Calais And Immigration

hopefully who ever makes that decision might apply some common sense and influence a bit of tweaking, great idea but times have changed,

 

I don't think the main issue is integration, it is numeric. The UK as a whole has a population density of 700 people per square mile. England has 1010. Our country is beyond full. Whether migrants are lazy or industrious, takers or contributors, Britain cannot accommodate an endless stream of migrants. We have no economic need for mass migration and no legal or moral duty to accept it. We are running out of land to grow food and bury the dead, we have a perennial water shortage in the south east of England, our productivity per capita has fallen substantially since the floodgates were opened to cheap migrant labour in 2004 and we have the severest housing shortage in the last 100 years caused entirely by politically orchestrated mass immigration. We have net inward migration running at 250,000 people per year. That excludes unprocessed asylum seekers who are technically not immigrants, students and illegals. How much higher the real figure is, no one knows. 250,000 is the population of Southampton. That means every 365 days we have to build an entire city the size of Southampton just to accommodate new arrivals, without accounting for subsequent births and without even beginning to house our own population. That is why we have a housing shortage, a land shortage and falling productivity.
Immigration is the scandal of our age. It is not necessary on either humanitarian or economic grounds, in fact it is detrimental in both cases and it is not an inevitable consequence of living in a grounded world. It is a disaster created by a combination of cynical political calculation and incompetence. And it is reversible.

 

There will, I fear, be no tweaking of the Schengen Agreement. There EU doesn't work like that. You will do as you are told.

 

bollox in 5years time we will running the show. :smile:

 

I agree with most of this, but I don't think it's that simple.
For a start, I'm not at all sure how reversible it is. What you are going to do - an Enoch Powell?
Secondly, the UK has an ageing population, so you have increasing amounts of people who are not productive, and a smaller base of workers to provide taxes to pay pensions and the like. That's a problem you can cure with immigration although admittedly, it brings its own problems of integration, changing of cultural identity etc.

The housing shortage is also influenced by the amount of divorces and one-parent families. If the couple gets divorced, then suddenly you need two homes instead of one - that has an effect on the housing market.

What you are looking at is not specific to the UK. It's happening in many places - certainly most of Europe, and there is huge latin-American immigration into the US (even if they do have the room for it).
It is surely a consequence of globalisation. The world is becoming homogenised. Communications and transport systems are cheaper and more efficient and that has brought migrants as well, of course, as British emigrants. People no longer accept that just because they were born in a place, they are going to live their lives there - not when they could have a better one elsewhere.

 

Immigration numbers are not an issue imho, provided we allow the appropriate new housing to be built AND the infrastructure to support it.

One of the issues is the short term migrants, i.e. Eastern European etc, come to work and go where the money is. So they stay, earn, go home with a few quid and set up. No thats not the problem. The far eastern ones, India, Pakistan, Arab countries, come and stay, bring large families and dont necessarily have the skills (i.e. cheap low paid labour) that is filled by the other migrants. So they add pressure to a creaking society, a creaking benefit system, a creaking travel infrastructure, creaking NHS and of course collapsing education system.

Obviously an uneducated, layman's opinion but I like to think a considered and balanced one.

 

The answer to providing for an ageing population is to retire later. The population is ageing because we are living longer. Our retirement age and pension provision were calculated in an age when the average person was expected to be dead within ten years of retiring. Now people can expect to live for 30 years and by the time I retire it will be 40 years. The is no possible way to provide for this new reality by sticking slavishly to an outdated socio-economic model. Importing a surplus population (who will themselves grow old) without reforming that model simple makes the problem exponentially worse. And if our economic model is reformed, continuing with mass immigration increases the population and depletes our land resources to no material advantage. Mass immigration has not been laid on to help us pay for profligate social welfare policies - because it can't. That is a fraudulent claim made by politicians trying to put a positive spin on a mess of their own making.
And it is not true that eastern Europeans coming here to earn a few quid and going home again is not a problem. It is a very serious problem because the fact that they can take their earnings out of the country has devalued our labour market to the point where some sectors can no longer support native workers. British workers cannot compete because they cannot remove their earnings to a country where those earnings will expand five fold in value. A Polish tradesman earning £10 an hour is actually earning £50 an hour because he can skip the country with his cash. I don't blame the migrants. I'd do the same if I could. If I could go to some other country and earn five times my present income for doing the same job while still undercutting the local workers but 50% and take my earnings out of the country I wouldn't be sitting here. I'd be over there and I'd be telling all my friends. I may even start a recruitment agency in this country so I could flood that foreign job market with my compatriots. I'd share a house with 6 other people, I'd work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and I'd get as much of my earnings as possible, as often as possible, out of the country, preferably in cash. I'd do that for twenty years and then I'd come home and by a Scottish Island (mind you, they'll soon be cheap enough to buy from here ).
Except I can't do that because no country on Earth would be crazy enough to let me. That is precisely why they have strict immigration controls. A flood of cheap labour is not filling a hole in our labour market, it is hollowing it out. Our economy is being ransacked. The only people who benefit from this crazy situation are the migrants themselves who are effectively working as non-doms and their employers who get rich off cheap labour. Call that globalisation if you like, its really corporatisation. And people who pay the heaviest price for it are those who can least afford to: in our case the British working poor.

 

You do know the difference between Asylum Seekers and Illegal Immigrants, don't you?

 

Well you're right. But try getting employers to employ you when you're over 45.
I've lost count of all my erstwhile colleagues who are now independent consultants, because when the multinational moves you out, you can't get a job anywhere, despite your qualifications and experience.
That's the big joke. These days you don't have a job for life. You're lucky if you have a job until you're 50.

Globalisation is corporatism. You are correct. The companies make ever increasing profits and the people who benefit are the rich with large share portfolios, the very senior management and the bankers. This is why we have a society which is either becoming increasingly poor in real terms, or increasingly rich - for a small segment of it.

Globalisation favours cheap goods and consequently cheap labour. It's not only indigenous workers being priced out of a job by migrants, but effectively by all the workers in cheaper countries making all the goods you buy. But have you given up buying Chinese goods as a point of principle? It's barely possible, even if you wanted to. I'm sure this Mac was made in China.

 

An Illegal Immigrant becomes an Asylum Seeker when they get caught ?

 

Taking British jobs because British are lazy, unwilling to work long hours and want everything for nothing. In comparison. Also we adhere to silly things like H&S, working time practices etc.

Oh and of course because your average institutionalised lazy b'std British fella has such a level of 'income' from the state he cant 'afford' to work. Which is why those who migrate and bring hoards of family are a bigger problem.

Personally, I think you let all in or none. Its too late turn back the clock and have a skills based system ala Australia.

 

You can take off the question mark and add a full stop to that sentence. Because, like it or not, that is exactly what happens.

 

Telling a British worker he is lazy and greedy because he cannot afford to live on a wage scale imported from eastern Europe is an insult. His Polish/Estonian/Lithuanian etc counterpart isn't working for £10/hr, in real terms he's working for £50/hr. The Brit can't achieve that, he's stuck with £10. What's he supposed to do, put his children into care and hand his house back to the mortgage company? Is it his fault he has to have trade qualifications to enter a construction site (for example) but his foreign "competitors" do not? Is it his fault if he could not apply for a job vacancy because it was never edvertised in his own country? Is it his fault if his application is discarded because the employer has a contract with an overseas employment agency?
And while it is true there is a small army of idlers who have been abandoned to institutionalised aspirational and material poverty by the welfare state, why should a willing British worker be condemned to join them to accommodate the short-term thinking of career politicians who cannot see beyond the next electoral cycle to reform a system that is broken?

 

I agree with what you are saying Gimlet, living wage, tradesmen etc. Bit how does a person from outside UK walk in and get a job stacking shelves where a local teen can't?! ( I count my son in that, the lazy arse!! Lol )

Also How does the Pole live in the UK then? London costs are no less for him than another of similar age etc. Simple fact is: get a Polish builder in and he does it in half the time at half the cost. Possibly half the quality, no idea. Having seen plenty of building work around my house over the years I cant see how it could be half the quality tho

 

They live the same way I've lived when I've been working away and living in digs: as cheaply as possible to make the most of the good times. The problem is British workers aren't temporarily domiciled, they can't go home because they are home, with mortgages to pay and children to feed. As I said before, should they give up the kids for adoption, sell the house and go and live in digs themselves?

 

My point being you are wrong on a number of issues.
Asylum seekers need to apply at the point of entry in order to qualify under the rules applied in the UK, illegal immigrants cannot apply for asylum. If an asylum seeker is refused they are then detained and deported to their country of origin. This all despite the protestations of the Mail and Express.