Why aren’t politicians honest about needing migration?

[rickyrickygrimes]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/29/politicians-immigration-wrong-cheap-labour

This article answers some questions I’ve had about migration, confirming that the pull factors created by the huge demand for cheap workers in northern / western countries is what drives migration in that direction. Refugees / asylum seekers (despite the headlines) are a tiny proportion of migrants. The vast majority of migrants are legal and needed - 9/10 Africans arriving in Europe do so legally, with visas and passports in hand.

why aren’t politicians honest about the fact that if we want to keep the cost of providing social / elderly care down, we need migrants to come and work in this sector for low wages? That if we want affordable houses to be built, we need construction workers to come here and build them? That if we want childcare to be provided cheaply we need migrants to come and work in the crèches and nurseries of Europe, again for low wages? That if we want to eat cheap food, migrants have to come and pick it cheaply?

Its our desire for cheap food / care / housing / etc that drives this, not the push away from their countries of origin.

So migrants should be underpaid because local workers won't work cheap enough?

Something in that doesn't feel right

The people on the boats are a distraction for whatever reason because as you say legal immigration is high. We have an ageing population, falling birth rates & a capitalist system so I’m not sure what people expect. Plenty of people like cheap labour, the gov does but as you say they pretend they want to be tough on immigration.

But I don’t think they can be honest because the population don’t want to hear it. Bit like preparing for the change in demographics they avoid discussion & planning because people don’t want to hear & prefer to blame it on feckless mothers having too many babies 🤔

Its not aspirational that we have been exploiting cheap labour for many years, in fact its pretty disgusting but nonetheless something we have all benefited from. The NHS plundering developing countries and depleting them of their qualified HCPs is particularly vile, they recruit way beyond the agreed fair levels. The solution is to increase wages and conditions in essential roles such as care and agriculture, but no one will so the cycle continues.

What we need is more skilled immigration.
More efficient and safer routes for asylum seekers and refugees.
Improvement in infrastructure ie investment in schools, GPs, housing etc.

As none of those will happen the government will keep hoping people actually believe its people in boats that are responsible for all of our issues.

We don’t have the labour workforce to fill all the jobs & we are quite a low wage society. Another economic issue is how little wage growth there has been in the last 2 decades. There’s hasn’t been much investment by the gov.

I agree OP. It’s suited right leaning governments, enabled by client media, throughout the last century to demonise immigrants/new comers/the other to enable them the get away with their racist/far right policies. Their approach to migration is schizophrenic. We need immigrants, offer them visas but simultaneously create a hostile environment here.
In fact under the current government, we’ve had the largest level of migration ever! These are people they issued visas to, but all the rhetoric is around the tiny, tiny number of #SmallBoats.

Well said!

What bit is it that the population don’t want to hear? I’m guessing it’s this bit:

that bringing people from other parts of the world to work here in vital roles, people who look, sound, live differently to ‘us’, also means accepting them into our communities? And accepting the changes that will result from this?

How can they have racist/ far right policies yet have the largest level of migration ever though?
Can you explain how they are creating the hostile environment? And why in that case are the most vulnerable people so keen to come to the U.K. rather than stick in Italy or France.

I think most politicians are pretty honest about migration in response to direct questioning actually. Movement of people is as old as civilisation itself.

Because the right-wing press (aided and abetted by government) have gaslighted us into believing that immigration is "bad", so they don't want to U-turn on it, and they have to maintain this narrative.

Also to distract us from the myriad of other misdeeds they don't want us to notice them doing.

Maybe if there was non-privatised social care, child care and if there was a government run national housebuilding programme there would be no shareholders to pay or creaming off the profits therefore wages could be higher?

Op does that mean always increasing? as you need a broader base over time

The push factors are increasing too hence politicians across EU looking at that, off shore processing included for asylum

Why should locals or immigrants work for buttons?

It’s because the fertility rate is so low in the UK ( and across most of the world.) There is a shortage of young working age people. Right now, absolutely, migration is needed to plug the gap. And politicians are not being honest about this. However, it’s not ethical to take these young people away from their home countries where they are also needed. Long term, we need to find other solutions.

Blair looked at off shoring asylum processing to a remote Scottish Island.

But i think the OP is more about legal migration, which at the moment is 3x higher than anything under Blair/Brown yet we still have huge labour shortages in many areas.

We need to use a lot more automation, where possible, as a pp has said, its immoral to take nurses say from India or Nepal when both countries are facing shortages of HCP themselves, Finland has done some great work in remote care due to staff shortages, Agri is another area where automation can work.

Not quite sure why the Tories took away the bursary, seems daft to me, Austerity yet again messing things up.

Because politics has changed over the past few years.

It used to be that all political parties broadly wanted what was best for the country, even if they differed wildly on what that meant in practical terms.

Then Trump was elected, who was basically a mobster who only ran for president so he'd have access to commit bigger crimes (like steal state secrets to sell to Russia) and grift/steal as much money as possible for himself and his family.

The Tories are going the same way, I consider the current Tory government to be basically a crime family. Look how they exploited the Covid crisis to line their own pockets and their mates' pockets, and how their enormous financial corruption caused deaths. They know that they're out soon so they're acting solely based on what will earn them the most money, and desperately clinging to anything that might keep them in power. Trying to pass laws to overturn democracy, ban protests, commit election fraud by trying to stop people from voting. We're practically seeing a genocide of disabled people.

The Tories actively tried to destroy the NHS so they could sell it, their only goal was £££££.

They don't care about immigration (except in that immigrants are useful scapegoats) because they won't have to deal with the fallout, they'll all fuck off to Spain or Cuba with their stolen millions, or even if they do live the rest of their lives in the UK it certainly won't be using the NHS.

AI will probably change workforce requirements, at some point

MN has too many xenophobes these days to discuss this properly. Scaremongering and racism is the answer to your question OP.

Hopefully, we need to get cracking on it though. Autonomous vehicles for freight would seem to be within touching distance.Basic informational copy writing. Maybe some programming type jobs, I don’t know much about that? I’m not sure what other jobs AI could imminently take over though.

Tech solutions will only do that IF we invest in them, so long as labour is cheaper, thats what will win out.
Europe is further ahead on Agri automation than we are, now UK farmers are trying to catch up or in many cases, just pack in growing.

Technology is likely to effect higher skilled roles, where Labour costs are higher = greater savings.

Because they don't want to address fundamental flaws in they way our society functions. They don't want to make employers pay decent wages. They don't want to train people. They don't want to do anything that devalues house prices so they keep them rising. Plus immigrants are a good whipping boy for the public to focus on rather than the government

In Singapore they pay immigrant nurses less than Singaporeans. That would solve the issue of U.K. citizens not wanting to do the job as the pay is low. Just pay them more. But because we have human rights it prob wouldn’t be allowed.

What's really strange is why they insist on including students in the headline figures when a) having people temporarily in the country on legitimate courses paying huge fees isn't seen as an issue by the public b) the net number is artificially high due to Covid because almost all of them left in 2020 and almost nobody arrived in 2021 so we've got no leavers to balance out the starters.

My theory is that they're leaving students in deliberately in order that when the people who started one year courses in 2022 leave in the 2023 data they can highlight a large drop in net migration without actually doing anything at all.

from the article "Fundamental choices have to be made. For example, do we want to live in a society in which more and more work – transport, construction, cleaning, care of elderly people and children, food provision – is outsourced to a new class of servants made up mainly of migrant workers? Do we want a large agricultural sector that partly relies on subsidies and is dependent on migrants for the necessary labour? The present reality shows that we cannot divorce debates about immigration from broader debates about inequality, labour, social justice and, most importantly, the kind of society we want to live in." This is the relevant part for me. We have a society that's built around employers not paying people high enough wages to live on the without the government having to pay ££ on in-work benefits to top these wages up - whilst simultaneously having large companies set up in such a way as to avoid paying significant tax to the government (to subsidise the benefits then being paid out). Its a weird sort of capitalism that's a bit like trying to fill a bath with the plug half way out.

If it’s easier to import cheap labour and house people in shoddy accommodation to do the jobs at a low price, then that’ll decrease need for investment in alternatives.

And yes tech will replace higher skilled roles. A good example the other day was a guy talking about replacing £800 (or near I can’t recall) per day coder with AI running at 12p per day. That kind of thing will disrupt workforce requirements

Since it's already poorly/low paid I hope so!