Do you think the UK should halt immigration?

A quick question: Say you have an academically top performing selective school of 500 DC. Financially it is just 'getting by'.

Everyone wants to go to that school. So they increase the school roll to 700, via widening the selection criteria. It continues to do well enough as the marginally less able are supported and 'brought along' with the better performing 'original DC' as they still form a critical mass; so the school is still popular and is still massively over subscribed, so they go along adding a higher intake every year until eventually The Authorities say 'Sod it', let's allow 50000 in. OK, we don't have the resources, but in the interests of fairness and spreading those resources all around, we must do it. But now, the school includes many DC of very average ability even of very low intelligence, DC with severe behavioural difficulties, children with highly specialist SEN, but all receiving exactly the same now available education. Remember there are no resources to pay for specialist teachers for these DC, no smaller classes, no differentiation in curriculum.

Do you think that school will still be academically top performing?

Well, stretch that analogy to flood-gate opening immigration. There seems to an assumption that the whole school would go from being an original 'A' grade establishment to maybe a 'B' when it allows everyone in. Where's the evidence for that? (Look in 'Education' on MN...) No, it becomes a 'D' or 'E' establishment, a 'lowest common denominator/race to the bottom' school. That people want to get out of or not go to.

thistle <a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?q=round+of+applause+gif&hl=en&sa=X&biw=1192&bih=606&tbm=isch&tbnid=ZuQfXu9RCEifoM:&imgrefurl=www.gifbin.com/982109&docid=b-x9Js3uqxx1OM&imgurl=gifs.gifbin.com/1233495358_appl3456.gif&w=300&h=225&ei=7MPkT6PSKITc8AO138DGCg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=420&vpy=153&dur=1816&hovh=180&hovw=240&tx=137&ty=113&sig=111408983438209469052&page=1&tbnh=128&tbnw=176&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0,i:78" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">one of these

But worldwide control of border and immigration is doing nothing to stop strife and bloodshed.

The alternative is to go the other way, like China has: not only do they take horrific steps to limit their population such as forced abortions and forced sterilisation of women, but they also control the movement of their population extremely tightly. They have a system of household registration, whereby everyone is required to register their place of residence, and to apply for permission from the State to move. They have even adopted a 'Points Based System' similar to the one we use to manage migration into the UK, but theirs is used to manage migration internally. Only people who have sufficient education, skills and money are allowed to move into an urban area where the best jobs are based. So if you have been born into a peasant village, and only had a basic education, you will not be permitted to move to a city within your own country to improve your prospects.

Is this really a desirable model for us, and the rest of the world to follow?

It has been shown that the more developed a country becomes, the better prospects each child has, and the more that women have access to employment, the lower the birthrate becomes. In many European countries the population is only increasing because of immigration.

We are doing subsequent generations a great disservice by failing to tackle world inequality now. Tougher immigration controls are the equivalent of putting a sticking plaster on a haemorrhaging wound.

Interesting to hear that Milliband is saying he now realises the UK should have put 'some controls' in place to 'manage' the eastern European influx. I had no idea that that was even a possibility! We certainly weren't told that there was even a debate that might be had! Doing so might have prevented some of the issues that confront many people, especially those forced to compete with new, less well off immigrants for increasingly scarce resources.

Once again, I can see that managed immigration of required people can be a win/win for all concerned: the UK gets the personnel it needs, those people arrive with an income-stream ready to go (a job) thus the ability to afford housing and not rely on the state purse; this has the knock on effect of not sparking discontent amongst the existing population. And it also means numbers can be managed and limits imposed as needed.

As for 'fair distribution of the world's resources', and 'enough to go round', we get into tricky territory. People will as a result of human nature, only do enough to get their 'share' and it isn't long before some feel they are doing more than their fair share. Resentment builds, battles commence, resources get redistributed with the winners getting the bigger share. It's interesting how inter-tribal warfare wasn't an issue in the UK til late Iron Age times, the reason being no one had to compete for resources. The population was tiny, the average lifespan short. As people began to practice agriculture, more suitable, fertile and guard-able room was needed, populations grew, strife ensued.

Next point: 50% of the world's wealth may be in the hands of 2% of the population, but that doesn't equate to resources! You can't actually eat money.

As a country increases in wealth, the first thing it does is to champion the consumer model. Watch China, India and Brazil. Is it that they've learned nothing from watching us or is it human nature that causes us to acquire the moment we get security of health and wealth, clean water and education? No one has ever achieved these things and said 'Right, that's me with enough, now, who else can I bring up with me?'.

Finally, a sad but true thought: When BandAid ('the rich putting their hand in their pockets'?) went into the Horn of Africa in 1986, the population was about half of what it is now- when they've (we've) had to 'go in again'. Grinding poverty, desperate security, war and starvation haven't caused anyone to consider limiting their population numbers to match their resources.

I am not for one second suggesting those people should die, of course I'm not. I'm suggesting that a free-for-all no borders immigration system would lead to massive strife and, eventually, bloodshed.

That's the point. It is impossible to end immigration. Immigration and emigration has been a fact of human existence since the dawn of time, and the fact that it is now so easy goes hand in hand with the cheap foreign holidays we hop on a plane to, and the cheap TVs flow in from China that we have in our homes.

There is a real issue with the fact that the world's resources are not equally shared. That some have more than they will ever need, and some don't have enough to survive. This creates an impression that there is not enough to go round, so people are scared of having to share with those even less fortunate than themselves. What we ignore is the fact that half of the world's wealth is under the control of just 2% of the world's population. The poorest half of the world's population has to share a meagre 1% of the total wealth.

I know that the debate about land, water and food is harder to quantify, but access to financial wealth means access to education, healthcare and sanitation.

There is an awful lot of redistribution that could be done before our standard of living becomes unacceptable.

It is a sad indictment of our moral standpoint that we prefer to pursue futile policies, which we hope will safeguard our own resources but keep the poor poor, rather than ask the rich to put their hands in their pockets.

longfingernails
^We should be extremely liberal with immigration when it comes to skilled workers and high earners.
When it comes to unskilled workers, especially those who don't speak English, the door to Britain should be firmly shut in their face.^

Yes, that's right longnails, it's about time the "skilled and high earners" were shafted for their jobs and income just as the working classes and middle classes have been. That's equality after all! D'oh!

Better to end nearly ALL immigration...too late now though!

well, easy for Ed Miliband to say - a real simple piece of politics.

whilst in power and dealing with the reality of life in the EU and a staff shortage in the NHS, (which is where most immigration comes into play - non-eu staff filling spaces in the NHS and EU people who are part of our deal with europe)
Immigration was ok

now it is the Condems problem - not ok.

totally solution free account again!

Ahh good old Milliband. Jump on that bandwagon baby!

Given that immigration exploded under Labour and not in a controlled way, it's very hard to give their ideas any credibility. Especially when most of them are along the lines of yet more legislation and laws which would add more red tape. Tape which the current government is trying to unravel to stop businesses wasting time on needless form filling and getting back to their core business.

the truly destitute have no means to travel. the mere cost of emigration is enough to make it impossible for the majority of the worlds citizens.

bbc news today

Edgar- absolutely not. Say you were a destitute, completely uneducated, landless, near starving southern Sudanese with 8 children. There are tens of thousands of them. Wouldn't they 'rather be here' enjoying heavily subsidised state housing, free health and education? Who wouldn't?.... Except, as Josephine points out, if indeed the country, any country was bulging at the seams with such newly arrived desperate immigrants, who'd be earning the money that paid the tax and NI that provides the housing benefit, unemployment benefit, free health and education? OK, such a country would cease to be a magnet for the world's destitute; but those destitute find themselves in just as dire a situation as they'd left behind, along with that country's indigenous population, all now bankrupt.

how effective do you think the current system is? don't you think that everyone that really wants to be here is here already? apart from a few law-abiding unfortunates?

Having no immigration control would be an absolute nightmare. There would be a worldwide race to the bottom in terms of everything.

This country was bankrupt by 1945.

And encouraged emigration from empire to make up labour shortages, e.g. Windrush, Pakistanis working in textile industry.

(And if you want to discuss cities changing following immigration/emmigration, the partition of India was quite a notable event).

As far as I am aware, quite a few people of European origin are living in former African colonies and New Zealand and Australia, and their descendants (rightly or wrongly) have rights to work in the UK. (Not too many indigenous people want to emigrate from Australia and New Zealand, but then again there aren't many of them left).

Sorry, that was to ciske - I was agreeing with you, abra1d!

Q: -"Let's have a rule that English people can only emigrate out of the UK to countries where they are really needed, make a genuine contribution to society, and they can't take their families to sponge off the local education/health system. And if they lose their jobs in the new country, they need to come straight home.

There, now it's fair."

Um- Abra1d- that's precisely what the rules are..... maybe not the 'deportation' but such people will have to 'return home' as they only have recourse to emergency HC' in the vast majority of countries, on temporary, even permanent visas. If they have no income, they have to leave. Did you know that, for example, if you move to say Mosman in Sydney, to ensure the local Australian DC get school places, that those places aren't all filled with the DC of immigrant Poms, the Poms have to pay school fees to the state schools?? No namby-pambying around there! Simply 'your taxes haven't paid for this, ours have, you have to compensate us to use this service'!

The situation in just about anywhere in the world is 'don't come unless we need you or you can handsomely support yourself'.

Much here is being made of non-EU immigration purely because it would appear we can do nothing about EU immigration. Maybe we can negotiate a 'deal' with the rest of the EU that seeing as the UK is shouldering the lion's share of the EU immigration, our EU contributions should be cut to 'compensate' for the non productive arrivees, like DC and pregnant women? This isn't racist, it's balancing the financial books. We may wish all this even harder if the likely influx of Roma materialises.

Abra1d - I don't think Sudan is a good example of the benefits of the British Empire. We created the country by arbitrarily lumping together several different ethnic groups, who had been governing themselves independently, we then recognised that probably they should be separate countries, and spent years promoting the idea that the South should be separate from the North. At the same time we deliberately failed to provide the education systems needed to produce people who could govern in the South, preferring instead to ship in people from Northern ethnic groups to become administrators. Then, despite years of planning and promising for an independent South, we failed to actually make it happen, and left the country without any means in place to see it through. There may have been less fighting between the ethnic groups at the time, but that was probably because we slaughtered so many of them ourselves.

niceguy - I agree that it is unlikely that we will see an end to immigration control in our lifetimes, but that does not mean that it is not something that we should be working towards. However, I do think that it will eventually happen, as there are pockets of free-movement areas around the world already: we are part of this in Europe, and there are similar free trade/free movement agreements between several sub-Saharan African countries, and the start of free trade agreements in Southeast Asia.

It is shameful how immigration is used as a political tool, and how immigration and immigrants are treated as an evil threat to our society. These are individuals, people, who are just trying to make a better life for themselves and provide their families with a future, yet if they stray one iota from the rules that we have put in place, we demonise them. We lock them up for months or often years on end, we separate them from their families and friends, we destroy the lives that they may have worked for years to build for themselves, and we deprive them of the dreams and hopes that they have for their futures.

Sadly, it has to be acknowledged that there is no political will to end immigration control: politicians of all hues have cottoned on to the fact that everyone in this country, no matter how poor, has a lot to lose when compared to the poorest people in the developing world, and they use the fear that this creates as a means of control - "Vote for us, we will stop those nasty immigrants coming here and making our country as bad as the one they have left". There is no incentive for politicians to present other alternatives, but it does not mean that those alternatives do not exist.

'Let's have a rule that English people can only emigrate out of the UK to countries where they are really needed, make a genuine contribution to society, and they can't take their families to sponge off the local education/health system. And if they lose their jobs in the new country, they need to come straight home.'

That is what happened to my brother in Australia. And to people I know in Canada.

Most of the benefits of the Empire were used to pay for the Second World War, a very worthy investment, I'm sure we'd all agree. This country was bankrupt by 1945.

And I can't see where all these fruits of empire have been for at least the last thirty or forty years. Our biggest trading partners have been the US and Europe.

And interestingly, the numbers of British people who actually went to live in the Empire were not as great as you might imagine. The Darfur area, for example, was patrolled by just a small number of mounted police. And they managed to stop the Arab tribes killing the African tribes far more successfully than has been the case in recent years.

It was not at all like the situation in, say, Bradford, where an entire city became ethnically very different following migration. There may be other reasons to offer 'pay-back' for the Empire, but numbers of people transferred isn't one of them.

I thought there were "no jobs". Or at least that is what lefties shout whenever there is a crackdown on workless people on benefits.

If there are no jobs for the million plus unemployed in the UK, why on earth would importing millions more, mostly unskilled, unemployable people be a good idea, except as an ideological move by the left to ensure their pool of voters doesn't shrink.

Let's have a rule that English people can only emigrate out of the UK to countries where they are really needed, make a genuine contribution to society, and they can't take their families to sponge off the local education/health system. And if they lose their jobs in the new country, they need to come straight home.

There, now it's fair.

Fourth - Depending on how long they have been married and living together he would either be granted 2 years leave to enter, or indefinite leave to enter. In order to qualify for indefinite leave he would have had to pass the 'Life in the UK test'. If he was granted 2 years leave to enter, he would have no recourse to public funds until he had been granted indefinite leave at the end of this period. If he is eligible for indefinite leave immediately, there is no absolute bar to him receiving NHS care, but his Spouse may be required to sign an undertaking to say that he will not claim public funds, and if he subsequently does, the money could be reclaimed from her. They would also have to demonstrate that they intend to settle in the UK (not just visit for treatment), and that they have a source of income sufficient to support them both (currently above the income support level, but there are proposals to raise this to £18,000 ver soon).

People speak English because of the Empire.

Some people have ties to this country because of the Empire. (E.g. rights of South Africans and Australians to visas).

Also, one of the reasons that Britain is a comparatively rich country is that Britain had an empire which took advantage of other countries. We can't then take the moral high ground when people from those countries want to come and live in Britain.

Equally, France has many immigrants from their former territories.