to believe the UK should take highly-skilled Venezuelan refugees

[longfingernails]

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have had to flee from the inevitable consequences of unadulterated socialism.

Amongst them will be highly skilled workers. We should do our best to seek them out and offer them refugee status together with the right to work in Britain.

If we are selective in our choices, in time they could form as effective a bloc as the Floridian Cubans.

Bless, most of us know there are huge similarities between the US and UK and that we will always share a common bond. Most of us have not hate for America. Some in the US and UK are anti-trump but that is a different issue really.

The British like the Americans even if MN may not always suggest so. We share very similar values and ethics and we don't forget the UK used to won the USA as well and you have our legal system and lots of our ancestors moved to the USA.

Everything has got so academic that it has educated a lot of people out of a job or the requirements of a job need so many academic qualifications just to train that there are not enough people qualifying just to train

I agree. Being old, I can remember when qualifications like engineeering, surveying, nursing and social work could be achieved by getting a trainee post and qualifying through day release courses. Now, people have to go to uni and come out with shedloads of debt to qualify, instead of getting paid while they do it.

My mate's dad was an environmental health officer, and he often rants about NQ staff coming out of uni knowing less about the job than he did with 5 O-levels and an ONC.

OP, you say you want the victims of democratically elected president Nicolas Maduro to seek asylum in the UK. I take it that "victims" means the better-off Venezuelans who oppose him. You say some of them will be highly skilled. You don't bother to mention these desirable skills, but you mention that they could "form as effective a bloc as the Floridian Cubans", people best known for their many unsuccessful attempts to invade Cuba and assassinate Castro.
It sounds as if you think the UK needs more angry right wingers prepared to kill, but I can't quite work out who you think they should target.

Venezuela is a beautiful and prospectively very prosperous country. It used to be, not all that long ago. If it wasn't for the corrupt and incompetent government there it would be a fabulous place to live.
You could take the UK and drop it into the rainforest and not find it again, it is huge. I went about 25 years ago when it was on the start of the downwards slide, it was a land of opportunity. Like many places, those who could see the writing on the wall, and who had the means, have left.
Sadly although petrol and diesel is virtually free, there is insufficient food which is causing so many to flee, not because they want to, or even have to in a basic living sense, there just is insufficient food down to sheer governmental incompetence.
Being as it is a bit south of the Bahamas it is fabulous for holidays but no more.

I was also there about 25 yrs ago, lived there for a short while. It makes me sad and angry to see what has been done to the country and it’s people by politicians.

I'm always very skeptical of this claim that there's a skills shortage.

There are plenty of people around with skills who cannot get jobs. What 'skills shortage' usually means is that employers want ever more skills but won't pay money for them.

For the rest, it would be nice to be able to help other people, but 'we' can't do it if 'we're' not in good condition ourselves. The middle classes should be looking to help our own people first, and I agree that Britain is overpopulated already.

The UK is not actually overpopulated in many ways. A handful 'own' vast areas and development is usually in tight clusters so it looks dense.
it might be an interesting diversion to look at the fall of Venezuela and see if there are parallels with the direction that the UK is heading.
Changing the politicians and some of the state controlled activities in Venezuela COULD return it to it's former glory as it has much mineral wealth.

Define overpopulation.

LeClerc you seem to be viewing it as a question of how much land is built up and who it is owned by. I don't question that the latter is important and a major factor in our inequality, but it does not get to the root of what 'overpopulation' means. At the moment Britain can feed perhaps 45 million people. We have rather more than that here. We import much of our food and have just seriously pissed off our biggest import partner. Quality of food grown here is declining too, which may have many causes but soil exhaustion might well be an issue. That is overpopulation.

BlatheringWuther

Agree, it’s the amount of people that can be sustained by the available land.

It terms of skills shortage it partly depends if the skills you have are the ones that employers want.
Large areas of the U.K. do not have the population that they had in the past, some areas may be over populated but some due to previous landowner and government actions are under populated. It would take government support with infrastructure and job creation to bring the population back but it is a fact that these areas are historically currently underpopulated.

OP, refugees tend to need to flee their own country so cross borders legally or illegally if they have to! If they waited for permission to leave or enter they would never get out! Do you seriously think they apply for a visa first?!!

... and some are massively overpopulated. The distribution is wrong, and could do with addressing - which is why I think we need to solving look to our own problems first. That does not change the problem of 'can feed 45 million / have 65 million'.

Oh, yay! A GF fascist sociopathic OP who can't understand the difference between refugees and economic migrants. Welcome to Brexit, folks!

At the moment Britain can feed perhaps 45 million people. We have rather more than that here. We import much of our food and have just seriously pissed off our biggest import partner. Quality of food grown here is declining too, which may have many causes but soil exhaustion might well be an issue. That is overpopulation.

In an agrarian society, where there were no other sources of food, sure.

In a modern society, the question is whether a society can sustain itself economically, including through social infrastructure, rather than whether it can self-sustain itself in food.

If you'll permit me the hubris of quoting myself, we have just seriously pissed off our main trading partner. There have also been concerns for some time about our manufacturing base vanishing, and our future relations with that trading partner I mentioned have not been determined but are likely to further damage that. We will see how well we weather Brexit.

Food and the capability to produce it are never an irrelevance.

The money for it can come from cutting benefits etc.

You are joking? Did you learn about benefits by reading the daily mail by any chance?

Being self sufficient in food, while useful is not vital. Singapore, which is not much bigger than Greater Manchester in area produces hardly any food, it understands that it HAS to trade with others.
While the UK might have had some pride if it could feed itself, again it is not important when you trade for other things, goods or services.
The only stupid thing is to piss off your most logical and economic supplier of food. Like the various sieges throughout history, you can only shut yourself in a castle for a certain amount of time.

The Brit who won a field medal for mathematics this year was a Kurdish refugee with farming parents and poor English. I think I'll start a thread about prejudice against farmers. I see 'farming parents' as an advantage. They're hard working and resourceful people.
This happens all over MN. We're greedy. We're cruel. We're stupid. We're irrelevant when discussing Brexit etc. etc.

AIBU

Yes. Yes, you are. Gobsmackingly so.

lfn has been around for years. And Thatcher was a bit too soft for her liking.

Well what we could do is prioritise skilled worker visa applications from individuals who also could apply as refugees.

dexra I wasn't meaning to insult farmers just to show that this chap didn't come from what TM would classify as a high skills background. Personally I think she is making a false link between skills and wages but she is going to base immigration policy on it. No Kurdish farmer is going to meet the current 'skills' test set out at the conservative conference.
Highly intelligent, talented and motivated people come from all sorts of backgrounds but people who want to assess refugees as well as economic immigrants don't recognize this.

Derxa
The majority of the traffic past my house is tractors. Some mornings I wish they didn't work quite so hard!
7am starts and past midnight finishing, depending what needs to be done.

Food and the capability to produce it are never an irrelevance.

I didn’t say it was irrelevant. I said it was a poor determinant of a sustainable or optimal population level in a modern society.

(And I’m an immigrant child of farmers.)