General Election: Immigration

[ewx]

I’m in favour of it. I’ve got immigrant colleagues who are competent and personable, and have had for most of my entire career. I think that reducing skilled immigration would mean that the UK IT sector got less done (and that this is almost certainly true more generally, but I’ll restrict myself to my most direct experience).

More personally, my grandmother was an immigrant (of European descent, via southern Africa) which of course predisposes me to view the idea positively. (I suppose you could view Europeans emmigrating from there to Europe as “going back where they came from” although gvien her maiden name I imagine that her ancestors were Dutch colonists rather than British ones. So maybe that doesn’t count.)

I also read that Eastern European immigrants (specifically, those from the countries that joined in the EU in 2004) pay 37% more in taxes than they get back in public goods and services (the corresponding figure for natives is 20% less in taxes than they receive). These immigrants aren’t costing the rest of us anything - in fact, it seems, they are subsidizing us.

So it’s a unfortunate, for purely economic reasons, that the three major parties are all talking in terms of controlling, restricting and reducing it.

There’s a detail that they like to gloss over, too. Each time they talk about immigration they generally exclude EU immigration and move quickly on to non-EU immigration. That’s consistent with our treaty obligations, of course, but it seems to me that the upshot is that anyone paying attention is not likely to be satisfied either way: if they are opposed to immigration then they’re going to be unhappy that nobody is proposing to restrict a major source of it, and if they’re in favour then they’re not going to be wild about the restrictions that are proposed.

There are parties which don’t have this problem, but they’re not going to form a government any time soon.

As for Gillian Duffy: she’s repeating what she’s read in the papers (not very coherently, unless perhaps you think there’s some mystery about the geographical origins of Eastern Europeans). She’s the symptom, not the problem. And I’m perfectly happy with politicians being rude about voters in private, even if getting caught doing so is politically very unwise.

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[k425.livejournal.com]

Those immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs and sponging off the benefits system...