Lower migration and the tax gap: raise taxes or ease restrictions?

@MeetMeOnTheCorner

How can 18 year olds up sticks and move to where there are jobs? Have you not noticed that they will mostly be living in poorer areas and more work is in pricier areas? How do they pay rent in the wage an 18 year old can earn?
They should do exactly the same what low skilled immigrants, the ones who move continents and find the jobs here. They need to go where jobs are and live in house shares if they can't find jobs locally. Our youth certainly prefer to live on benefits and this option should be removed from them.

It’s better to create the economic growth in all areas so employment is relatively local. Instead firms like Ineos move out and the government doesn’t wake up to the burdens it places on industry in terms of tax and high energy prices. We lean far too heavily towards state provision but nowhere near enough is done to support jobs. I definitely agree that employers need support to employ people by lowering their costs.
Absolutely! We need to create conditions which attracts businesses and job creators, and lowering taxes is one of the key steps to achieve it.

@nearlylovemyusername There’s quite a lot of holes in your argument though. How can 18 year olds up sticks and move to where there are jobs? Have you not noticed that they will mostly be living in poorer areas and more work is in pricier areas? How do they pay rent in the wage an 18 year old can earn? It’s better to create the economic growth in all areas so employment is relatively local. Instead firms like Ineos move out and the government doesn’t wake up to the burdens it places on industry in terms of tax and high energy prices. We lean far too heavily towards state provision but nowhere near enough is done to support jobs. I definitely agree that employers need support to employ people by lowering their costs.

Housing is a problem. Many areas have land set aside for housing under development plans and policies. Then the actual planning permission takes years. It’s far too complex. Numerous public bodies get involved and the whole process crawls along. Plus many decent trades people left after Brexit causing a labour shortage and there’s a materials shortage too. Building homes takes a very very long time and no government gets near their targets. This one won’t either. Nor does government money build homes. Councils are not builders and haven’t been for decades. They are not in a position to actually build anything but housing associations can. But on what land? Using what expertise.

@Mouldemort

i don’t think our economy needs lots of people who work cash in hand in nail bars, or who work for 5 years in care, then get ILR and work in retail part time instead. The government’s own immigration minister has admitted that lots of people will leave care once they get ILR. It’s not sustainable.

As I stated above - I want welfare system to be reformed so people are pushed into jobs that are currently filled by low skilled workers on visas. Released money should be directed into building of social housing so housing costs go down.
The example thread I linked above should not be possible - 18yo must not be allowed to claim benefits, they need to take whatever job in whatever part of the county rather than live on taxpayers money.
And then reduce tax and legal burden on employers so hiring picks up again.

And yes, low skilled foreigners do contribute to economy in other way then taxes, much more than idle Brits. But at present they become entitled to benefits in five years time and then there is no incentive for them to contribute. I'm all up for Shabana's change of ILR requirements

@Mouldemort

I’d be happy to pay a bit more tax to fund it, given that it is a tax gap now that is also an investment in the future (low income migrants will cost us a lot over the longer term - the government’s own modelling acknowledges that)

Yeah, my niece and nephew were born abroad to British parents. They are now all back in this country and would not be entitled to any nationality other than British!

@MeetMeOnTheCorner I don’t disagree, although I do think pensioners have been protected above others due to the sheer numbers of them. The outcry over means testing winter fuel was ridiculous.

I am very surprised that Burnham is talking about scrapping the triple lock

Yes, absolutely. Plus people like Joanna Lumley, Emma Watson, Prince Philip etc.

"Foreign born" doesn't necessarily mean what people might think it means.

Nail on the head with all that.

Yes. But the private rail companies were not doing the work. The accident reports highlighted that. So the rails were re-nationalised. And now less accidents.

Boris was PM during that time. He lived in Government housing, and he was foreign born.

I just mention that for folk that maybe do not know what "foreign born" covers.

Thank you for responding.

I do think you have made some valid points here, but your post overstates some of the figures and you're treating gross costs as though they were net economic losses, which I don’t think is a fair representation.

I think the UK population has grown by around 3 million since 2021, with net migration accounting for most of that growth. That is undoubtedly a rapid expansion, and it is entirely reasonable to be concerned that housing and infrastructure have not expanded equally to match this. But “13 million extra people” describes growth over nearly 3 decades, and not just five years.

It is also fair to acknowledge that immigration inevitably increases demand for housing, and it is therefore likely to have contributed to higher house prices and potentially to higher rents. However, the evidence suggests that immigration is just one factor in a much bigger picture. A recent review estimated that immigration might explain around 4–6% of the total rise in UK house prices over the past three decades, while other factors account for most of the increase.

It is true that higher rents might indirectly increase Universal Credit housing expenditure, but I don't think that should simply be assumed - further analysis would be needed to identify how much additional welfare spending, if any, could be specifically attributed to migration-related rent increases.

The infrastructure point is a fair one. A rapidly growing population obviously needs additional schools, healthcare facilities and other public services. If we fail to invest in this infrastructure, then we end up with overcrowding, long waiting lists and poorer services etc.

However, I don’t think it is true to suggest that these costs are wholly ignored by the economic analysis. The OBR explicitly considers public-service and infrastructure requirements, yet in the scenarios that they have modelled, they still calculate that the overall medium-term fiscal effect of additional migration is positive. Perhaps there are flaws or omissions in their analysis, and there is certainly a case for looking more closely at the costs and benefits over the longer term. But it simply isn’t accurate to suggest that infrastructure costs are ignored by the economic analysis.

Finally, overseas remittances are approximately £10 billion annually, not “tens of billions” as stated. These are private transfers from earned income, and not a cost borne by the taxpayer. And if migrant workers happen to send a proportion of their income to their home countries, that doesn’t negate the fact that they still probably spend a significant proportion of their income in the UK, pay taxes and contribute through their work. Treating the entire remittance as an economic loss fails to recognise the wider value of their labour to the UK economy - just as I might spend a proportion of my income on an overseas holiday without it wiping out the value of my wider contribution to the UK economy.

They think they are too good to do hard work. Actually, it’s racist. Let Johnny Foreigner do the hard work, our DCs are above that.

They aren't disproved theories though.

Yes, there is evidence that reducing immigration might have a small impact on wage growth. But there is also evidence that wage growth typically leaves leads to inflation. I have seen no credible evidence to back up the idea that reducing immigration actually results in people having any more purchasing power.

Of course, if you have a credible source that evidences this, I would be happy to have a look at it. I'm interested in the economic evidence, though, and not just your "lived experience", which is by its very nature subjective and not necessarily representative.

@MrsBennetsPoorNervesAreBack

I don’t have any data I can show you because I’m talking about costs that are caused by immigration, but aren’t attributed to it. For example:

Just in the last 5 years we have increased the population by millions. Scarce housing has got scarcer. Rents have gone up enormously, so more people claim UC, or claim more.

13 million extra people need a lot of extra infrastructure. You only have to see many of the threads on here to realise successive governments have often just not bothered to build it, which has costs in itself. When it is built, it is not attributed to the costs of immigration, although it is only needed because of it.

Tens of billions of pounds leaving the UK as remittances.

@bannabead But nothing is popular! Thats why populist politicians do nothing. They need pensioner votes. They need benefit claimant votes. They frighten everyone else by saying taxes must be raised because we are unsafe and the NHS is overwhelmed. They do nothing much about anything. There’s some waffle on the edges of policy but the big decisions to live within our means are not tackled because they lose votes and attract criticism. Political leaders now want to be loved and Burnham is yet another who craves admiration. We never get anywhere as a result.

I did say this is what you would do.
Dismiss lived experience out of hand, and keep going with your disproved theories while asking everyone for evidence.

There may be a specific industries where this effect is felt, but at a national level, I have not seen any evidence to back up this argument. Companies typically pass on higher costs to consumers, and so wage increases don't necessarily increase in higher purchasing power.

As for the Indian software engineer example, I think this is a pretty poor example to use in an argument about immigration because. For that kind of role, salaries are likely to be affected at least as much by the potential to outsource to cheap overseas labour as by Indian immigrants to the UK. And arguably those Indian immigrants would at least be spending that money in the UK economy and paying UK taxes etc, whereas outsourcing would result in those costs being invested elsewhere.

That’s means targeting pensioners which isn’t popular

The care home idea is ridiculous. Nobody wants to be cared for by somebody who is forced to be there to tick a box. That would be an appalling situation.

I imagine a lot of people aren’t physically able to do fruit picking.

the term NEET, like most political terms, is actually pretty useless.

I think 30% of them aren’t claiming benefits at all in which case, none of my business.

It also includes people who are too ill to work.

But the more I look at all the terminology that’s used in the media, the more I realise it’s utterly useless. Hence why I don’t really look at the media.

With so many sets of figures available to us directly from the source, it’s much easier to look at that kind of information.

Actually, I realised after posting this that my figures are also slightly misleading, as the total number of social housing residents includes children, who are perhaps more likely to be UK born even if their parents are immigrants.

However, even after the figures are adjusted to exclude children, foreign-born adult Londoners are still proportionately less likely to live in social housing than UK-born adult Londoners. And it clearly isn't true that "most" social housing is given to immigrants as previously claimed.