To think immigration will always mean that we have high levels of inequality?

University students make up nearly half of the Net figure - yet Uni fees for people coming from abroad are extremely expensive! I am covered by the Brexit withdrawal agreement but we didn't encourage dd to go back to UK for Uni, nor for her planned Masters because of the huge tuition cost. She pays 850 euros a year vs £9k. How are these people fostering inequality? A lot will go home after their studies after paying rent and spending money for several years. Some will stay and presumably will have to jump through some hoops to do so.

This is bonkers op. You've been shown research - long running and recent research - that concludes that immigration does not affect inequality yet here you are determined that it is all wrong and you are right.

I know this is anecdotal but I teach and children moving to our area/school from other countries are generally hard-working, smart and driven. Their parents uprooted their entire lives to move here and are determined to make a success of it. They value education and are more respectful of teachers than many white British families I encounter. After 3-4 years in school the children are indistinguishable from children who were born here. I hate this rhetoric, based on nothing of substance.

What makes you think many don’t speak English? Speaking English as their second language is one of the main reasons people choose to come here. A study by Oxford university reported that 90% of migrants spoke English well and both migrants and the indigenous population believed it was important to integration. Stop reading the daily Mail for god sake.
Rising inequality is caused by government policy and that’s it.
migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/english-language-use-and-proficiency-of-migrants-in-the-uk/

Most are from countries that are poorer than the UK

ime, most immigrants come from relatively wealthy and even very wealthy families in their home country. Look at people like Badenbach, Sunak, Braverman. They came from a lot of money & high status families. All the foreign students that come to UK: their families can afford the very high tuition fees to come here; the student families are much better off than UK average family. So regardless of whether the country itself is poorer, most the countries will be poorer if UK is 28th in world for gdp per capita, the actual family origins are probably much wealthier than Uk average.

Don't we all know people who were qualified teachers in Poland or engineers medical doctors in Egypt and end up working as care workers & technicians in UK ?

Even refugees often come to UK by airplane, from well heeled families.

At a factual level you're right though, as other have said, it's a mixed picture.

The figures show that inequality among immigrants is greater than inequality among people born here. Therefore immigration will tend to raise inequality.

Is "equality" a thing we all believe in now?

I feel it's a sort of made up fictional realm, yet people talk as if it is a type of achievable reality.

First and foremost we would have to agree on what we think are objectively "better" ways to live, and while there may very well be a majority who believe the accumulation of wealth and power would be up at the top, I'm sure there would be others who would disagree.

I suppose we could classify equality as having an equal possibility of achieving our own person goals in life, but seeing as human society has evolved to a stage where we would not physically survive but for the labor of others, are we to believe that those doing the hardest and most physically demanding and dangerous jobs really want to be doing so forever more?

Perhaps it is damaging to our own mental wellbeing to contemplate the struggles some humans go through to survive and so we talk about "equality" in an abstract fashion, knowing fully well that it's not realistic.

Could we install equality in a small isolated community? Possibly, if children were raised together and jobs were rotated throughout life. Would it survive the years when those who lack the intelligence to lead and plan were on rota to be in charge? Possibly not.

My point is that migrants are disproportionately more likely to be taking this type of work and therefore more likely to appear in statistics around poverty, deprivation and therefore also driving inequality statistics.

You keep saying this, but it's not true. The report you cited says
"Taken as a whole, the occupational distribution of migrant workers did not differ much from that of UK-born workers in 2022". There is nothing disproportionate about it. You cannot ignore highly paid, highly-skilled migrants working in the same proportions as UK-born workers, when you are trying to make the point that they are driving poverty statistics!

Again, immigration levels are forecast to go down so if that is the case, why the worry?

OP, is it that you don’t want more lowly paid immigrant care workers over here? I mean, their numbers have gone down now too, because they cannot bring their families anymore due to a change in immigration rules. Student visas numbers have also declined because they can’t bring families either, so much so that UK universities are in financial trouble because of it.

As far as care workers are concerned, they have to work for 5 years on their visa apart from their families to get citizenship and bring family over. Care workers visas are some of the few that don’t have stringent income requirements but wow, apart from your family for 5 years? There are fewer numbers willing to do that. Why do you think the NHS has so many vacancies?

Apart from care worker visas, on spousal visas, the income requirement to bring a partner from another country have increased a lot. You have to make £29000 a year to bring a partner from another country over, and the financial need rises by £3,800 for the first child and by £2,400 for each additional kid. You have to have some means. And the visa fees for any immigration process apart from war refugees are also high.

There are refugees that don’t have a lot economically of course, but most immigration isn’t like that.

I see you posted while I was writing, OP.

The argument you made is that an influx of immigrants in low paying jobs is leading to a high level of inequality. What I'm refuting is that immigration is all people taking low-paying jobs. What you are trying to avoid discussing is that there are immigrants in high-paying jobs as well. Therefore the problem is not immigrants.

I think the full phrase ‘net immigration’ is very important, OP. In my experience most who don’t use it don’t understand the difference. As you do, I apologise.

Thank you for the link to the Migration Laboratory report. My connection is currently wonky, so I have only been able to scan the first part briefly. My reading thus far agrees with @KrisAkabusi . Could you please explain why you interpret the report differently?

I look forward to reading the whole report soon.

The standard entry route to the UK is the Skilled worker visa which now requires a firm job offer with a minimum income of £38,700. The median UK income as of April was about £37, 400. So present policies require relatively high earnings for entry. The jobs with those earnings usually require decent English.

Many children also learn English at school, particularly in Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East. Obviously learning in a new-ish language is challenging, but there are lots of resources and many, many pupils all over the world do this successfully. The younger, the better, of course. Parental attitudes are very important.

The new regulations will probably change the faces of immigration to some extent.

Most British do not start out with capital at their disposal. ( Whether you have access to The Bank of Mum and Dad is becoming a great divide amongst YP. ) I can’t see that immigrants mostly failing to bring financial capital is of great significance.

Immigrants are more likely to be in low skilled sectors than UK 'natives'. Your quote verifies this. They are therefore more likely to be overrepresented on data regarding disadvantage and deprivation. The fact that some migrants are highly paid doesn't take away from this fact.

Of course it does! Because you are talking about inequality and if immigrants are also overrepresented on the highly paid side it balances out.

Interesting thread. You have been provided with a lot of facts OP - perhaps take the time to digest them,

I don't believe your statement :- It is completely logical that this will have a massive impact on inequality.

It might be logical in your mind, but the facts seem to suggest otherwise.

OP, Please look at Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
According to the 2021 Census in England and Wales, 41% of those born abroad had a university degree, compared to 25% of people born in the UK. Migrants were more ethnically diverse, healthier, and more likely to live in privately rented accommodation.

Forecasts are that immigration levels will actually go down in future.
See here: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/

So I’m not sure where your linkage of inequality and immigration comes from, nor the fears about another million people coming next year. Whilst there are some immigrants whose English isn’t great, a lot are students who have to pass an English and people here on work visas (as mentioned upthread).

I cannot understand the obsession with eliminating inequality. So what if some people have multiple yachts while I have a 6 year old Yaris?

The focus should be on ensuring all essential needs are met which they are with free education, health and even money if you need it.

I don't think you can make the underemployed claim. From your own link:

In 2022, the employment rate of working-age migrant men (82%) was higher than that of the UK-born (78%) (Figure 2). Most region-of-origin groups had higher employment rates than UK-born men. Among women, the overall employment rate for working-age migrants was 71%, slightly lower than for the UK-born (73%). However, EU-born women had unusually high employment rates (80%).

Or the non-well-payed sector:
Taken as a whole, the occupational distribution of migrant workers did not differ much from that of UK-born workers in 2022, although migrants were slightly more likely to be working in jobs classed as both high- and low-skill than the UK-born.

Your claim "statistically much more likely to be under employed and in sectors that don't pay well." doesn't stack up.

This links to the wider question of why we have to import labour to do jobs at the lower end of the pay scale (e.g health & social care) when we have a large amount of the indigenous population apparently disinclined or unable to work. We're paying 'our own' to not work, and need to import labour to fill gaps.
Personally I think this is to do with welfare dependency, to a degree.

I believe the data shows that migrants claim far fewer benefits than natives, happy to find a reputable source for that if anyone's interested.

Inequality, overall is a fundamental part of capitalism. You can only address it with high levels of progressive taxation then used to improve education / housing / access to good work, which us what helps social mobility.

I think the entrenched class system, and a 'political class', along with ridiculous amounts of wealth and land being hoarded by a minority means that inequality will inevitably get worse. Particularly with working and middle class being pitted against each other and amongst themselves by those hoarding the wealth and resources to take the focus off the very real issues facing them.