To wonder why people hate immigration/immigrants so much?

[PeachyParisian]

I don't mean to the UK specifically, but within Europe, worldwide..

Does it boil down to a sense of entitlement? i.e. I was born here so i deserve to reap the benefits of my ancestors hard work.
Also I suppose economic migration is completely different to fleeing to claim asylum although I see no differentiation made in the UK media.
Its always about "benefits tourism"/"generous benefits given to asylum seekers".
I'm an expat, DH is non-EU and we are planning on moving to the UK this year and I'm tired of all the raised questioning eyebrows incredulously asking me if he really is forrin.

I find it hard to get my head around the idea that I am worth more, deserve more etc just because I was lucky enough to be born a British citizen.

I know :) I was just wondering where Tucson's 'grateful guests' logic extended to...

Littledrummer, the huge flaw in your logic is the assumption that everyone economically active - local-born or immigrant - is an employee. Second is your idea that businesses have a finite amount of work and money - and that by hiring talented people, they will not increase the work and money coming in, enabling them to further expand thanks to the contribution of their employees.

no I don't buy your argument Ikea. I didn't vote for the EU in 1972 (I was a child) or Tony Blair in 1997. We are supposed to have a greenbelt policy and all the building causes flooding if we keep concreting over our countryside.

I don't think it is benefiting most of the indigenous population unless you run a business.

There are also many social problems and people trafficking.

Alemci, did you see the figures I cited from UCL on the net contribution of post-2004 EEA immigrants?

why do we have to have so many people here. who is it helping?

people employing immigrants, people employed by immigrants. the B of E governor is an immigrant. they chose to go external because they thought the best person for the job was a foreigner. Same for royal mail. as a british tax payer, don't you want the best for your money? I do.

Jassy I know many make a great contribution. I don't dispute that but it is the volume of people and feeling overcrowded plus the area I grew up in totally changing.

Trazzletoes - certainly 100,000s of immigrants are leaving Spain. And these are economic migrants who are going back to their own countries because they are failed to establish a life here. Ecuadorians are the biggest group going back.

200,000 Brits have gone home too because Spain have asked them to declare their assets lol - British people want to live in Spain as long as they dont have to pay the same taxes as everyone else

Anyway, the British attitude to immigration is one born out of racism and frustration at a diminishing quality of life. As posters have correctly said, British people and all Europeans in general have enslaved the world's populations for hundreds of years and continue to do so. For every person that shops at Primark, another person has had to live and work in misery. I used to live in London, a wonderfully grand and oppulent system born off the back of enslaving a third of the world's population

Living standards are only going to get worse in the West. Get used to it, embrace immigration everywhere. Open all the borders I say, let people live wherever they like, or use a lottery system. Maybe you will be luckily enough to get a one-way ticket to work in a Primark factory in Indonesia ;)

This country thrived for centuries without mass immigration

www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/aug/15/scotland-dna-study-project Read and wonder... Immigrants introduced porridge into Scotland. Can't get a better argument for immigration than that!

We British people are a mixed up mixture of peoples. Some of the most diverse genetic history in the world. Personally I think the tall, blondness in our family is pretty unlikely to be Pictish. Bloody Vikings.

I was responding to your statement that:

I don't think it is benefiting most of the indigenous population unless you run a business.

The facts are contrary to that. Unless you think funding services, benefits and the NHS isn't beneficial to most people.

I don't like the idea of one benefit rule for native Brits and one for immigrants. It's innately unjust - I'm a Dutch national, have been here 17 years, have never claimed benefits (no, not even CB as through DH we are ineligible). What I have done is paid taxes. Why should I then get nothing if I lose my job, whilst someone born here who has never worked should get benefits? Whatever benefit system we have, it needs to treat people equally. If that means making it contribution-based, so be it. No-one is inherently better or more worthy than anyone else just because they happen to have been born locally.

I think you knew I meant things like big corporations where they can pay low wages or hotels.

I agree to some extent about the NHS but I remember hearing that medical graduates couldn't get jobs in the NHS who had trained here for 7 years'.

"I think rules have to be changed so that immigrants cannot claim benefits would you suggest the UK paid benefits to British people living abroad?"

No, of course not!

"I think a big part of the problem is the British obsession with living in houses, if family friendly apartments were built with wonderful communal gardens instead of rows and rows of little houses with tiny gardens there would be more open space."

Family friendly apartments with "wonderful communal gardens" soon become run-down high rise flats with dilapidated common areas, just like the "streets in the skies" that were supposed to be the way forward when they were built in the 60s did. If people want to live in houses, then that is what we should build. Ideally, we need to be reducing the population though, it is the 21st century after all. The countries sustainable population is about 1/3 of what it currently is. Anyone who wants the population to rise even higher is two sandwiches short of a picnic IMO, the infrastructure at present is barely coping.

also the immigrants can claim some benefits e.g child and have been given social and local authority housing however much this is sidestepped.

I agree to some extent about the NHS but I remember hearing that medical graduates couldn't get jobs in the NHS who had trained here for 7 years'.

can't get a job in your home country? go to another EU country! that's the beauty of it! one less person on the dole here, one more doctor in Germany. everyone wins.

I agree with your analysis of overpopulation, Tucsongirl. I just think it ought to be applied planet-wide, not only in the UK. Sometimes I think we need a major natural disaster (supervolcano anyone?) to wipe out 80% of humanity so we can start over and hopefully do better.

Singling out 'forriners' for second-rate treatment does nothing to resolve the problems, though. I get so tired about the 'forriners taking our jobs' rhetoric - well, I have got every job I've had in the UK because I've been the best candidate and not because I've offered to do the work for less. Let the Brits pull their bloody socks up and compete.

pointy it really isn't as simple as people think, is it? I paid lots of tax in the UK, rarely used services of any kind. Moved to Canada, started to pay tax, then had an extremely expensive childbirth. I have certainly cost Canada but benefited the UK. However, because Canada wants people, and I made a little Canadian, I think we are square!

Tucson, why? They don't in other countries. The obsession with houses is a relatively Anglocentric one. I have Britidh friends living in Brussels. They have a nice 3-bed semi in Britain, they much prefer their lovely, well-built, spacious Brussels apartment.

Alemci - no, I didn't. You made a sweeping statement about net benefit of immigration. I questioned that and cited a study that suggested you were wrong. You've now radically rephrased by reverting to a hackneyed stereotype.

Alemci - cross posted with you. The study shows that taking all use of services and benefits into account, EEA immigrants from post-2001 (not even just post 2004) are net contributors. They put in more than they take out.

I hate immigration because we don't have the infrastructure/housing etc. to handle 10 million new people.

Aga, that's quite sweeping. I assume you're talking about the 2028 population projections? Those show that of a projected 9.3 million increase, more than half will be natural increase (more births than deaths) and the rest migration (and births associated with migration).

That said, if your problem is with the lack if decent infrastructure, why aren't you angry about the lack of decent infrastructure that wouldn't be enough to deal with natural population increase anyway?

No I'm talking about the fucked up housing situation we already have in this country, and the millions of new immigrants we have admitted in the last 15 years.

There is no natural population increase; if there is one in the future, I'm pretty sure it is due to immigration (higher birth rates in migrant groups).

That's nonsense. Where are you getting your information from?

Births have never dipped below the levels of deaths in the last 50 years. The gap had changed significantly over time, with peaks and troughs, the ONS has said very clearly that the post-2000 increase in birth rate has been driven by both immigration of women of childbearing age and rising fertility among UK-born women. In 2011 the total fertility rate for UK-born women was 1.84, and 2.21 for women not born in the UK. (TFR measures number of children a woman is likely to have throughout her reproductive years.) So a higher birth rate but not vastly so - and certainly not what you are characterising above.

It is a slightly odd measure as it only cares about the nationality of mothers - though I suppose it is the only reliable way. Is my child the child of an immigrant, or the child of a British person? Answer: both. And some people will despise his existence because his mother is foreign; that is your prerogative.

I'd again say that if your issue is lack of decent housing, then your real beef is with the absence of a decent housing policy.

PeachyParisian I can't agree that a proud history stretching back hundreds of years of the UK welcoming immigrants is "not relevant" to your wild assertion that people "hate" immigrants.

I guess there will be no one alive who lived under colonialism in the next couple of decades, so on that basis will you be dismissing it as irrelevant to this debate too?

As to your comment : & I understand that resources can only stretch so far, but that shouldn't mean we don't "share" but that we do something about the fact the resources are insufficient in the first place.

This suggested to me that you are advocating inviting the world to share the UK's resources, i.e. move to the UK. In any event it is a staggeringly naive and simplistic statement to come out with; particularly when there are people in the UK queuing at food banks.

Writtenguarentee the point is that the pensioner has to WAIT longer for his operation as there are more people using the NHS and more calls on its limited resources. So I suspect, in those circumstances, he would care very much.

Millie, there are also more people paying into the NHS and in recent years making an overall net contribution. If governments are not prioritising funds properly then vote for one that will; the pressure on the NHS currently is driven be obesity, diabetes and age to a huge extent.

There is a big difference between current attitudes (it feels like lots if people hate immigrants or immigration now, regardless of attitudes in the past) and the lasting effects of British colonial policy over centuries in the countries where those policies were practised.

on the benefits bandwagon, how many of you know that most Europeans cannot claim benefits as soon as they come to the UK, and those from outside of the EU are not entitled to benefits or housing, those that get it are ligitimate immigraiton status.

There are more people leaving the UK than immigrants entering. Yes we should have tighter controls, but is that any reason to hate those that come here? Seriously?

How many of you seriously earn in the tax bracket that your tax actually goes towards benefits and housing, and you do know the highest users of social houseing and benefits in the UK are the UK nationals?

Well why don't we say the UK should give back all the artifacts in our museums it has stolen from other countries, don't create useless wars in countries you want to control the oil supply, back and give aids to regimes which will help you get rid of your enemies, don't go ot other countries and test out the clinical trials compounds on unsuspecting villiage natives, for the benefit of your home nationals and hope you won't get caught, do in other countries and pilfer the nice land and mineral rich areas and force the locals to live in squalar because you came with guns and the bible to take over their riches.
Any years later people want to complain when those countrymen and women seek a better life in the UK?

To be honest, we are a declining nation, aging nation, less babies from English are being born, high rise in infertility amongts natives, we need a controlled number of immigrants to come in an prop up this country, just like they did during the war times. We need these people to help pay the pensions of tomorrow. Fact.

Don't have immigrants, don't have prejudices, just try and better your own life.

What a sad thread. What's wrong with being patriotic, and proud of our country, though there's nothing to be proud of at tge moment, with the dismal football and tennis results. I think people are disagreeing with mass immigration.