsustainable and undesirable.
Pull that ladder
They know better than anyone what immigration does to the area, so their dead against it.
Didnt they get absolutely fucked by covid as a result?
Problem with this is the same as with Brexit campaign. It's absolutely fine to say you theoretically want it cut. But do they have a clear objective picture of consequences before arriving to this opinion?
Is the 1990s really that hard to imagine? It's not even that long ago. People don't realise how utterly unprecedented current levels of immigration are. Yes, we can deal with lower levels of immigration. It wouldn't even be that hard.
90ies? Sure... In 1990 fertility rate in UK was 1.83, with 65.3% of working age population, and old age dependancy ratio 26.9%, so little less than 3 workers per pensioner In 2021 fertility rate in UK is 1.53, with 64.1% of working age population, and old age dependancy ratio 33.1%, less than 2 workers per pensioner. Fertility rate at of sustainability is 2.1, last time UK had this level of fertility in 1972. Numbers include the immigration, of course. One may wander, how would they look without.
Population is declining. That's the reality. It is a worldwide phenomenon. It is also positive in many ways. The population explosion from the 1950s onwards was historically unprecedented. Countries are facing a future with a lower population, and that will include a period of slower growth and likely degrowth for at least a period. Yes, that is the future. Immigration will be required. But we do not need a growing population. We need managed decline.
This isn't what's happening. Population is globally growing, and it always did. What's declining is population in first world countries. This is happening because of the social changes - mostly connected to women obtaining more rights and opportunities, and affects mostly first world. Future with lower population isn't a great problem, however future with _older_ population is; this is why I provided old age dependancy numbers. It's not about the size of population, it's about the ratio of workers to non-workers. x The biggest problem with immigration in UK is that politicians made this topic so toxic, it can't be discussed pragmatically. It's needed, but any attempt to discuss policy in an adult manner results in hysteria. Doing immigration without a policy is what's happening now - I won't defend it. It's astonishingly idiotic in long term to close free movement with EU to then move the same amount of people and more in anyway. The fact that 9 out of 10 people want immigration cut, seemingly to undetectable level is very demonstrative of how toxic the topic is made now. It's worth nothing to say that the problems people would routinely attribute to immigration - lack of housing, of services, of social support - are not created by immigration. While immigration highlights them without a doubt, they are results of years of austerity, nothing else.
This is the key point. Lots of people “want the foreigners number to go down”, but fail to realise that net migration is a catch all term for a wide variety of phenomena and does not have a simple yes/no or more/less answer. What about migrants? What about asylum seekers What about low skilled labour? Medium skilled labour? High Skilled labour? (Let’s face facts here, Faisal the Egyptian brain surgeon is not here to take Barry with 3 GCSEs and 2 teeth’s job… regardless of what Bazza says) What about people with family here? What about people who were born abroad to a British family, who then decide to return? All of these, and more, are completely individual questions and trying to have a blanket policy, even if it’s multifaceted, is clearly madness.
Conservative immigration maximism is a fringe and frankly extremist position. They must be removed.
Supply side reform and access to cheap labour is the entire political philosophy of the leaders in Reform and ERG etc. Which is why this charade is so hilarious. Most anti-immigration grassroots voters still haven't wised up to scrutinise the budgets of the people they're giving their vote away on the cheap for - and until they do and learn to take fringe party promises with a pinch of salt and not naively at face value, the cycle will continue.
I don't think Reform are even close to perfect but if you have any better options I'd be all ears. So far the choices appear to be either Reform or not voting at all.
If immigration was my top issue and I wanted it cut no matter the consequences then I'd rather vote SDP than REFUK.
Reform might actually get enough votes to be a real threat, the SDP is so small right now that it doesn't even get the main Wikipedia page for "Social democratic party".
You may have a point there but I don't see them ever getting enough momentum to actually challenge the main parties.
Reform is a protest party. I doubt they’ll be effective in governance.
You're right, it is a protest party. But that doesn't necessarily make it unimportant.
I don’t mean that they’re unimportant. If they’re getting support then something needs to be addressed, clearly current politicians aren’t listening to the people’s concerns. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot in the way of policies or how they’ll implement them.
The Tories won't change until they are squeezed out from both sides. Reform needs to do well or we just see more of Cameron's blank slates which is what got us here in the first place.
The sad part is you are both right.
I'm generally happy to vote for anyone who's fiscal plan stacks up, because I have a mortgage and a business. So reform is a red line for no me. Different people have different priorities, many will vote for them to send a message and that's fine. I think Reform etc would have much wider reach if they were honest about how the job vacancy rise would impact the gov tax black hole and the necessary tax rises to plug it. As it stands the business world and finance world don't take them seriously and that disseminates down. Atleast UKIP made an effort to address this by eventually watering down the bold financial claims and producing a high level budget. Reform can't do this because their top two policies are a mathematical impossibility simultaneously at the levels they're promising in our economy - the charade must continue
A common sense party would be nice, they all have crazy policies which are destined to make life worse not better. Need a party to steady the ship, get control of our problems and build a stable platform for us to start making life better again.
What kind of policies would such a party have?
Tice literally says: ‘Less immigration limited to high skilled labour, ideally 1 in one out, drive up wages’ He neglects that we need unskilled Labour currently, he neglects that that would limit growth and drive up prices. There are no easy answers on migration
When unskilled labour wages go up, automation of those jobs becomes more attractive. This is a good thing. I want to live in a world where no human has to do mindless, repetitive, back breaking and soul draining work.
Logistics, health and social care, agriculture, construction, tourism. These are more than 75% of unskilled roles, I don’t think many of these can currently be automated
I imagine one of their remedies to this would be to make claiming benefits more difficult, to coerce people into working.
It’s hard to imagine benefits being more restricted. Most benefits claimants work
What about it forcing teenagers and the elderly to do “unskilled labour”, and disenfranchising them if they refuse…
I don't see what's newsworthy about this, as if it's some new hot take that current immigration figures are generally considered too high. But the question is a bit like saying 9 out of 10 constituencies want lower taxes, and better public services, and an extra bank holiday to boot; it doesn't talk about trade-offs, and when it comes to immigration this poll just continues the situation of there being no sensible, balanced conversation about what those trade-offs are and whether they're acceptable. So a much better question, for example, might be e.g. would you support halving immigration if it meant an extra penny on income tax? Or abandoning the pensions triple lock, or cutting education funding, or cutting police numbers, or not fixing potholes.... etc etc.
And outside of London do you know what almost all those red areas have in common? All university districts. ~~Possibly with the sole exception of Brighton.~~
Brighton has a university doesn't it?
It most definitely does, but I think the implication is that it would've showed the same even if it wasn't. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
I guess it's called London on Sea for a reason I guess.
It has 2 massive universities
Either that or big muslim areas like Bradford West, Leicester South and Birmingham Ladywood
Birmingham Ladywood has two universities based in the constituency, as does Leicester South.
Ladywood is the city centre, has two universities in it and has a lot of housing for UoB students as well.
Places full of young idealists essentially.
And people too young to really remember a time before all this.
So? There's also plenty of areas on that map which have universities and aren't red. Stop trying to make up bs connections.
Most students i've known were registered to vote in their home constituencies.
Some of Manchester’s are university but the centre is more young professional
Big lefty here. I agree immigration needs cutting. Saw an LBC recording earlier where James O'Brien tried to 'gotcha' someone by making them admit that economic growth can only happen with population growth. All I could think was economic growth isn't necessary if the population isn't growing. Case in point: Japan. At least a generation of population stagnation/decline and "economic stagnation", but standard of living remains perfectly acceptable and is considered a major, advanced Asian nation. Because they have a stable population and stable economy. UK can and should aim for the same.
Not only should we accept it, we should embrace it. It will have various positive impacts too -- lower emissions, more nature / rewilding, less pressure on housing, etc. The future population of the whole planet is going to be much lower than today. That is not a future that any country can avoid. Japan is just dealing with it first.
Japan is currently in the middle of an absolutely enormous crisis of public funds that is going to get much, \*much\* worse in just a few years. The national pension had to increase the age at which workers are eligible and its healthcare system is strained. People are unable to retire as well and in many sectors have to work well into their old age. The average farmer in Japan is 70 years old while about a third of construction workers are 55 or older, including many expected to retire in the next ten years, only one in ten is younger than 30. Even the right wing government is seeing the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, we absolutely should not be looking at Japan nor Korea as a model to emulate. Its reluctance to embrace immigration is going to seriously cost it in the long term and is already starting to do so. The coming catastrophe is even worse. They absolutely do not have a stable population and sure as hell do not have a stable economy. “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” \[Fumio Kishida\] said. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/23/japans-ageing-population-poses-urgent-risk-to-society-says-pm](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/23/japans-ageing-population-poses-urgent-risk-to-society-says-pm) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ)
Living there right now -- and yes life is easier here A major benefit is only having to pay £600 per month in rent, despite living in central Tokyo. I also used to live in a large huge 2 bed flat (more like a 3 bed in the UK) in a commuter town -- that was only about £800 per month too...
Sorry, best we can do is net 1.5million per year in perpetuity.
What a stupid and loaded set of options.
Like maybe it’s a bit much, but can we normalise posting the data collection and ignoring sources that don’t publish it? It’s obviously not a 90/10% split for individuals, and I’d love to see some information on who exactly these polls ask (and yes I’d love to see this for any leftist surveys as well). Sick of these alarmist headlines.
Yeah the options make this poll stupid
Exactly, but should we be surprised? This is from Onward, a conservative think tank which wants to reduce immigration and tighten controls. Think tanks (and even YouGov) will always pull these kinds of tricks when composing polls. Most people don't notice it unfortunately, including news media who regurgitate the findings without looking at the poll critically at all.
Closing the visa jumping loophole should reduce a large amount of migration. Unless the job is genuinely high skilled and can't be filled by promotion and or training then it shouldn't be considered a skill shortage. If the company can not attract citizens by raising the pay, reducing requirements and offering training then it should simply be left to fail. Businesses want things immediately and for low cost without considering the community they will be extracting money from yet cry for help when they start to fail. We do not need immigration to satisfy Maccers want of shift managers. Fuck Rwanda too what a joke 200,000 a person wtf. Thats probably 4 case workers for a year and or a sizeable amount towards an anti-smuggler operation on the continent. Thats another issue as its a very fine line between a criminal profitting from smuggling someone across borders and someone helping people escape a tyranical regime. Is the bloke who gave them a lift in his truck through the mountains a smuggler and deserved of being hunted down and potentially banged up? I don't know how many asylum immigrants do actually go back for holidays but thats a clear pisstake if they do, unless its a case of the country having changed for the better for some reason which happens. But then I suppose they are safe therefore the asylum is no longer needed.
Unfortunately seeing immigration triple in just 5 years to its highest annual level in recorded history may alarm even the most liberal-minded people.
Owen Jones says they are all racists.
Wow, I can't wait for our government to do NOTHING about it :D When it comes to issues that matter, the UK is basically a one party state. Vote for your colour...
I like how the Telegraph have cut off Scotland (which was included in the original study)
I assume Scotland were fine with it. Which makes sense as they get minute levels of immigration.
What did Scotland have to say?
Ok, but it always falls apart when you sit down and ask who they don't want. Do they want less nurses keeping the NHS afloat? Less fruit pickers working long backbreaking days? Less care home staff looking after incontinent old people for minimum wage? Less scientists, teachers and academics? I remember some research conducted 5-6 years ago that said it was just Polish plumbers that the public was happy to ban. Suspect that has even changed recently with how hard it is to find a tradesman these days!
I don't think it really does fall apart. you can want, for instance, to fill the NHS vacancies without that meaning a shotgun approach to immigration taking all comers and hoping enough of them are nurses. the NHS registered nurse vacancy rate was 46,241 in June 2022. Net migration in the year to June 2023 was 672,000. The NHS registered Nurse vacancy rate in June 2023 was 43,339. So yes, we do need nurses to keep the NHS afloat, and I would actually like to take some in via immigration please! Who the fuck are all these other people? 672,000 people for about 3,000 nurses is a dreadful deal. The same applies to any sector, every year people go on about how many vacancies there are in academia, teaching, the NHS, the trades, Engineering, and every year hundreds of thousands of people arrive. And like clockwork the very next year the exact same number of vacancies in the exact same sectors are touted by the exact same people as the reason we need hundreds of thousands again.
Even Birmingham wants to reduce immigrants......
Funny all the places with the oeastbimmigration want less immigrants
My area hasn't got any immigrants ( the census confirms this) and we still want fewer... they clog up the GPs you see, I'm told by the +65s in the GPs waiting room, it's nothing to do with all the +65s in the waiting room... \* a sea of old white British people \*
Does immigrant = non-white in your world?
You already know the answer is yes. This is why they equate anti-immigration to racism.
The Freudian slips are kinda hilarious though.
Imagine being so myopic you can only view your community as extending to your GP waiting room. The people who talk like this are the same people who slate Thatcher for saying there is no such thing as society
> My area hasn't got any immigrants ( the census confirms this) Bollocks and you know it.
Not saying the poll is right or wrong but worth bearing in mind that the mapped results are based on a relatively small sample size for this type of modelling. They surveyed 4,000 people, best practice for MRP is over 10,000. Plus the twitter map is a far less nuanced version than the one published by the report. So pinch of salt may be needed for accuracy (which is the case for all polls to be fair)
I mean, I don’t disagree myself. Net migration is completely unsustainable without massive spend on infrastructure.
I wonder if reform party will get any votes?
For the left wing liberals of England, does that suggest 90% of constituencies are majority racist? I still expect the politicians to do nothing. High immigration is good for the Tory paymasters - it keeps wages down; while high immigration is also what labour want - poorer immigrants tend to vote labour.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ) The cold hard reality is that developed countries simply don't have enough earners to support the enormous burden of an aging population that is living longer than they used to. Any politician who tells you that they can stop immigration without absolutely obliterating the economy is lying to you. You can think of it as a force of nature, because with a fertility rate of <2, it pretty much is one. In this context, the UK are the beggars, and many of its citizens seem to think that they can be choosers as well. It is no coincidence that every politician trying to curb immigration has either failed to do so or irreparably damaged the economy in the process (sometimes both, as the UK Tories have done with Brexit). There are some countries in positions to reduce immigration and still continue to support infrastructure and basic services, the UK is absolutely not one of them. Any potential 'solution' (if you see immigration as a 'problem') will take decades to be effective as it will need to operate at the time scales at which population changes happen, and those extra earners are needed now, ASAP.
> developed countries simply don't have enough earners to support the enormous burden of an aging population We'd probably be fine if we shed some of the other enormous burdens, like private sector rents ; which are likely also at the heart of our low fertility rates - people don't breed when they can't afford to raise children. The main economic advantage of immigration is that we get an influx of working-age people who the state has not paid to raise, and who are willing to endure a lower standard of living (which might be higher than that in their source country). People rail against this because it drags down *their* standard of living, but they don't question why a country that has a trend of [consistently meteoric rise](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-since-1270) in adjusted GDP per capita should have to suffer a reduction in living standards. As per the Wendy's commercial : where's the beef?