To think that, in general, some of the hardest working people in the world are migrants?

The cleaning company we use has had Eastern European employees for years. They’re great, work really hard and do a great job. Most of them are just here to earn money though, they intend to go home. The girl that comes to me at the moment has left her kids with her mum and DH, she’s here to earn money to build a house - she’s shown me pictures, it looks lovely. She’s hoping another 9mths or so and she can pack up and go home. Good luck to her!

I mean in some cases I'm sure they are, but not all. My DGP had carers for the last few years of their life, and DGM later moved into a care home. They had wonderful carers, some UK born, some not, but many of them were being squeezed out of the job by the appalling rates of pay. I'm talking about carers being expected to do 4 15-minute visits in the space of an hour, with no allowance for travel time, and having to supply their own cars. Similarly, in the care home, they just stopped paying extra for night shifts and instead people were told they had to cover one a week.

The council signed off on a visa scheme to bring over immigrant care workers rather than pay the existing carers a living wage, or even looked at the workability of what they were asking from the carers. There were significant problems with the new workers (who incidentally were all male), and we had to intervene a number of times after my DGM was very upset, and we actually raised official complaints about neglect from the overnight staff in the end.

Personally I would much rather the council had paid an extra couple of quid an hour to the wonderful carers who actually did the job properly and cared about their clients, rather than bringing over people who would work for poverty wages. In any other context it would have been seen as a form of union busting.

Back in around 2005, I worked for this textbook upper-middle-class bloke in his early 60s — very Home Counties type. His company was full of immigrants (myself included, though admittedly of the paler variety). One night after work, we all went to the pub and he got absolutely shitfaced then proudly announced he liked hiring foreigners because “they work harder and never complain.”
Charming, really.

My dh is a manager (newish to his company) and his workplace is majority migrants, here legally but on short term visas (lots of Sudanese). These people are doing lower skilled (tech/ engineering) jobs but through chatting to them he’s found out that they are highly educated and most have masters degrees. He says they are much harder working than the local people that work there.

Well, yes, of course. Legal migrants are typically young and able bodied with enough resilience to build a new life in a new country without the safety net of family around them. By necessity, you are ruling out a lot of people who cannot work hard. But by the same token, they are no more or less hardworking than natives with those same advantages and qualities who stay put for whatever reason.

How racist.

Quite often they are single young men who are able to share a house with others and so can take the low paid jobs. The reason that Brits don't want these jobs is because they are too low paid and if someone has a family to support they are better off claiming benefits than working for a pittance. Also farmers often want fruit pickers to live on site which Brits can't do if they are in social housing.

I think the criticism of remittances is misplaced - mostly immigrants are trying to make their money go as far as possible as they know how much it is worth at home - so they pay tax, VAT, and the normal costs here and send what might be savings home to family or work extra to have extra. It’s not a loss to this country as it wouldn’t have necessarily have been spent ( would have been saved or not earned).

I work with quite a lot of migrants.

I wouldn't say they are intrinsically harder working.

However, they do perceive the "reward" of work in the UK to be "worth" more effort. If you've grown up in a poor country lacking things like basic sanitation, doctors & good schools, your motivation and frame of reference are so different. You might think you've absolutely made it if your family of 5 are living in a clean, spacious two bedroom council apartment, with good schools nearby and nhs healthcare on tap. The £30 you remit home each month might be buying ALL your elderly parents food. It's worth more to you.

I never employ British tradesmen if I need anything done and I would never have a British cleaner, so yes anecdotally for me they are harder workers who produce better results.

I completely agree with you

I think that this is how we get polarised - this constant comparison of migrants to locals - immigrants = hardworking and worthy and non immigrants = lazy and ungrateful. My father was an immigrant who did the jobs many English wouldn’t do but some still did and these were difficult manual labour jobs. I ( born here and English) have worked with people who are working harder than necessary because they don’t understand systems put in place to help them and won’t change their behaviour, people who are making work harder for themselves than necessary and a lot of people who just don’t recognise that some roles require different degrees of effort and are paid to compensate that ( not all esp teaching and caring roles).

Yes there is a faint cringe about this thread. It reminds me of David Brent ‘if I had it my way, the place would be full of them…’

Yes there are some very hard working migrants at the hospital where I work, there are also hard working people from this country

There are people in this country who don’t work hard or contribute to society from both migrant and non migrant groups and expect to be handed everything in a plate

I support migration, the UK would topple over without migration.

But honestly OP, this just feels like virtue signalling. Yes, huge numbers of migrants work immensely hard, in the UK and other countries, and some migrants don’t. Citizens of all countries work hard, and some don’t. Is positive stereotyping really much better than negative stereotyping?

Here’s one way this argument could go: migrants work really hard so of course they don’t need access to out of work benefits. Is that ok?

The majority of migrants who work bloody hard do so because they have to. Whether they’re in the UK reliant on keeping a visa, sending money home, or having been trafficked. They’re not some different breed which works harder than a UK citizen. We take advantage of this. There is a huge grey area of people who are here legally, but in ways which closely resemble illegal trafficking.

Yes, you can get a visa without paying thousands.
Do your research first. I'm not doing it for you.

But really, my point is that migrants and just people, some with a strong work ethos, others not.

Yes, and it’s frustrating when some British born people don’t respect that hard work.

I see it a lot at work, people not putting their lunch remains in the bin or leaving rubbish around or leaving facilities in a horrible state.

Plus the patronising of software engineers because of their accent.

Dame Stephanie Shirley, who died recently, came here on the Kindertransport, and said she always felt she had to make her life one that was worth saving. I expect there are lots of immigrants who think like that, if they arrived as refugees.

DH works in manufacturing and has said that the hardest workers he has worked with are migrants, he works with people here that are from all over the globe (Poland/ Hong Kong/ Latvia/ Romania/ Ghana to mention the few colleagues I remember him talking about.)

Presumably (& you’d hope!) their wages are taxed before any remittances are sent and they will buy things here so will pay VAT on purchases where applicable. If they are healthy & have families overseas they are not likely to be taking up school places / incurring healthcare costs either.

You mean the sitting on their arse all day independently wealthy children of billionaires migrants?

Because you can’t get a visa to come here without paying a lot of cash and having a job offer at a decent wage, and then keeping it to get the visa renewed.

No they don’t. One or two maybe.

My husband and I came to this country on the highly skilled migrant programme which was a points based one and ended in around 2009. We had to keep our household income at a high level and not be unemployed for 5 years and I really really did not what to ever have to move back to my homeland. 15 years later and I still always err on the side of over working versus just in case. It becomes a built in mentality. I’m also forever grateful of the fact that I get to live in this relatively highly safe country!

DS isn't a migrant and he works long, unsociable shifts in hospitality. I used to work two jobs to pay my rent. Some migrants sit on their bums all day claiming benefits, so do some Brits. YABU.

All sorts of people move countries.

Some are happy to work their arses off, others are happy to sit on them all day long.