We cannot continue taking on immigrants indefinitely

Where do Asylum seekers live? Not in houses? Houses that could be lived in by somebody else?

You say the pay is unattractive in the NHS and social care but the jobs are being done, just not by British workers, instead we have immigrants doing these jobs because British workers refuse to do them. There are still lots of vacancies in the NHS but, again not being filled by British people.

I think the issue of the NHS is simpler. The working conditions and pay rates created by the Conservatives made the jobs unattractive. They really did break it. These are things you can fix. The NHS is nominally full of good, secure jobs with good benefits attached. You need to look at contractors.

Social care is another matter. That looks unsolvable unless the pay rates went up and up. Nobody wants to pay for social care. I had two families next door to me in one house who had come from Sri Lanka to work in social care.

They brought their families with them which is course what I would have done in their shoes, children to educate and access to the UK school system. They were living in overcrowded conditions from the moment they arrived, the only way they could afford the house, and the British landlord was throughly exploitative by charging them a huge amount for the house.

The only person who did well out of this was the landlord, who, as soon as they asked for some repairs chucked them out.

I don't doubt they worked hard, but they lived in a way that most British people would not accept and for good reason. We have to stop this happening in the UK.

That's not the only problem - there simply aren't enough workers in this country paying tax to be able to pay for the most expensive demographic, the retired. Aside from the fact that they cost more than any other demographic in health and support services, the current generation of workers pay for their pensions.

Since the birth rate has been so low for so long, there's a massive population gap...and it's getting bigger, because the birth rate is still dropping (it's just over half what it was in the 1960s). The good news is that it'll even out in about 25 years.

The bad news is that, while those folk are still around, we either need immigrants to pay the tax for those people or we all need to be paying about £5-10k/year more tax each.

The real problem is that British people refuse to take jobs in the NHS, social care, hospitality etc. We need to understand why this is the case. Is it because they are better off on benefits and free multi generational council housing? If we solve this problem we can start moderating immigration. If we can't, we have no choice but to accept it.

There are very similar articles in the Observer and Independent. Labour are right to be worried. They cannot Ming vase this issue any longer. It is the rate of legal immigration which is the issue. All this focus on asylum seekers, which is a tiny number compared to our legal rates, was a bit of panto invented by the Conservatives with their Rwanda solution.

They are finished. But Labour don't have nearly as long.

That’s the argument that’s always used but show me the proof.

Also we don’t need 1 million new people coming in every year to do these jobs. 4 million extra in 5 years. That’s enough to do these jobs for years.

It’s a old line used over and over again to get a temporary boost to GDP without ever properly thinking through the strain or existing infrastructure, the impact of failing to incentivise our own people to do jobs (pay them better? More holiday? Better housing). With a wealth tax, a lot of this could be achieved but the government just imports cheap labour today, knowing tomorrow some other government is going to Pick up the tab.

If you care anything for this country, the numbers have to stop. And by that I mean our freshwater rivers, sewage which isn’t being processed, our biodiversity which has plummeted, our air pollution.

I would consider more people if the government would actually just run the country better and plan things like better public transport that is properly subsidised but it never happens.

In the meantime we just keep adding to the cesspit this country has become.

If you put too many rats in a box, they turn on each other and kill one another.

There are so many problems in this country. Sort them out first. Stop adding to the strain with extra people.

How long does it take you to get a GP appointment? With all these new people we should be getting one instantly but it’s proof the system of immigration doesn’t work. There’s still massive backlogs because the government has cut funding to hospitals and the nhs. Yet we have more people coming in.

It doesn’t add up. To take more people. Our productivity has stagnated for years. Extra people aren’t changing this. They only add to infrastructure loading.

The Home Office knows we need immigration for the jobs British people refuse to do. The NHS and social care industries would collapse without it.

I suppose we’ll have to see if Labour takes note.

Indeed! Well they can hardly ignore the opinion polls, which show that Reform has now overtaken both Labour and the Conservatives - and what is Reform's central message? Control immigration. This is one of the lead articles in The Sunday Times today: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/pm-rails-at-complacent-liberals-as-farage-pulls-the-strings-l5pwvrfvb

Nobody voted for this. For years, voters have wanted less immigration, and were promised it.

Brexit did give us control over our borders. Apart from people who claim asylum, who number well below 100k, we have complete control over who is allowed to work, study and settle here.

The conservatives under Boris Johnson, having promised a strict points system to only let in the ‘brightest and best’, instead proceeded to hand out visas to low paid workers for the asking, even allowing employers to pay less than the minimum wage. They no longer had to even pretend to try and recruit British workers.

As people have pointed out on this thread, this has really screwed with the labour market. To take one example, newly qualified nurses are struggling to find jobs because hospital trusts now have contracts with countries such as Nigeria to take so many nurses a year.

To add insult to injury, hundreds of the nurses had faked their qualifications, but are still at large working as nurses.

I suppose it’s some consolation that the latest polls suggest they have destroyed their own party, and no doubt betraying their voters over immigration had a lot to do with it.

After the cost of living, the second most important issue in deciding how people would vote in the general election was immigration.

I suppose we’ll have to see if Labour takes note.

No that's not a reasonable comparison.

What has happened is that the UK jobs market is now globally competitive and for British graduates that is huge competition. It's not good for young British graduates to be in that position.

In terms of well paid programmers from India or China. No doubt you may need them for a while. But you keep them on a visa for that purpose alone. And you build up your own graduate skills to the level they are no longer needed.

We are mostly parents on here. If you fancy your children competing as young professionals against India or China you will find their lives are going to be very hard. The UK may make a trade deal with India where many Indian professionals come to the UK as part of services, never mind graduate jobs. Do you fancy that kind of competition?

Other economies are much more purposive and careful about who is allowed in and why. It does not have to be "immigration is the only thing that supports the economy". For the Conservatives it was simpler and cheaper.

That’s a huge leap and you know it. What a lot of assumptions. Private wealth and entrepreneurs who’ve been here historically for long periods are not taking jobs, they’ve come here and created jobs and paid taxes because they like what we offered.

They’re leaving now because conditions have changed. Can’t say I blame them.

Well they’re all from reputable sources like the guardian so go ahead and stick your head in the sand. Just look at the links. It’s very obvious but you’ve chosen not to engage because you’ve got nothing to refute with, what I’ve written.

People are complaining about millionaires leaving the country and at the same time complaining that UK citizens are having to compete harder for jobs and that we should invest in UK workers. You have to make a decision. You either want highly paid foreigners working and living here and paying taxes, or you don't. Those rich millionaires everyone is so sad are now leaving may well be foreigners who competed for jobs with those poor UK born citizens.

It's not up to me to disprove everything. It's down to you to back your arguments. Until you show me that the rest is not disinformation and misrepresentation, I shall choose to not believe you.

Singapore is a city state with 6 million people and offers no lessons for the UK. It's also got a far denser population and is a city built on immigration! I mean all those people who don't want immigration, they must know a lot of people in UK who are prepared to work long hours for very little money in social care/agriculture and hospitality and tourism. And be very happy to pay far more taxes to invest more in the young in the UK/pay more to care for the elderly and build new social housing. I am not saying that we should get higher skilled workers by the way from abroad. It's just that if we get just low skilled workers, we can't expect them to contribute a lot in taxes and GDP, unless you want to take away all their pay in taxes and not pay them anything?! How do you think all these workers get migrant visas??? It's the sectors that pressure the Government to get more working visas. We're just in denial The public says we don't want higher taxes/we don't want immigrants. But businesses are saying we need low paid/productive workers. We need immigrants.

Millionaires leaving the U.K. at the fastest rate ever.

https://www.forthcapital.com/uk/articles/record-9-500-millionaires-expected-to-leave-the-uk-this-year

I can understand. The country is going downhill fast.

What is most frustrating is that Brexiteers were completely duped by Farage into voting for much more migration from places far away from the UK!

The response to ageing population and declining birth rate is always going to be immigration unless there is a massive surge in UK economic productivity. Nigel Farage knows it and so do most of those on the right of the spectrum. They are duplicitous and take advantage of economic ignorance to get political power. And have no answers to that conundrum of declining birth rate and people living longer. He knew that there would likely be an increase in Asian immigration in response to Brexit and used this to sell Brexit to Asian communities. It's frustrating that people voted for Brexit thinking it would reduce immigration when it did no such thing and also reduce investment and growth. The proof is there now in the data. What happened after Brexit? Higher immigration from Asia likely to lead to a larger population whereas before with European immigration, people are far more likely to go back and forth. Also because of uncertainty of Brexit. UK also had much lower investment post 2016 than any other European country which has implications for growth. Before 2016, UK's investment was actually on a par with other countries. . Not sure how Thames Water going bust is anything to do with immigrants! That post is a classic for let's blame immigrants for anything going.

If we encourage highly paid programmers from those countries all that will happen is we will fail to invest in our own young people. I listened yesterday to a phone in on LBC and a young man was saying how tough it is now to get a graduate job. There’s so much competition now, not least from people coming in from abroad. He said many of his friends who were really good at what they do, just couldn’t get jobs. You should listen to it. Between 2-3pm. It was a sad listen.

incidentally, China and Singapore have very strict immigration policies which are NOTHING like ours. Because they invest in and retain their young people.

I completely agree.

You’re absolutely right on that front. But the rest stands. Prove me wrong on the other points. Thames is an outlier but the fact remains that however Thames water has gone bust, there isn’t enough water left to go round, even as things currently stand.

TW applied to take millions of gallons from a river recently to boost their supply and the high court blocked it.

TW is another example of numerous badly planned government initiatives that has been extremely bad value for the tax payer,

Immigration will undoubtedly be found to be another initiative that barely pays its way, at all, quite probably.

You realise Thames water went bust due to asset stripping.

I wonder how much else in this post is misrepresentation.

Yes. This is it really. The Conservatives absolutely knew that would happen, they signed up to it.

I can see a lot of agitation in the Guardian of all places about Reform and migration and that Labour should think the unthinkable to make radical change on migration and employment.

The response of the Labour Party should be to totally reverse the majority of the migration policy of the last four years and to invest in the citizens we do have. I would also expect that they will also start aping a lot of more right wing policies from Europe and on DEI being dropped because of the cost to business.

If you want to get net tax contributers, UK can do so by recruiting skilled workers from Asia (there are plenty of them) rather than low skilled workers who do vital jobs in agriculture and social care. Nigel Farage is being very manipulative by pointing out that immigrants don't contribute a lot to GDP! He well knows that it's because they do low paid jobs in care and agriculture. If we encouraged highly paid programmers from China and India, things would be different.