To think that net immigration…

[Libertass]

Of 745,000 people a year isn’t what the 17 million people who voted for Brexit in 2016 thought they were voting for?

YABU = Yes, this is what Leave supporters voted for.

YANBI = No, they didn’t vote for this.

@Havanananana definitely not Ukraine or Hong Kong in the main- though I have actually chattered to a few in the lift who are.

I have to be honest I have no idea what they are here to do- most seem way too old to be students unless doing PHDs in their late 30s and 40s - just wanted to be honest though and say it definitely was very few single people at all - male or female. A lot of Africans and Indians/Pakistani, a few South Americans - lots of children .

To be fair I don't have a massive thing about legal immigration per se- I am more miffed that we ourselves have lost a lot of our rights within the EU and lost a lot of good people- all for dogma I feel and replacing with families who will take even more housing resources and healthcare and education requirements than the people they are replacing- doesn't make any sense to me at all

I will never understand these self-defeating appeal to emotion argument based on a type of toxic nostalgia that are so common in England.

None of that is relevant to our CURRENT set of problems.

That infrastructure you just tried to describe in nostalgia terms is falling apart because it has not been maintained and replaced.

Do you folks still not understand this?

The capital stock in the UK has been run down in order to increase funding to the older generation in the UK.

Roads, Bridges, Houses, Hospitals, Schools... these have not been maintained and/or replaced. They have all have deteriorated as more money was diverted by the Tories to the older generation for votes due to the FPTP electoral system.

Now the bill has come due. And its enormous. Hundreds of Billions of pounds.

Not everyone takes that same view. We have the highest tax burden in 70 years under the Tories and Labour will be no better. I would rather public services were much fewer and worse than tax and the amount of our money we do not keep is so high.

We have the highest net immigration ever in the UK. Some people have no problem with that but plenty do in many places in the the UK, US and EU.

ONS - "In the YE June 2023, the top five non-EU nationalities for immigration flows into the UK were: Indian (253,000), Nigerian (141,000), Chinese (89,000), Pakistani (55,000) and Ukrainian (35,000)".

So those are the places adding to the numbers.

@Xenia - which public services would you reduce?

All seems unnecessary

We should concentrate on helping the genuine refugees such as the Ukrainians, Syrians and Afghanistan but not all the others, it's never ending and it's not good for the people already here trying to get by

Massive immigration hasn't s

Mass immigration hasn't solved our labour shortages, probably because workers can bring in their dependants, so the family creates more demand for services than it satisfies. Employers love it though, because they can legally pay less than minimum wage, and don't even have to advertise the job to locals, why would they?

745,000 really is a lot of people, it's more than the number of babies born in the U.K. each year. And this is the net figure, so deemed to be permanent additions to our population.

We've had Rishi et al going on and on about the boat people, who are a small fraction of the numbers, presumably hoping we wouldn't notice the 700k they sneaked in legally.

I do think this level of immigration is concerning, as England, where most immigrants settle, is already the most densely populated country in Europe, vastly more so than countries such as France, Germany and Spain.

I don't want to see our countryside bulldozed and our wildlife further decimated to build houses and facilities for people we have to learn to manage without.

Mass immigration is not the answer. Immigrants also get old. We've artificially increased the population for over 20 years now, when these huge numbers start reaching retirement age, what then?

We do have control over the numbers, more control since Brexit, but the government chooses not to exercise that control.

We can still welcome immigrants, Just in vastly fewer numbers.

"745,000 really is a lot of people, it's more than the number of babies born in the U.K. each year. And this is the net figure, so deemed to be permanent additions to our population."

Even with the addition of 745,000 immigrants, overall population growth is fairly constant at around 250,000 a year - a 0.3% growth that is considered population stagnation. One reason why immigration is important to the UK is that over time too few births have resulted in there being too few young people in the population for the job market.

The net figure quoted does NOT imply that these are permanent additions to the population. Go back a page and watch the video from Sky - students coming to the UK (and contributing to the economy through their fees and day to day expenditure) account for almost half of the net immigration, and the vast majority of these leave the UK at the end of their study period.

@Xenia "We have the highest tax burden in 70 years under the Tories and Labour will be no better. I would rather public services were much fewer and worse than tax and the amount of our money we do not keep is so high."

This is misleading. That taxes are higher than ever is true, but the UK is actually still a comparatively low tax country when compared with other European countries. This is not just income tax - there are many other forms of taxation (Corporation Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Alcohol and Tobacco Duty, Sugar Tax etc.) that are also much higher in other countries than in the UK.

The UK spends far less on vital public services than many OECD countries. Germany spends (or rather, invests) over 30% more per capita on healthcare than the UK does. It spends as much in 3 years as the UK spends in 4 years. The result is more doctors, hospital beds, ICU facilities and more modern hospitals than in the UK and lower waiting lists. Austria has twice as many doctors per capita as the UK has. Again, this means hardly any hospital waiting lists. People can just walk in and see a GP. Consultants apologise if a patient has to wait more than 3 weeks for an appointment.

I understand the howls of pain every time someone points out that taxes would need to rise in order to repair the damage caused by decades of underinvestment in public services, but seriously, what would you accept when you talk about "I would rather public services were much fewer and worse?"

Public transport in the UK is very poor compared with most other European countries. There is nowhere in Europe where over 12% of the population is waiting for hospital treatment. Where else are schools, hospitals, roads and other public facilities literally crumbling due to the lack of investment?

Vital public services have either been run down or sold off (often to foreign investors) while the Conservatives follow their Free Market illusion. An illusion that believes that the Free Market will provide a service (for a profit); an illusion that appeals to those who can afford private education, private healthcare and their own transport. But it is an false dogma that leaves those who cannot afford these things to fend for themselves, or very often to go without.

But the UK had a great deal within the EU, including a veto (which it now doesn't have). We had our cake and ate it within the EU, anything else was just bad governance.

Nor did it take a genius to work out that immigration would go up once we were out the EU. And the huge political football that is small boats is entirely down to Brexit.

Also. can I point out to those with private healthcare in the UK that the only reason it's affordable it because we have the NHS as well. The NHS picks up all the emergency treatment, all the long term conditions and all the elderly healthcare (where the big money is spent). Private health insurers in the UK just insure healthy young people so nice and cheap for them.

The number of people who came into the country in 2022 was much higher than 745,000, the figures take into account that people also leave, so I disagree that this number is not a permanent addition to the U.K..

"The number of people who came into the country in 2022 was much higher than 745,000, the figures take into account that people also leave, so I disagree that this number is not a permanent addition to the U.K.."

This is a false assumption - there is no evidence that these 745,000 are going to remain permanently. Immigration for study and key workers on fixed-term contracts make up a large percentage of the immigration figure at any given time, but this does not imply that these people will stay permanently. On the contrary, most will move back or move on - to be replaced by other students and fixed-contract workers.

Plus nobody seems to be addressing the fact that immigrants get old too. So what happens when instead of having 600k people reaching retirement age each year, we have 1.2 million? How many immigrants will we need to support that elderly population? It really is unsustainable.

What was interesting was I think on channel 4 news last week they interviewed a few migrants about migration. One was an Indian woman, she’d come to England to do care/healthcare work and she got les money salary wise than she would get in India but she also said factors like better schooling and other things were deciding factors in moving to England for her and her family. If we can’t get workers in that sector what’s wrong with her being here?

I strongly support selective immigration whereby we can make use of people in the industries that are desperate for employees. Like the care and nursing roles already mentioned. Asylum seekers and refugees should also be given a chance, we do seem to have an influx of people from safe countries that appear to be here as a lifestyle choice though. Surely it’s easy enough to establish who’s who with language tests and so on. I also don’t get the lengthy fuckery about processing these applications, from a safe country? Fuck off and come back by the legal migratiory application. Genuine applicant? Here’s an intense English course and a work permit so you can support yourself and contribute to society. Job done.

I'm not assuming that all immigrants stay here permanently. But that is already accounted for in the figures, which is why it is net migration. The actual number coming in each year is far higher.

@DogsDinner "I'm not assuming that all immigrants stay here permanently. But that is already accounted for in the figures, which is why it is net migration. The actual number coming in each year is far higher."

You have posted more than once that you are assuming that the "net migration" figure represents the number staying permanently. It does not.

"Net migration" is simply the number of people arriving minus the number of people leaving. It does not take into account whether the individuals arriving are going to stay permanently or whether they will leave after a season, a year or 10 years.

You are correct to say that the actual number of people arriving in the last 12 months is higher - it is well over 1.1 million. Minus the 400,000 or so who left the UK in the same period gives the net migration figure for the period of 745,000.

@Rottenpizzas

What you have described is actually what happens at the moment - the process that the (net) 745,000 legal immigrants have followed in order to live and work in the UK.

So if the ones that leave are replaced by new arrivals the ‘number’ of immigrants, and thus the increase in population, stays the same.

How are you going to determine a safe country - it can be on a very individual basis. If the UK put the resources into hearing cases for right to remain, successful applicants could start work. Unfortunately the UK government would rather ignore putting a process in place and instead try unlawful means to deport like the Rwanda scheme.

I think ROI are going to allow work in new scheme

So we’ll see if it dampens tensions or the opposite

Most countries in the EU (and the USA) have the same issue and climate change will add to it and they will all need to decide how many new people from abroad they all want (or not as the case may be).

The ONS graph on this link is interesting. It shows from the 60s when I was born until early 80s when I was married we had just about more people leaving than coming. I quite liked it then. Then from about the time of Blair (and I am certainly not blaming Labour as the Tories as just as bad) we had big increases

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/explore50yearsofinternationalmigrationtoandfromtheuk/2016-12-01

I don;t'; think that came out very well. The grey is the increase in immigration. The bottom straight line is UK population so it was negative until the 80s and then rising a lot as we start going through the 90s.