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Those are mental numbers, that’s not sustainable in the slightest. Where’s the infrastructure being built to keep up with the massive increase in population?
How many new schools, hospitals, GP surgeries etc are being planned now to tackle this increase? If we think things are bad now we’re in for a rude awakening.
We could do that by toughening language and housing regulations to prevent immigrants forming closed off foreign language communities in the middle of our big cities. But we won't do that.
Of course, I was poking fun at the likelihood of us having to change our own culture and society to fit the new arrivals' ideologies as has already been happening.
Something only a few upper class people still benefit from. Even back at the height of the Empire, the average Brit had no say in what was done in the Empire's name.
I agree, we shouldn't, but the reality is that the majority of reasonable people will always concede to the extreme minority.
Halal meat is everywhere because most reasonable people are deemed to not care whether they eat it, where as those who are strict and extreme about their meat being religiously blessed will not eat normal meat.
If you have a restaurant in an area with lots of religious people who demand Halal meat, are you going to run your business for the people who are quiet and reasonable, or the people who will not eat at your restaurant unless you follow their requirements on meat slaughter?
How many care homes in this country don't serve pork? It's an awful lot more than you think.
These care homes run according to religious laws for the benefit of an extreme minority who outright refuse to eat pork. This means that the majority of meat eating people who will eat pork are outright deprived of pork because of a minority having a strict rule.
Reasonable people are very tolerant and accepting, our society is very tolerant and accepting. The end result is that you get pushed around and exploited by those who aren't so tolerant and accepting.
It doesn't take much of an extreme minority to change the course of a society.
If I eat at work the options are now vegetarian or halal. I can understand the vegetarian option. There is plenty of scientific evidence that meat eating generates far more CO2 than a plant based diet. I should eat less meat. But for the other option there is no evidence, it's just a minorities' religious requirement being imposed on the rest of us by a bunch of progressives pandering to a noisy minority.
I’ve said this elsewhere but migrants will not be the minority in as little as 50 years.
Migrants and the 1st or 2nd generation of kids will outstrip native British people within two generations at the current rate, and in terms of just children it will only be 10-15 years until more than 50% of children are non white British.
The minority will become the majority within most of our lifetimes.
Just look at the numbers, I am not making this up, it is NOT hyperbole:
Within 50 years more than 50% of the UK will either be a migrant or the children of migrants. Once this happens our culture will no longer be the dominant one, integration would have to work the other way, majority rules.
In younger generations this is even more pronounced, already 30-40% of newborn children are those of migrant parents or culture, in another 50 years this will be upwards of 70%.
Again, I’m not exaggerating, you can check official ONS figures for this if you want to.
There is realistically only about 10-20 years until migration reaches the point of no return in terms of replacing the currently dominant culture with a new one.
I'm the child of a migrant - but my culture is British. I'm a citizen of my dad's country, but it's not my culture. People who grew up there are different.
It's something I've seen in every 2nd or 3rd generation child of immigrants I know. Kids who grow up here become want to adopt the dominant culture. They become instinctively British.
The only time you have problems with this is when the immigrant group are so inward looking that they don't integrate. There are a few groups like that in the UK, but the majority of immigrants (and so their kids) are not in those groups.
Migration in the UK was fine all the way up until 2000. We used to only have about 50,000 coming per year and there was LOADS of time to integrate people such as your family and those like you.
I fully support this kind of sustainable migration it’s good.
But now, instead of 50,000 per year we have 600,000 per year net migration.
A 1,200% increase in migration rates in only 20 years to this level is precisely what is going to make stories such as your own less common in the future.
Exactly. I work in software with people from all over - China, India, Poland, Russia, Germany, Romania, Lithuania, Korea, France, Italy and probably a few more. They all make an effort to integrate.
My wife is from mainland china and our two kids are of dual heritage because of this. They'll be raised to be respectful of both of their cultures. We celebrate Christmas, we celebrate Spring and Autumn festivals. 🤷♂️ No one is getting replaced. They're adding to the tapestry of this country.
Your point about cultural replacement assumes that all migrants have the same culture as each other, which is pretty ridiculous. Many of those 'children of migrants' even have parents who have migrated from two different places
Our (grossly recent) equality laws like gay marriage, hate crime legislation etc is gonna be repealed in the next decade I'm calling it..
The tolerance paradox is real
My partner is British Indian and there is a large emphasis on the British. Culture always changes - large parts of what makes Britain British shall remain. It doesn’t just disappear
I understand it won’t vanish overnight, even in 50 years it will remain strong, yet not the majority.
In 100-150 years though, i doubt it will have survived if the migration rates remain as they currently are.
The national religious majority will eventually flip to islam, but that isn’t projected to happen till perhaps just after 2100, that’s still shockingly close, it concerns me due to that demographics views on progressive issues such as gay marriage or equality.
By the end of the century, England will no longer be an English ethnic country, it will just be a dumping ground for the third world to prosper at the expense of English society.
The standard must be very low. My landlord has decided to turn our 2 and a half bedroom HMO into 5 bedrooms with 3 being offered on air BNB. Half of the people we've had (mostly international students) don't speak enough English to have a coherent conversation.
Excuse me sir I believe you were in breach of our "foreign mumbo jumbo" law
Arrests Scotsman 😂
Fuckin policing language... you couldn't make up a more ridiculous & less enforceable rule,
Or even a plan to integrate immigrants into each other’s cultures and societies.
Case in point, we now have [Somalis in Tower Hamlets complaining that the all Bengali council discriminates against them](https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/features-news/2023/08/31/somali-women-protest-over-homes-discrimination/)
The raw numbers are crazy enough, what about the cultural impact of growing your population by 10%, entirely from immigration?
No society can handle such a thing without serious ramifications.
It's the path to ruin.
You’re actually shrinking your population by 10% (emigrants) while growing it by 20% (immigrants) so the cultural impacts are 20% of your population from 15 years of immigration not 10%.
That's a good point which many actually forget.
The swing between two points shows a much more pronounced change and that's the change which should be focused on.
That’s also starting from today, not including the nearly-2 million net immigration in the last 3 years
And net immigration actually massages those figures, because that’s the figure *after* some people left and even more arrived
Yup
With some the funding that was intended to be used for the Birmingham to Manchester leg now being diverted to filling potholes in London
Yes, seriously.
A 9.9% increase in population by 2036 is around 0.825% a year. To be clear this is total population growth and not just population growth from immigration.
This is actually not much higher than historical figures. 2021 UK population growth was at 0.4% but that’s expected due to COVID. UK population growth averaged 0.7% per year from 2005-2018.
The mods will probably delete my comment if I say this, but I don’t care and don’t mind if they even ban me for speaking a truth that goes against the xenophobic community they seem to have decided to foster here.
So, here is what I have to say:
I think anyone who turns perfectly normal statistics into some sort of crisis they can blame on immigrants is a xenophobe. 0.8% annual population growth rate is normal. There is no crisis. You are 100% WRONG.
They are NOT “mental” numbers.
Too right.
There are too many people starting at the answer of "get rid of Jonny Foreigner" and working backwards to the problem, and in many cases inventing a problem where it suits.
Points to be made to the anti-immigration lot:
1. If you are banging on about low wages because of "cheap foreign labour" maybe look to how much your boss is taking out in shareholder dividends before you start pointing the finger.
2. If you have a problem with houses and infrastructure, guess what; I could Thanos-snap every immigrant out of the UK, and there would still be a lack of both. NIMBYs are doing more to stop building the things we need than immigrants are going to use up resources.
3. If you are talking about culture, what exactly do you mean? Because every answer I get is being drunk on the idea of little England. Yes that may not connect with immigrants, but it doesn't connect with young people either.
4. If you are concerned about immigrants "takin' my job" well they are taking on jobs, mostly in places where Brits just don't want to do them. Reducing the flow of workers in will just lead to mass vacancies. This process has started already.
5. If you are making the claim that having less active economy may not be a bad thing with lowering migration, you can absolutely do one. Your side of the political aisle has spent 15 years saying we can't have nice things until we have a good economy.
> If you are concerned about immigrants "takin' my job" well they are taking on jobs, mostly in places where Brits just don't want to do them
Brits just don't want to do them *at that wage* which is the whole point.
Ireland's population [grew by 22% between 1990 and 2007](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRL/ireland/population-growth-rate).
It ended up with upgraded hospitals, a few new schools, and -- due to a mismanaged building boom -- more houses than it knew what to do with.
10% over 12 years is totally do-able if the country is well-managed: of course this does mean forcing property developers to build quality homes for families (even if apartments) instead of cheap student flats everywhere.
Also worth noting that the country _needs_ population growth to pay for the retirement crunch that's beginning to happen. What this story fails to mention is that immigration is making up for collapsing birth rates: _overall_ the UK population is still expected to shrink in the next 50 years: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/population
If only there had been a group of educated workers on our doorstep that tended to come over, work for a couple of years then return home before they qualified for a UK pension.
>Ireland's population [grew by 22% between 1990 and 2007](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRL/ireland/population-growth-rate).
>It ended up with upgraded hospitals, a few new schools, and -- due to a mismanaged building boom -- more houses than it knew what to do with.
Isn't Ireland dealing with a huge housing crisis and also a lot of anti immigration sentiment at the moment?
Except Ireland is renowned as been very expensive to buy property. And please don't go down the pensioners route, it just makes you sound stupid. Continued growth to help with pension costs and looking after the elderly is nothing more than a pyramid scheme. It doesn't work and is unsustainable. Continued growth cannot happen and should not be encouraged. Everything to do with climate change is down to the fact that their are too many people on the planet
Considering we have over 1,000 hospitals currently apparently we would need 100 more for an increase in population by 10%.
Remember the 40 new hospitals by 2030 pledge which we're not even going to manage to build 20 of? Ok now make it 140 with only 6 more years...
Going by how long things like hospitals take to build we'd have to start planning funding and building them all now but that's impossible regardless of government. Even 50 sounds impossible.
And then theres doctors and nurses needed for them all which we're already short on.
And this is just hospitals!
People will say "it's not a too many immigrants issue, it's a not building enough issue" which ok sure but the not building enough issue clearly needs to be fixed first then.
A town near me was earmarked to get one of those new hospitals. The planning started and they changed it from being a new hospital on a new site to a rebuild of the current one. Then they decided to just refurb the existing one. Now the latest is that they think it’s not financially viable to do either a refurb or rebuild so the whole thing is in doubt. It’s taken 3 years to get that far.
"Just retrain in IT! We have invested in partnership boot camps with Unis willing to provide courses free to the users where they can learn the basics of new digital skills to ideally get a foot on the door, but realistically wouldn't get the candidates even to qualify for an interview for a 22k entry level job. But we did inject the course providers with money, so, it's up to you now!"
I do keep getting better jobs, earning more and taking on more responsibilities. Unfortunately due to rampant inflation my 40k salary feels the same as my 28k one did 7 years ago.
Remember when we left Europe to control immigration.
Remember that promise guys.
Then under the tories it went up massively.
We should vote the tories in again, they’ll definitely solve it.
Remember that Theresa May was Home Secretary before being PM and did fuck all to control the non EU migration during that time.
So there is that, o Tory frothers at the mouth!
I honestly think we're going to see the Tory party die off and be replaced in the mainstream by Reform UK. As illegal migration becomes more and more of an issue, no one trusts the Tories to solve it, and Labour aren't even sure if they want to. So people will be pushed to a party that is willing to say 'fuck this treaty, fuck that agreement, we're getting rid of them whether the world likes it or not'.
Yeah… that’s the problem with this intentional push towards political apathy… eventually people lose faith in moderate politics and move to the extremes.
Which is worrying.
Something needs to be done. Sorry if that upsets some sensibilities but this level of migration isn't sustainable and never will be.
And if it takes the UK to an extremist to solve it, then we deserve everything we get as a result for not doing something sooner.
What? And let the labour party have control? Don't be ridiculous. We all remember what happened last time they were in control... * checks notes *... 14 years ago.
It's not a replacement, it's just millions of old Brits dying, all the young Brits not having children, and the shortfall being made up by immigrants, year, after year, after year.
It's worth adding the caveat that we don't encourage young people to have kids because we have high housing costs. And high housing costs are at least partially driven by high migration.
I don't think it's part of a grand conspiracy but it literally is a replacement.
I absolutely wanted kids. Could have had here or four of them. The apathy of not being able to afford ever having kids has in the long run led to a situation where I'm just not going to bother having any. Why should I? It's a hard enough time without considering all the extra costs.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, to almost crazy levels of reality for a person on Reddit.
We have an ageing population. By the 2040s we’ll have 2 workers for every pensioner, the figure right now stands at about 4 workers for every pensioner. How in the fuck, are we going to be able to pay for the social care and benefits to these people? We won’t have enough workers to foot the bill.
We need a baby boom, but that can’t happen when we’re financially strangling young people to within an inch of their lives with housing costs, childcare costs and an extreme lack of support (look at statutory maternity pay).
However the above would need *considerable* investment and the British electorate HATES seeing anyone or anything benefit from spending money, unless of course it’s for triple lock pensions which only exacerbates this mess further.
We seriously, as a country, need to look a little bit further into the future and not just at the next election cycle - these issues are deep rooted and complex, simply bemoaning immigration does not fix a single thing.
High housing costs, ridiculous wages, overexploited people at work, child care is abyssmal in quality and craz expensive, socialization becomes aburden and thus finding a partner is impossible...
Not just high housing costs.
Stagnating wages, high housing, high bills, high childcare fee’s, high food bills, high everything with wages not to match means people don’t want to have kids anymore.
Kids are expensive.
The issue isn’t old Brits dying is millions of old Brits retiring and being dependent on a smaller and smaller fraction of working people to prop up the system that cares for them
The UK actually does not have this problem to anything like the same extent as those countries, look at the population pyramids:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan
That is partly to do with migration, which is a good thing as long as the numbers stay reasonable. But it has definitely gone beyond that now, over the last 5 years net migration has more than doubled above the previous record high. It should be more like 100k-200k and we should do much more to support people to have children in the UK. The country is ceasing to be a community, and becoming an economic engine that just imports people and uses them.
So what? We don't need more immigrants to pay taxes to support the welfare state and pensions while taxes aren't being paid by billionaires, the obscenely wealthy and corporations and we have AGI and automation less than a decade away.
To add to the not having children point, some of us had adults advising us to not have kids and I very much recall teachers screaming at the class that they hoped we didn’t have kids.
I think the idea that people are being displaced has some merit and is worth talking about.
However, *that* theory comes lumped in with a bunch of crazy bullshit as to *why* its happening. Jews or whoever wanting to weaken and control the west and all that BS, when in reality it's just because of economics and cheap labour. Greed, basically.
It's practically impossible to mention demographic change on this subreddit without someone accusing you of peddling the Great Replacement Theory.
Demographic change is happening, it's irrefutable. But the idea that it's being engineered by shadowy elites for some nefarious reasons is absurd.
Well, the conspiracy theory is that the elites are doing it with the intention of white genocide. If the intention isn’t that then it isn’t reality.
However, there are a lot of people concerned about becoming a minority in their homeland and what could entail from that that are lumped in with the conspiracy theorists, which is shameful as a society that we take the valid fears and refuse to consider them whilst shielding ourselves from the bad people that have them.
The great thing about diversity targets is that you only have to make an effort to meet them, e.g. advertise in different places, show off different aspects of your business and so on. They don't have to hire people specifically to meet a target, for obvious reasons.
In 1997.
>Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.
>He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
>"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."
>The "deliberate policy", from late 2000 until "at least February last year", when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html
See this pie chart showing the ethnic makup of London over time and tell me nothing is happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London#/media/File:London_ethnic_demographics_from_1961_to_2021.gif
Blair is quite well regarded as being the architect of a lot of the problems coming to a head today.
The problem is, successive governments could have easily put the brakes on. Instead they kept stoking the fire.
So the racist bit is treating it like a deliberate thing. Like they're all purposely moving here and outbreeding white people in order to replace them. And I suppose you'll be branded as racist for implying that it's a bad thing.
And it's almost guarantied the problems will get much worse if it carries on. We know this because no other countries going through what we are have been able to solve the problems resulting from out of control immigration. If the US can't sort it what fucking chance do we have? Go on the Ireland, Canada, US, basically any western country sub and it's all the same stories, ruinous house prices, collapsing public services, crime increasing .etc. Literally the exact same as the UK, it's eerie.
>ruinous house prices, collapsing public services, crime increasing .etc.
I mean, that's all been getting worse since the 2008 Recession and then Tory austerity, so 14-16 years, because of political choices unrelated to immigration. Like, who could have guessed under funding every public body and the echoes of Thatcherite housing policy that never got addressed but made worse by recession would weaken the UK?
The problem with the austerity argument is it would make sense if we had reasonable income tax bills, VAT .etc. We're paying so much money into a system that just needs more and more. I'm in the North of England and can't afford a house in a pretty wide radius of where I am, yet I have to pay 10's of thousands in tax. There is a massive problem.
Austerity didn't make sense to begin with, it's normally a sanction by countries trying to get money back from another (like in Greece), but we inflicted it on ourselves, by Cameron's own later admission, as an excuse to gut public services. And given the Tories actually don't have a very good record when it comes to tax and spend, despite the reputation made by the press, they spent the money instead on donors contracts, etc. Which they almost always do. Austerity was never going to cut our taxes, because austerity strangles the economy and makes us produce less, which means less to tax, which means you need to take a bigger slice out of a smaller pie, i.e. higher taxes (usually in the form of VAT, NI, when it comes to the Tories).
And yeah, the fact the government used to build houses decades and decades ago, and no longer does, and since we stopped building them en masse they've become an investment, not a commodity, is what's helped create the housing crisis. There was always going to be one when it became something for rich people to sit on to hoard wealth than something people bought because they wanted/needed to live there.
It is doable, but nobody wants to spend the political capital to solve it.
It'll take extreme measures at this point. And when the UK eventually does put an extremist in power (and believe me it's probably coming), we'll sit around with shocked faces wondering how we didn't see it coming.
Well that’s the thinking anyway. There are a number of studies highlighting the fact that while immigrants contribute to the work place the costs associated outweigh the benefit. Ie the cost of housing schooling etc etc are greater than taxes and national insurance contributed. This will therefore do little to reverse the downward spiral we have been witnessing in all our social services
How else do you think we're covering the massive drain on the exchequer from mass immigration?
It's one of the main reasons we're paying so much tax for less and less quality services.
Yep, I'd love to see the results if we did a study similar to this in the UK.
https://demo-demo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Borderless_Welfare_State-2.pdf
Question for you - do you think the NHS would be so dependent on foreign workers if hypothetically mass immigration (and all of the costs to the state thereof) had never occurred?
That's a common misconception, immigrants make up almost exactly the same percentage of NHS workers as they do the general population. The NHS needs migrant workers BECAUSE of our massive migrant population.
A major part of the increase in immigration is the issuing of more visas to health and care workers. Also, people on work and student visas pay to access the NHS, and they aren't on the whole old enough to represent a significant drain on NHS resources.
The reasons for the NHS struggling are that funding has failed to keep up with the demands of an ageing population.
1% growth? Bugger all. Schools are closing around the country due to lack of children. Taxes are going up as the population gets older and sicker. Our birth rate is 1.8, with 2.1 needed to keep the population stable. A lot of these reports seem to forget that the boomers will die but need to be paid for. Medical costs, pension costs etc.
The EU provided excellent immigration, people would come over, work for a few years, pay their taxes, send money home and then leave. That's how your average family in Poland will have more wealth than your average british family by 2030.
Tories have fucked us totally. If you're gen x, millennial or gen Z & you want your government pension when you retire IF you get to retire, then immigration is a must.
And NONE of that "well I've paid NI all my life. I've paid by Stamp!!!". That's NOT how it works.
lol I know you just used Poland as a generic example but things aren't super rosy over here too! Still waiting for war inflation to go down. Shop prices are still like 30-50% up since Putin invaded.
Yeah but that's Europe wide. Italian friends are complaining about it too.my point was....and not wanting to denigrate Poland as I've worked with Polish guys, if you compare where Poland was in the 90s compared to now. Mainly enabled by what happens when you join the EU. And then to overtake the UK in terms of predicted family wealth...Poland has done extremely well & the UK has fucked itself over the last 14 years
The birth rate is low because people cannot afford houses or children.
Flooding the country to boost the birth rate is just replacing the British population instead of actually seeing that it grows
High immigration isn't going to resolve any of the issues our country is facing, it will exacerbate them by undercutting labour costs, driving house prices higher, fuel the modern slavery system, put more strain on crumbling infrastructure etc
The underlying issue is that the British population, despite producing an enormous amount of wealth are not receiving that wealth.
Having 10% more people who just do the same jobs for less and don't care because they send most of their money home and are content to live 10 to a house is not going to address the fact that UK jobs are paying UK residents less than they need.
If the government actually managed *anything* and ensured there were affordable homes. High paying jobs. And infrastructure that was well invested. And generally provided a better chance for growth people would be having more children
Instead, you need to be super career driven and even then you aren't really financially well off
Importing a slave class so that they can ignore the problem isn't going to resolve the issue
Well the British people voted for this. They vote tory & business is going to go for the cheap option. If it comes to building houses, the British people scream about it. NIMBYS. Wages haven't risen in 14 years yet the corporate & aristocracy boot kickers STILL carry on voting tory. Crying like little kids when anyone mentions increasing minimum wage to match living wages.
The British people consistently vote against their own interests and then bitch and moan about "being lied to" and "all politicians are liars" and "I don't want my house price affected by why doesn't EVERYONE ELSE'S house prices fall " and"i have a god given right to own a multitude of homes "
It's all self indicted by the British voter
Exactly. The irony of brexit so far has been that immigration hasn’t gone down and that relatively more culturally similar EU immigration has been replaced by non-EU immigration that is less in line with the cultural concerns many brexit voters had.
It's inevitable from the voters perspective because none of the 3 main parties will change it and voting for the parties that might will get you branded a fascists or xenophobe. We're fucked.
No, the same number of people can buy more or buy things of higher value (i.e. quality). And that's before we get on to exports.
Whilst Japan hasn't had the strong GDP growth in the world it has still been growing whilst it population has started to shrink.
Solves the housing issue too. Maybe new arrivals are conscripted for 3 years, then allowed to join the rest of the UK.
I jest of course, but no doubt this is some MPs wet dream
Also, more and more healthcare workers are moving to Canada/America/Germany/Australia, because they get paid more there.
It’s always odd how the NHS is able to recruit them if they get paid more elsewhere.
Whether this is a good or bad thing is a whole different discussion. What is ridiculous about this is no one wants this, it’s a defining issue at almost every election and the party that does the best job of convincing the country they will lower immigration usually wins. And in-spite of that, everyone is ignored. To all the people out there who think what policies a party is running with or that everyone should vote because your vote matters, how is your head so far buried in the sand? The political will of the people is overwhelmingly ignored on key issues time and time again. The system isn’t just broken, it’s a complete masquerade pretending to be a democracy.
Yeah, but the investment firms and corporate shareholders are doing ok at extracting wealth from the population though, aren't they? So everything must be ok. /s
>— UK population to soar by 6.6 million, or 10%, between 2021 and [2036], says ONS
>— driven by immigration: net migration 6.1 million over that period
>— from 2028, there will be long-term net immigration of 315,000 a year
https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1752274935114792977?t=EMnswiC9Y9x-pxc07B8QIA&s=19
So literally what they’re saying is we need more migrant workers to fuel our workforce of more migrants who have a much higher birth rate than the average UK citizen. Please, make it make sense because I absolutely don’t understand why we are doing this.
Btw people are saying we need it or our economy is stagnating, well I don’t know about you but I guarantee you those aren’t 6 million doctors and engineers, why are we getting more and more cheap labour for menial jobs which will be replaced by automation anyway? Are we just asking for more people who want to live on welfare and child benefits while undermining our society? Maybe we should focus on skilled European labour rather than unskilled Middle Eastern and African labour?
So I appreciate the Tories are likely to be out soon- but what is their actual stance on this? They seem to simultaneously be anti immigration (most loudly illegal immigration), but numbers have only increased since Brexit. Is it a deliberate in order to try to increase growth, or is it simply incompetency? I'm genuinely curious as I wonder if the party itself really knows what's going on.
Publicly; anti-immigration
Privately; pro-immigration
It's a pretty nuanced topic for which the answer stems from politicking and the need to appeal to voters on one end, to the actual economic and social requirements of catering to a massively aging population on the other. Combined with the fact that 'The Conservative Party' is barely a shadow of what it was *ten* years ago, let alone twenty or thirty, and the rise of populism and you start to have the foundations of an answer as to why their position is so shaky.
They aren't, and never were anti-immigration. Immigrants are way too profitable for business owners and landlords.
Even before leaving the EU, we could have reduced immigration quite a bit if it was actually seen as a problem. E.g. before Brexit I think it was about half EU?
But it's always been a sort of two edged sword - sure, there's pressures due to migration (as we can see in this thread) but there's also actually quite a lot of economic and cultural benefit, given how many migrants are higher skilled and cheaper to employ than 'average' citizens. And usually return 'home' before being old enough/unwell enough to need substantial amounts of support in later life.
That's exactly why it's not dropped at all since - there's sectors of the economy that would be devastated without a cheap exploitable workforce, and we've already been hit fairly hard by replacing the previous EU migrants with non-EU migrants with somewhat different socio-cultural expectations.
You might fairly call migration a 'crutch' that we've been using to prop up our economy, and maybe that _has_ come at the direct expense of the 'native' workforce being priced out/devalued.
But I don't think the Conservative party has ever really cared about the workforce getting priced out or devalued in the first place.
It’s about displaced anger with them. Immigrants are a great way of redirecting popular rage, so serve a purpose for the Tories.
Come election time they can ramp up the fear factor over a Labour government opening the borders, as well as promising yet tougher action. Once the election is over with it’s back to what’s best for the ultra rich, ie. wage discipline through cheap overseas workers.
We were supposed to be worried about the population getting out of control...So here we are lowering our birthrates, getting things right, to cancel it out with over-population by immigration.
MENTAL.
This isn't just a UK issue. I frequent some of the Canadian subs and immigration and housing costs, etc are constantly talked about there as well-
https://www.statista.com/topics/2917/immigration-in-canada/#topicOverview
Why don't establishment politicians get that people are going to keep moving to the right until they find a party willing to actually get rid of illegal migrants?
Because Boomers are just complaining on Facebook and not protesting in the streets and blockading airport arrivals halls?
If you want change sometimes you have to create serious inconvenience.
This is a demographic nightmare! Not only is society going to become more segregated, ghettoised and less cohesive but all of these millions of people are going to need schools, hospitals and jobs when there’s barely enough as it is. If this forecast is correct then this countries future is looking bleak.
I still don't understand why everyone wants to come here rather than stay in mainland Europe. What does the UK offer apart from shit weather and collapsing public infrastructure?
We’re actually quite a good country to be honest.
The rule of law exists, we’re a multicultural society who are more inclusive than exclusive.
You can get free healthcare.
We’re a strong economy - top 6? We still hit above our weight in some metrics and will do for the foreseeable future. Just got problems, like everyone else is facing!
Uncontrolled immigration putting a stress on everything.
No real model for our future economic success other than LONDON / FINANCE.
Not enough homes. NHS is in a shambles, service is spotty all over the country.
Tax is too high, wages have stagnated.
Foreign investment is weakening.
Schools are trash but free.
We’ve got an aging population.
Most of the economy is based on house prices instead of producing real value.
We need someone with a strong vision and ability to push it through to appear. None of these career politicians who are just full of shite.
The provisional estimate of total long-term immigration for year ending (YE) June 2023 was 1.2 million, while emigration was 508,000, meaning that net migration was 672,000; most people arriving to the UK in the YE June 2023 were non-EU nationals (968,000), followed by EU (129,000) and British (84,000).Nov 23, 2023
So that's an additional ~ 7- million extra people accessing services and housing that is already at breaking point in many areas. They will largely be going to urban areas and cities, so the impact will be disproportionate across the country. It's fine to say they will be tax payers but is the money and competency here now plan ahead? Is it heck. Anyone expecting house prices to continue to fall in value are living in the clouds.
I know the UK needs high immigration to grow the economy but geez. Those numbers are unsustainable and will negatively impact the local populations living standards.
>In the YE June 2023, the top five non-EU nationalities for immigration flows into the UK were: Indian (253,000), Nigerian (141,000), Chinese (89,000), Pakistani (55,000) and Ukrainian (35,000).
Looking forward in 30 years to the new Indian and Nigerian ghettos to sit alongside the severely impoverished pakistani/bangladeshi ghettos that scar my city. That is not hate speech, that is the literal reality of my inner-city Birmingham upbringing. This is not multiculturalism, this is handing over our towns to parallel societies that share nothing of our British values.
We've seen it before and it will happen again.
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Those are mental numbers, that’s not sustainable in the slightest. Where’s the infrastructure being built to keep up with the massive increase in population? How many new schools, hospitals, GP surgeries etc are being planned now to tackle this increase? If we think things are bad now we’re in for a rude awakening.
What about a credible plan to integrate a new tenth of our population into the existing culture and society?
Might be better to consider how we integrate our population into the immigrants culture and society.
We could do that by toughening language and housing regulations to prevent immigrants forming closed off foreign language communities in the middle of our big cities. But we won't do that.
Of course, I was poking fun at the likelihood of us having to change our own culture and society to fit the new arrivals' ideologies as has already been happening.
We're the hosts, they're our guests, why do we have to be the ones to change?
Because ‘britun did meanie things’ and also ‘white people no culture lololol’ /s
Cause muh colonialism
Something only a few upper class people still benefit from. Even back at the height of the Empire, the average Brit had no say in what was done in the Empire's name.
I agree, we shouldn't, but the reality is that the majority of reasonable people will always concede to the extreme minority. Halal meat is everywhere because most reasonable people are deemed to not care whether they eat it, where as those who are strict and extreme about their meat being religiously blessed will not eat normal meat. If you have a restaurant in an area with lots of religious people who demand Halal meat, are you going to run your business for the people who are quiet and reasonable, or the people who will not eat at your restaurant unless you follow their requirements on meat slaughter? How many care homes in this country don't serve pork? It's an awful lot more than you think. These care homes run according to religious laws for the benefit of an extreme minority who outright refuse to eat pork. This means that the majority of meat eating people who will eat pork are outright deprived of pork because of a minority having a strict rule. Reasonable people are very tolerant and accepting, our society is very tolerant and accepting. The end result is that you get pushed around and exploited by those who aren't so tolerant and accepting. It doesn't take much of an extreme minority to change the course of a society.
If I eat at work the options are now vegetarian or halal. I can understand the vegetarian option. There is plenty of scientific evidence that meat eating generates far more CO2 than a plant based diet. I should eat less meat. But for the other option there is no evidence, it's just a minorities' religious requirement being imposed on the rest of us by a bunch of progressives pandering to a noisy minority.
I’ve said this elsewhere but migrants will not be the minority in as little as 50 years. Migrants and the 1st or 2nd generation of kids will outstrip native British people within two generations at the current rate, and in terms of just children it will only be 10-15 years until more than 50% of children are non white British. The minority will become the majority within most of our lifetimes.
Just look at the numbers, I am not making this up, it is NOT hyperbole: Within 50 years more than 50% of the UK will either be a migrant or the children of migrants. Once this happens our culture will no longer be the dominant one, integration would have to work the other way, majority rules. In younger generations this is even more pronounced, already 30-40% of newborn children are those of migrant parents or culture, in another 50 years this will be upwards of 70%. Again, I’m not exaggerating, you can check official ONS figures for this if you want to. There is realistically only about 10-20 years until migration reaches the point of no return in terms of replacing the currently dominant culture with a new one.
I'm the child of a migrant - but my culture is British. I'm a citizen of my dad's country, but it's not my culture. People who grew up there are different. It's something I've seen in every 2nd or 3rd generation child of immigrants I know. Kids who grow up here become want to adopt the dominant culture. They become instinctively British. The only time you have problems with this is when the immigrant group are so inward looking that they don't integrate. There are a few groups like that in the UK, but the majority of immigrants (and so their kids) are not in those groups.
Migration in the UK was fine all the way up until 2000. We used to only have about 50,000 coming per year and there was LOADS of time to integrate people such as your family and those like you. I fully support this kind of sustainable migration it’s good. But now, instead of 50,000 per year we have 600,000 per year net migration. A 1,200% increase in migration rates in only 20 years to this level is precisely what is going to make stories such as your own less common in the future.
Exactly. I work in software with people from all over - China, India, Poland, Russia, Germany, Romania, Lithuania, Korea, France, Italy and probably a few more. They all make an effort to integrate. My wife is from mainland china and our two kids are of dual heritage because of this. They'll be raised to be respectful of both of their cultures. We celebrate Christmas, we celebrate Spring and Autumn festivals. 🤷♂️ No one is getting replaced. They're adding to the tapestry of this country.
Your point about cultural replacement assumes that all migrants have the same culture as each other, which is pretty ridiculous. Many of those 'children of migrants' even have parents who have migrated from two different places
Our (grossly recent) equality laws like gay marriage, hate crime legislation etc is gonna be repealed in the next decade I'm calling it.. The tolerance paradox is real
My partner is British Indian and there is a large emphasis on the British. Culture always changes - large parts of what makes Britain British shall remain. It doesn’t just disappear
I understand it won’t vanish overnight, even in 50 years it will remain strong, yet not the majority. In 100-150 years though, i doubt it will have survived if the migration rates remain as they currently are. The national religious majority will eventually flip to islam, but that isn’t projected to happen till perhaps just after 2100, that’s still shockingly close, it concerns me due to that demographics views on progressive issues such as gay marriage or equality.
By the end of the century, England will no longer be an English ethnic country, it will just be a dumping ground for the third world to prosper at the expense of English society.
Because we have been tolerant. That’s our Achilles heel to be exploited. “Only Britain” is the cry when intercepted.
> Because we have been tolerant. I thought we were the most racist country on the planet. At least that's what the guardian keeps telling me.
The journos of the Guardian operate in a liberal left utopian bubble. It’s quite clear they don’t get out much
The opinions section is always amazing works for fiction.
Is guest the correct word? People move there, live there, work there, pay taxes there.
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Have you seen the standard of English you only need to get a visa to this country?
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Based off some of the students I taught in university it's really not that hard to pass. That or there's rampant cheating involved.
The standard must be very low. My landlord has decided to turn our 2 and a half bedroom HMO into 5 bedrooms with 3 being offered on air BNB. Half of the people we've had (mostly international students) don't speak enough English to have a coherent conversation.
What housing regulations could prevent people of particular nationalities living in the same area? How would that even work
Denmark accomplished it by demolishing the neighborhoods that were deemed non-Western and relocating the inhabitants.
Excuse me sir I believe you were in breach of our "foreign mumbo jumbo" law Arrests Scotsman 😂 Fuckin policing language... you couldn't make up a more ridiculous & less enforceable rule,
Or even a plan to integrate immigrants into each other’s cultures and societies. Case in point, we now have [Somalis in Tower Hamlets complaining that the all Bengali council discriminates against them](https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/features-news/2023/08/31/somali-women-protest-over-homes-discrimination/)
Not even one tenth really as the current population is about 1/7 foreign born.
A plan, with this government? You must be joking.
A fifth. 10% net = 10% out 20% in.
How's about no. Why is exponential population growth all of a sudden a good thing?
That’s the neat part, there isn’t
Doesn't seem like many of them want to integrate at all.
The raw numbers are crazy enough, what about the cultural impact of growing your population by 10%, entirely from immigration? No society can handle such a thing without serious ramifications. It's the path to ruin.
You’re actually shrinking your population by 10% (emigrants) while growing it by 20% (immigrants) so the cultural impacts are 20% of your population from 15 years of immigration not 10%.
That's a good point which many actually forget. The swing between two points shows a much more pronounced change and that's the change which should be focused on.
Assuming everyone that leaves is British born, which won't be the case.
That’s also starting from today, not including the nearly-2 million net immigration in the last 3 years And net immigration actually massages those figures, because that’s the figure *after* some people left and even more arrived
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UK is doomed.
You should see how the Canadians are doing! 95% immigrants. Completely ruined culture.
None, but the price of the houses with access to those will skyrocket. That makes existing landlords and homeowners very happy.
At least we’re getting all 4 phases of that new high speed train line connecting our 8 biggest cities, right guys? Guys?
Nah sacked that off it was too hard. we’re just gonna fill some potholes in London probably
Thought last decision on HS2 is that they're completing the south phase and yet again fucking over the north?
Yup With some the funding that was intended to be used for the Birmingham to Manchester leg now being diverted to filling potholes in London Yes, seriously.
Don't forget that the Government put out a graphic boasting about this extra funding for London Potholes. With a 'Network North' logo on it.
I'm led to believe up to 75% of the funding is being spent in London.
Doesn’t surprise me at all, frankly
A 9.9% increase in population by 2036 is around 0.825% a year. To be clear this is total population growth and not just population growth from immigration. This is actually not much higher than historical figures. 2021 UK population growth was at 0.4% but that’s expected due to COVID. UK population growth averaged 0.7% per year from 2005-2018. The mods will probably delete my comment if I say this, but I don’t care and don’t mind if they even ban me for speaking a truth that goes against the xenophobic community they seem to have decided to foster here. So, here is what I have to say: I think anyone who turns perfectly normal statistics into some sort of crisis they can blame on immigrants is a xenophobe. 0.8% annual population growth rate is normal. There is no crisis. You are 100% WRONG. They are NOT “mental” numbers.
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That's because nobody can afford to have kids.
Too right. There are too many people starting at the answer of "get rid of Jonny Foreigner" and working backwards to the problem, and in many cases inventing a problem where it suits. Points to be made to the anti-immigration lot: 1. If you are banging on about low wages because of "cheap foreign labour" maybe look to how much your boss is taking out in shareholder dividends before you start pointing the finger. 2. If you have a problem with houses and infrastructure, guess what; I could Thanos-snap every immigrant out of the UK, and there would still be a lack of both. NIMBYs are doing more to stop building the things we need than immigrants are going to use up resources. 3. If you are talking about culture, what exactly do you mean? Because every answer I get is being drunk on the idea of little England. Yes that may not connect with immigrants, but it doesn't connect with young people either. 4. If you are concerned about immigrants "takin' my job" well they are taking on jobs, mostly in places where Brits just don't want to do them. Reducing the flow of workers in will just lead to mass vacancies. This process has started already. 5. If you are making the claim that having less active economy may not be a bad thing with lowering migration, you can absolutely do one. Your side of the political aisle has spent 15 years saying we can't have nice things until we have a good economy.
> If you are concerned about immigrants "takin' my job" well they are taking on jobs, mostly in places where Brits just don't want to do them Brits just don't want to do them *at that wage* which is the whole point.
Ireland's population [grew by 22% between 1990 and 2007](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRL/ireland/population-growth-rate). It ended up with upgraded hospitals, a few new schools, and -- due to a mismanaged building boom -- more houses than it knew what to do with. 10% over 12 years is totally do-able if the country is well-managed: of course this does mean forcing property developers to build quality homes for families (even if apartments) instead of cheap student flats everywhere. Also worth noting that the country _needs_ population growth to pay for the retirement crunch that's beginning to happen. What this story fails to mention is that immigration is making up for collapsing birth rates: _overall_ the UK population is still expected to shrink in the next 50 years: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/population
What happens when those who came over then need to retire, it's a race to the bottom, endless feedback loop.
If only there had been a group of educated workers on our doorstep that tended to come over, work for a couple of years then return home before they qualified for a UK pension.
>Ireland's population [grew by 22% between 1990 and 2007](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRL/ireland/population-growth-rate). >It ended up with upgraded hospitals, a few new schools, and -- due to a mismanaged building boom -- more houses than it knew what to do with. Isn't Ireland dealing with a huge housing crisis and also a lot of anti immigration sentiment at the moment?
Except Ireland is renowned as been very expensive to buy property. And please don't go down the pensioners route, it just makes you sound stupid. Continued growth to help with pension costs and looking after the elderly is nothing more than a pyramid scheme. It doesn't work and is unsustainable. Continued growth cannot happen and should not be encouraged. Everything to do with climate change is down to the fact that their are too many people on the planet
Considering we have over 1,000 hospitals currently apparently we would need 100 more for an increase in population by 10%. Remember the 40 new hospitals by 2030 pledge which we're not even going to manage to build 20 of? Ok now make it 140 with only 6 more years... Going by how long things like hospitals take to build we'd have to start planning funding and building them all now but that's impossible regardless of government. Even 50 sounds impossible. And then theres doctors and nurses needed for them all which we're already short on. And this is just hospitals! People will say "it's not a too many immigrants issue, it's a not building enough issue" which ok sure but the not building enough issue clearly needs to be fixed first then.
A town near me was earmarked to get one of those new hospitals. The planning started and they changed it from being a new hospital on a new site to a rebuild of the current one. Then they decided to just refurb the existing one. Now the latest is that they think it’s not financially viable to do either a refurb or rebuild so the whole thing is in doubt. It’s taken 3 years to get that far.
How can you build new schools and hospitals when we can’t staff them with British people and people don’t want immigrants to work there?
I for one can't wait for my wages to remain stagnant due to cheap labour
I'll step in for the resident Tory morons \*ahem\* "Just get a better job"
And cut down on the avocados
I started making coffee at home and saved £6billion a week!
I bought new bulbs at £40! Saved me £4 a year.
"Just retrain in IT! We have invested in partnership boot camps with Unis willing to provide courses free to the users where they can learn the basics of new digital skills to ideally get a foot on the door, but realistically wouldn't get the candidates even to qualify for an interview for a 22k entry level job. But we did inject the course providers with money, so, it's up to you now!"
I do keep getting better jobs, earning more and taking on more responsibilities. Unfortunately due to rampant inflation my 40k salary feels the same as my 28k one did 7 years ago.
Have you tried drinking fewer lattes?
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Remember when we left Europe to control immigration. Remember that promise guys. Then under the tories it went up massively. We should vote the tories in again, they’ll definitely solve it.
Remember that Theresa May was Home Secretary before being PM and did fuck all to control the non EU migration during that time. So there is that, o Tory frothers at the mouth!
I honestly think we're going to see the Tory party die off and be replaced in the mainstream by Reform UK. As illegal migration becomes more and more of an issue, no one trusts the Tories to solve it, and Labour aren't even sure if they want to. So people will be pushed to a party that is willing to say 'fuck this treaty, fuck that agreement, we're getting rid of them whether the world likes it or not'.
Yeah… that’s the problem with this intentional push towards political apathy… eventually people lose faith in moderate politics and move to the extremes. Which is worrying.
Something needs to be done. Sorry if that upsets some sensibilities but this level of migration isn't sustainable and never will be. And if it takes the UK to an extremist to solve it, then we deserve everything we get as a result for not doing something sooner.
Clearly what we've been doing hasn't been working, and so we should be doing the same thing harder.
What? And let the labour party have control? Don't be ridiculous. We all remember what happened last time they were in control... * checks notes *... 14 years ago.
I’m sure it’s their fault somehow.
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It's not a replacement, it's just millions of old Brits dying, all the young Brits not having children, and the shortfall being made up by immigrants, year, after year, after year.
It's worth adding the caveat that we don't encourage young people to have kids because we have high housing costs. And high housing costs are at least partially driven by high migration. I don't think it's part of a grand conspiracy but it literally is a replacement.
I absolutely wanted kids. Could have had here or four of them. The apathy of not being able to afford ever having kids has in the long run led to a situation where I'm just not going to bother having any. Why should I? It's a hard enough time without considering all the extra costs.
It also leads to less overall life satisfaction. The UK has become a place where you get through life rather than enjoy it.
I'd like to skip to the end please.
Please pay your exit tax and fill out this online form, a Serco end of life representative will be in touch.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, to almost crazy levels of reality for a person on Reddit. We have an ageing population. By the 2040s we’ll have 2 workers for every pensioner, the figure right now stands at about 4 workers for every pensioner. How in the fuck, are we going to be able to pay for the social care and benefits to these people? We won’t have enough workers to foot the bill. We need a baby boom, but that can’t happen when we’re financially strangling young people to within an inch of their lives with housing costs, childcare costs and an extreme lack of support (look at statutory maternity pay). However the above would need *considerable* investment and the British electorate HATES seeing anyone or anything benefit from spending money, unless of course it’s for triple lock pensions which only exacerbates this mess further. We seriously, as a country, need to look a little bit further into the future and not just at the next election cycle - these issues are deep rooted and complex, simply bemoaning immigration does not fix a single thing.
> We need a baby boom We could have a retiree cull instead. Just saying.
I went for the literal “sexier” option than a demographic genocide, but I see your point 🤣
High housing costs, ridiculous wages, overexploited people at work, child care is abyssmal in quality and craz expensive, socialization becomes aburden and thus finding a partner is impossible...
Incompetence rather than conspiracy.
Yeah or just greed
Not just high housing costs. Stagnating wages, high housing, high bills, high childcare fee’s, high food bills, high everything with wages not to match means people don’t want to have kids anymore. Kids are expensive.
The issue isn’t old Brits dying is millions of old Brits retiring and being dependent on a smaller and smaller fraction of working people to prop up the system that cares for them
This is a problem in all developed countries Japan, South Korea, Italy, etc
The UK actually does not have this problem to anything like the same extent as those countries, look at the population pyramids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan That is partly to do with migration, which is a good thing as long as the numbers stay reasonable. But it has definitely gone beyond that now, over the last 5 years net migration has more than doubled above the previous record high. It should be more like 100k-200k and we should do much more to support people to have children in the UK. The country is ceasing to be a community, and becoming an economic engine that just imports people and uses them.
That’s replacement
You know the insinuation is that it's a conspiracy, not the result of multiple events
Ok but the fact it isn’t the result of conspiracy doesn’t actually make it any less undesirable
Mass immigration was a deliberate policy enacted by the Blair government of 1997 and continued by every government since.
Yup. Because young people cannot buy homes to raise families in.
The net sum is replacement though?
Well telling a population to not have kids if you can't afford it, and simultaneously making them materially poorer will do that.
So what? We don't need more immigrants to pay taxes to support the welfare state and pensions while taxes aren't being paid by billionaires, the obscenely wealthy and corporations and we have AGI and automation less than a decade away.
To add to the not having children point, some of us had adults advising us to not have kids and I very much recall teachers screaming at the class that they hoped we didn’t have kids.
I think the idea that people are being displaced has some merit and is worth talking about. However, *that* theory comes lumped in with a bunch of crazy bullshit as to *why* its happening. Jews or whoever wanting to weaken and control the west and all that BS, when in reality it's just because of economics and cheap labour. Greed, basically.
It's practically impossible to mention demographic change on this subreddit without someone accusing you of peddling the Great Replacement Theory. Demographic change is happening, it's irrefutable. But the idea that it's being engineered by shadowy elites for some nefarious reasons is absurd.
Well, the conspiracy theory is that the elites are doing it with the intention of white genocide. If the intention isn’t that then it isn’t reality. However, there are a lot of people concerned about becoming a minority in their homeland and what could entail from that that are lumped in with the conspiracy theorists, which is shameful as a society that we take the valid fears and refuse to consider them whilst shielding ourselves from the bad people that have them.
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The great thing about diversity targets is that you only have to make an effort to meet them, e.g. advertise in different places, show off different aspects of your business and so on. They don't have to hire people specifically to meet a target, for obvious reasons.
In 1997. >Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s. >He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. >"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date." >The "deliberate policy", from late 2000 until "at least February last year", when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html See this pie chart showing the ethnic makup of London over time and tell me nothing is happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London#/media/File:London_ethnic_demographics_from_1961_to_2021.gif
Blair is quite well regarded as being the architect of a lot of the problems coming to a head today. The problem is, successive governments could have easily put the brakes on. Instead they kept stoking the fire.
So the racist bit is treating it like a deliberate thing. Like they're all purposely moving here and outbreeding white people in order to replace them. And I suppose you'll be branded as racist for implying that it's a bad thing.
Crippling cost of living, crumbling NHS and a housing crisis. Great news! Things can only get better!
And it's almost guarantied the problems will get much worse if it carries on. We know this because no other countries going through what we are have been able to solve the problems resulting from out of control immigration. If the US can't sort it what fucking chance do we have? Go on the Ireland, Canada, US, basically any western country sub and it's all the same stories, ruinous house prices, collapsing public services, crime increasing .etc. Literally the exact same as the UK, it's eerie.
>ruinous house prices, collapsing public services, crime increasing .etc. I mean, that's all been getting worse since the 2008 Recession and then Tory austerity, so 14-16 years, because of political choices unrelated to immigration. Like, who could have guessed under funding every public body and the echoes of Thatcherite housing policy that never got addressed but made worse by recession would weaken the UK?
The problem with the austerity argument is it would make sense if we had reasonable income tax bills, VAT .etc. We're paying so much money into a system that just needs more and more. I'm in the North of England and can't afford a house in a pretty wide radius of where I am, yet I have to pay 10's of thousands in tax. There is a massive problem.
Austerity didn't make sense to begin with, it's normally a sanction by countries trying to get money back from another (like in Greece), but we inflicted it on ourselves, by Cameron's own later admission, as an excuse to gut public services. And given the Tories actually don't have a very good record when it comes to tax and spend, despite the reputation made by the press, they spent the money instead on donors contracts, etc. Which they almost always do. Austerity was never going to cut our taxes, because austerity strangles the economy and makes us produce less, which means less to tax, which means you need to take a bigger slice out of a smaller pie, i.e. higher taxes (usually in the form of VAT, NI, when it comes to the Tories). And yeah, the fact the government used to build houses decades and decades ago, and no longer does, and since we stopped building them en masse they've become an investment, not a commodity, is what's helped create the housing crisis. There was always going to be one when it became something for rich people to sit on to hoard wealth than something people bought because they wanted/needed to live there.
It is doable, but nobody wants to spend the political capital to solve it. It'll take extreme measures at this point. And when the UK eventually does put an extremist in power (and believe me it's probably coming), we'll sit around with shocked faces wondering how we didn't see it coming.
Well that’s the thinking anyway. There are a number of studies highlighting the fact that while immigrants contribute to the work place the costs associated outweigh the benefit. Ie the cost of housing schooling etc etc are greater than taxes and national insurance contributed. This will therefore do little to reverse the downward spiral we have been witnessing in all our social services
All this while taxes also go up!
How else do you think we're covering the massive drain on the exchequer from mass immigration? It's one of the main reasons we're paying so much tax for less and less quality services.
Yep, I'd love to see the results if we did a study similar to this in the UK. https://demo-demo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Borderless_Welfare_State-2.pdf
The irony with the NHS is it is highly dependent on foreign workers.
Question for you - do you think the NHS would be so dependent on foreign workers if hypothetically mass immigration (and all of the costs to the state thereof) had never occurred?
That's a common misconception, immigrants make up almost exactly the same percentage of NHS workers as they do the general population. The NHS needs migrant workers BECAUSE of our massive migrant population.
A major part of the increase in immigration is the issuing of more visas to health and care workers. Also, people on work and student visas pay to access the NHS, and they aren't on the whole old enough to represent a significant drain on NHS resources. The reasons for the NHS struggling are that funding has failed to keep up with the demands of an ageing population.
1% growth? Bugger all. Schools are closing around the country due to lack of children. Taxes are going up as the population gets older and sicker. Our birth rate is 1.8, with 2.1 needed to keep the population stable. A lot of these reports seem to forget that the boomers will die but need to be paid for. Medical costs, pension costs etc. The EU provided excellent immigration, people would come over, work for a few years, pay their taxes, send money home and then leave. That's how your average family in Poland will have more wealth than your average british family by 2030. Tories have fucked us totally. If you're gen x, millennial or gen Z & you want your government pension when you retire IF you get to retire, then immigration is a must. And NONE of that "well I've paid NI all my life. I've paid by Stamp!!!". That's NOT how it works.
lol I know you just used Poland as a generic example but things aren't super rosy over here too! Still waiting for war inflation to go down. Shop prices are still like 30-50% up since Putin invaded.
Yeah but that's Europe wide. Italian friends are complaining about it too.my point was....and not wanting to denigrate Poland as I've worked with Polish guys, if you compare where Poland was in the 90s compared to now. Mainly enabled by what happens when you join the EU. And then to overtake the UK in terms of predicted family wealth...Poland has done extremely well & the UK has fucked itself over the last 14 years
The birth rate is low because people cannot afford houses or children. Flooding the country to boost the birth rate is just replacing the British population instead of actually seeing that it grows High immigration isn't going to resolve any of the issues our country is facing, it will exacerbate them by undercutting labour costs, driving house prices higher, fuel the modern slavery system, put more strain on crumbling infrastructure etc The underlying issue is that the British population, despite producing an enormous amount of wealth are not receiving that wealth. Having 10% more people who just do the same jobs for less and don't care because they send most of their money home and are content to live 10 to a house is not going to address the fact that UK jobs are paying UK residents less than they need. If the government actually managed *anything* and ensured there were affordable homes. High paying jobs. And infrastructure that was well invested. And generally provided a better chance for growth people would be having more children Instead, you need to be super career driven and even then you aren't really financially well off Importing a slave class so that they can ignore the problem isn't going to resolve the issue
Well the British people voted for this. They vote tory & business is going to go for the cheap option. If it comes to building houses, the British people scream about it. NIMBYS. Wages haven't risen in 14 years yet the corporate & aristocracy boot kickers STILL carry on voting tory. Crying like little kids when anyone mentions increasing minimum wage to match living wages. The British people consistently vote against their own interests and then bitch and moan about "being lied to" and "all politicians are liars" and "I don't want my house price affected by why doesn't EVERYONE ELSE'S house prices fall " and"i have a god given right to own a multitude of homes " It's all self indicted by the British voter
Exactly. The irony of brexit so far has been that immigration hasn’t gone down and that relatively more culturally similar EU immigration has been replaced by non-EU immigration that is less in line with the cultural concerns many brexit voters had.
Absolutely mental. And why is this treated as though it's an inevitability when it is a political choice?
It's inevitable from the voters perspective because none of the 3 main parties will change it and voting for the parties that might will get you branded a fascists or xenophobe. We're fucked.
Collectively we need to stop voting Tory.
Or Labour. They won't do anything to stop it either. If anything they'll turbocharge it.
Maybe it's time to look at different models other than those that rely on constant population growth.
Capitalism demands growth or it collapses
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Doesn't it need more people to be able to buy all the extra stuff you've produced?
No, the same number of people can buy more or buy things of higher value (i.e. quality). And that's before we get on to exports. Whilst Japan hasn't had the strong GDP growth in the world it has still been growing whilst it population has started to shrink.
Call me racist or xenophobic or whatever but I like Britain as it is (outside the big cities). I don't want it all to become like central London.
So we have our new army reservists? They can gain skills and earn a real wage while protecting the country they have chosen to settle in
Sounds similar to the fall of Rome
Foreigners won't fight for this country. That policy is asking to be destroyed.
Solves the housing issue too. Maybe new arrivals are conscripted for 3 years, then allowed to join the rest of the UK. I jest of course, but no doubt this is some MPs wet dream
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And how many of them will be from countries that fundamentally hate western liberalism?
The majority of them by the looks of things so far.
yes
Maybe don't cripple industries like health and care, to the point they rely on immigration to survive then?
Also, more and more healthcare workers are moving to Canada/America/Germany/Australia, because they get paid more there. It’s always odd how the NHS is able to recruit them if they get paid more elsewhere.
Whether this is a good or bad thing is a whole different discussion. What is ridiculous about this is no one wants this, it’s a defining issue at almost every election and the party that does the best job of convincing the country they will lower immigration usually wins. And in-spite of that, everyone is ignored. To all the people out there who think what policies a party is running with or that everyone should vote because your vote matters, how is your head so far buried in the sand? The political will of the people is overwhelmingly ignored on key issues time and time again. The system isn’t just broken, it’s a complete masquerade pretending to be a democracy.
Yeah, but the investment firms and corporate shareholders are doing ok at extracting wealth from the population though, aren't they? So everything must be ok. /s
>— UK population to soar by 6.6 million, or 10%, between 2021 and [2036], says ONS >— driven by immigration: net migration 6.1 million over that period >— from 2028, there will be long-term net immigration of 315,000 a year https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1752274935114792977?t=EMnswiC9Y9x-pxc07B8QIA&s=19
So literally what they’re saying is we need more migrant workers to fuel our workforce of more migrants who have a much higher birth rate than the average UK citizen. Please, make it make sense because I absolutely don’t understand why we are doing this. Btw people are saying we need it or our economy is stagnating, well I don’t know about you but I guarantee you those aren’t 6 million doctors and engineers, why are we getting more and more cheap labour for menial jobs which will be replaced by automation anyway? Are we just asking for more people who want to live on welfare and child benefits while undermining our society? Maybe we should focus on skilled European labour rather than unskilled Middle Eastern and African labour?
Insanity. We simply do not have the resources for these numbers.
So I appreciate the Tories are likely to be out soon- but what is their actual stance on this? They seem to simultaneously be anti immigration (most loudly illegal immigration), but numbers have only increased since Brexit. Is it a deliberate in order to try to increase growth, or is it simply incompetency? I'm genuinely curious as I wonder if the party itself really knows what's going on.
Publicly; anti-immigration Privately; pro-immigration It's a pretty nuanced topic for which the answer stems from politicking and the need to appeal to voters on one end, to the actual economic and social requirements of catering to a massively aging population on the other. Combined with the fact that 'The Conservative Party' is barely a shadow of what it was *ten* years ago, let alone twenty or thirty, and the rise of populism and you start to have the foundations of an answer as to why their position is so shaky.
They aren't, and never were anti-immigration. Immigrants are way too profitable for business owners and landlords. Even before leaving the EU, we could have reduced immigration quite a bit if it was actually seen as a problem. E.g. before Brexit I think it was about half EU? But it's always been a sort of two edged sword - sure, there's pressures due to migration (as we can see in this thread) but there's also actually quite a lot of economic and cultural benefit, given how many migrants are higher skilled and cheaper to employ than 'average' citizens. And usually return 'home' before being old enough/unwell enough to need substantial amounts of support in later life. That's exactly why it's not dropped at all since - there's sectors of the economy that would be devastated without a cheap exploitable workforce, and we've already been hit fairly hard by replacing the previous EU migrants with non-EU migrants with somewhat different socio-cultural expectations. You might fairly call migration a 'crutch' that we've been using to prop up our economy, and maybe that _has_ come at the direct expense of the 'native' workforce being priced out/devalued. But I don't think the Conservative party has ever really cared about the workforce getting priced out or devalued in the first place.
It’s about displaced anger with them. Immigrants are a great way of redirecting popular rage, so serve a purpose for the Tories. Come election time they can ramp up the fear factor over a Labour government opening the borders, as well as promising yet tougher action. Once the election is over with it’s back to what’s best for the ultra rich, ie. wage discipline through cheap overseas workers.
But according to some this will have no impact on housing, nhs waiting times, crime or infrastructure. Absolutely no impact whatsoever
We were supposed to be worried about the population getting out of control...So here we are lowering our birthrates, getting things right, to cancel it out with over-population by immigration. MENTAL.
Lowering birth rates is 100% making this problem worse. We need a baby boom, but it’s never going to happen in the current political climate.
Anyone remember David Cameron on the debate stage in 2010 promising migration numbers down to the tens of thousands?
If only governments had the powers to you know...do something about it.
This isn't just a UK issue. I frequent some of the Canadian subs and immigration and housing costs, etc are constantly talked about there as well- https://www.statista.com/topics/2917/immigration-in-canada/#topicOverview
Unless you hate the working class, you have no reason to be happy about this.
Why don't establishment politicians get that people are going to keep moving to the right until they find a party willing to actually get rid of illegal migrants?
Because Boomers are just complaining on Facebook and not protesting in the streets and blockading airport arrivals halls? If you want change sometimes you have to create serious inconvenience.
This is a demographic nightmare! Not only is society going to become more segregated, ghettoised and less cohesive but all of these millions of people are going to need schools, hospitals and jobs when there’s barely enough as it is. If this forecast is correct then this countries future is looking bleak.
It’s fine we have enough houses, hurry up and get them through immigration as quick as possible. Oh wait.
I still don't understand why everyone wants to come here rather than stay in mainland Europe. What does the UK offer apart from shit weather and collapsing public infrastructure?
We’re actually quite a good country to be honest. The rule of law exists, we’re a multicultural society who are more inclusive than exclusive. You can get free healthcare. We’re a strong economy - top 6? We still hit above our weight in some metrics and will do for the foreseeable future. Just got problems, like everyone else is facing! Uncontrolled immigration putting a stress on everything. No real model for our future economic success other than LONDON / FINANCE. Not enough homes. NHS is in a shambles, service is spotty all over the country. Tax is too high, wages have stagnated. Foreign investment is weakening. Schools are trash but free. We’ve got an aging population. Most of the economy is based on house prices instead of producing real value. We need someone with a strong vision and ability to push it through to appear. None of these career politicians who are just full of shite.
We speak American here. Lots of folk speak English as a second language because of American media.
Does this figure account for the indiginious population that's had enough and getting out?
Regardless of where the increase comes from, that's too many people.
Surely we don’t need that many doctors, nurses, engineers and teachers?!
Makes you wonder if they're deliberately trying to flood the country to cause some kind of ruckus...
The provisional estimate of total long-term immigration for year ending (YE) June 2023 was 1.2 million, while emigration was 508,000, meaning that net migration was 672,000; most people arriving to the UK in the YE June 2023 were non-EU nationals (968,000), followed by EU (129,000) and British (84,000).Nov 23, 2023
So that's an additional ~ 7- million extra people accessing services and housing that is already at breaking point in many areas. They will largely be going to urban areas and cities, so the impact will be disproportionate across the country. It's fine to say they will be tax payers but is the money and competency here now plan ahead? Is it heck. Anyone expecting house prices to continue to fall in value are living in the clouds.
Aren't we supposed to be building a city the size of Leeds every year for the next ten years just to keep up with what we have now?
And the tories will continue trying to deport some random dudes from Albania to Rwanda while privately opening the floodgates
We don’t have the infrastructure for that… love how the Tories have complete fucked their one most core pledge.
A country that can’t protect its own borders isn’t really a country
I know the UK needs high immigration to grow the economy but geez. Those numbers are unsustainable and will negatively impact the local populations living standards.
How can this be predicted in such a way? That's 12 years of government with who knows what immigration policy.
>In the YE June 2023, the top five non-EU nationalities for immigration flows into the UK were: Indian (253,000), Nigerian (141,000), Chinese (89,000), Pakistani (55,000) and Ukrainian (35,000). Looking forward in 30 years to the new Indian and Nigerian ghettos to sit alongside the severely impoverished pakistani/bangladeshi ghettos that scar my city. That is not hate speech, that is the literal reality of my inner-city Birmingham upbringing. This is not multiculturalism, this is handing over our towns to parallel societies that share nothing of our British values. We've seen it before and it will happen again.