To think Europen governments need to respond to immigration?

[Finlesswonder]

So the Netherlands is going to have a far right government.
Sweden has moved to the right.
Finland has shut its borders.
Countries that have traditionally been liberal are hardening and irrespective of the many issues listed its to do with immigration.

Ireland has seen violent protests last night following a series of stabbings.
In the UK we obviously had Brexit.

I think governments need to start responding to voters feelings on immigration as if they don't we will continue to see a general slide to the right in Europe, when actually these countries aren't right wing: it feels like a single issue is distorting the entire political landscape?

Students.

Let the universities collapse. Who cares.

On Radio4 about 6:50am... Net Zero "train our own people" : does that mean all the people on long term sick benefits need to "get back to work" ? I just wondered what "our own people" are doing instead of working in UK right now.

I tried to figure out who the people are that should be taking UK jobs that new immigrants got. This list only adds up to 65.4 million, who have I missed? Which of these groups needs to provide workers to make up for 300k+ immigrants entering the UK workforce each year?

Retired people in UK: 11.9 million
Economically active, 27.8 million (not who NetZero meant)
(Unemployed, of the EA, about 4.2%) 1.1676 million
Economically inactive, most of them are long term sick, 9 million
Children (under age 17) 12 million
Students: 2.9 million (but some of them are also working...)

Political Fix podcast pointed out that when people are asked specifically which type of immigrants they don't want... the only specifics are irregular and bankers (both tiny % of total).

@lljkk This is what made me think people are clueless when it comes to numbers - how can three quarters of a million incomers annually in a country with a population of 65 million not be an issue - other European countries do not have nearly this amount (discounting Ukrainians).
When DH worked in the USA he had a work visa - certainly not a residence visa and he had to be interviewed by an expert in his profession (Uni professor) to be allowed in at all.

European governments need to respond to immigration by being bold enough to make the case for its economic necessity and cultural benefits, and the fact that it's an inherent part of human life.

They also need to respond by fixing the deep-rooted issues of economic deprivation and inequality in their societies, for which they currently blame immigration rather than cronyism and neoliberal capitalism.

As it is the same pattern keeps repeating itself. "Centrist" parties have no interest in changing the system, even though it doesn't work for so many people, and so they borrow the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far right to manufacture a scapegoat. They do it in more polite language but the thing is, if you foment anti-immigrant feeling among voters, then voters will go to the real thing.

Gordon Brown did engage with Gillian Duffy actually. He spoke to her pleasantly, but forgot his mike was on when expressing his views in private.

Gillian Duffy didn't 'ask a question'. She started from an anti-inmigrant position.

Brown was wrong to say what he said, but correct in his assessment of her starting position.

PR-wise I agree, politicians would be wise to ignore the starting point of someone like Duffy and answer the questions in good faith.

But there are some (too many, sadly) who are bigoted and policy should never pander to that, even if presentation must accommodate it.

Universities are one of our few success stories - worth £30 billion a year.

There is an economic benefit to current migration numbers that the Government knows from but will not openly discuss.

So we have a Government that tells voters one thing (migration is bad) whilst doing something completely different and then blaming everyone else.

Until the Government are honest about why they have liberalised the Visa system we will continue going around like this.

The other thing about lots of people coming in in large numbers is that they aren;t processed properly and also there risks an increase to the black economy whilst people hang around waiting for visa or job. Our Justice system is broke - no one will be prosecuted for anything, This doesn't bode well for the UK in the future.

In some areas the negative views of immigration had nothing to do with the boats, it was after Tony Blair’s government in 2004 opened our borders to the A8 countries that some people’s lives started to really be affected. Only Sweden and Ireland did the same at that time, and so there was a huge influx to the UK.

For instance, one suburb in Sheffield is home to around 6000 Roma from Slovakia. It was a fairly diverse and deprived community, but there have been serious tensions since large numbers of Roma moved there. David Blunkett, who was the Labour MP for many years there was quoted ten years ago by the BBC expressing concerns about the lack of integration. The police took over a house there, and things appear to be quieter, but the impact on the existing community was widely reported, noisy gatherings, indiscriminate rubbish dumping, big groups fighting in the streets, and issues in the local schools. If the people in power had the same daily reality, they might not be so quick to call people racist?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24909979

The mainstream right, the center and the mainstream left do take the issues seriously.

No, they don't. They actually makes things worse by stopping new build of housing for environmental reasons, clearly prioritising approved immigrants for social housing, building asylum centres in small villages in the countryside so that the asylum seekers outnumber the people living there and then sticking their fingers in their ears when people ask how to deal with all the issues that arise.

If you vote for a racist party (e.g. Wilders), either you support the racism (so you are also racist) or you overlook the racism (which I consider to be foolish).
A quarter of the voters of Wilders are first or second generation immigrants themselves. Are they racist too?
Wilders is actually a weird mix of right and left: right on immigration and diversity/multi cultural issues, left on housing, benefits, healthcare. This is why a lot of people vote for him, that weird mix.

*I do not understand what is wrong with saying this - am I supposed to pretend racism is reasonable?

If you vote for a racist party (e.g. Wilders), either you support the racism (so you are also racist) or you overlook the racism (which I consider to be foolish).*

You are not listening to what I am saying. People are voting for him for other reasons than racism because they deem those other reasons to be more important. Plus I know a lot of people know that he will have to form a coalition, probably with SNC, which will water down some of his more extreme ideas. Every government in the Netherlands ends up slightly right of slightly left of the middle because there is never a single ruling party.

I do not understand what is wrong with saying this - am I supposed to pretend racism is reasonable?

Missing the point again.

Yes this is my recollection.

It is difficult for politicians, they must be polite even if the questioner is aggressive.

If his mic had been off, it would have been quite unremarkable.

I think what European countries (or their electorate) are saying is that they don't care about the economic benefit.
Brexit showed us that people were willing to take a financial or economic hit in exchange for less immigration.
That is the shift that is happening. The economics no longer matter and can no longer be used as an argument.

I'm not missing your point - I just don't agree with you.

My view is If you vote for a racist party (e.g. Wilders), either you support the racism (so you are also racist) or you overlook the racism (which I consider to be foolish).

You say: A quarter of the voters of Wilders are first or second generation immigrants themselves. Are they racist too? They may be racist or foolish, in my opinion.

I don't personally think his policies will benefit the Netherlands, therefore I think it is foolish to vote for him.

I am a liberal. I accept the right of voters to vote as they wish. I don't have to be supportive of their thought processes.

I also think the debate post 2020 has moved beyond "They are stealing our jobs/taking our housing" and it is much more about identity and cultural aspects now, which again, economics cannot be used to debate

Yet it's the thing that business want; it has been for a long time, and the pretence of cracking down on migration with tough talk is a constant. Look at Braverman going on about our record figures. She was responsible for those until a fortnight ago.

So people will pay more in taxes.

Telegraph and Times both explicitly said that the recent tax cuts came about because of higher than expected migration numbers.

I still think Gordon Brown's 'bigoted women' comment was one of the catalyst for brexit.

It amuses me how much fuss there was about that comment in 2010. And he wasn't wrong.

Fast forward to 2023 and we have the likes of Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson etc etc getting away with saying far worse with nary a sanction, even when it's based on pure bullshit.

Social cohesion will be talked about more. We are pretty accepting in the U.K., comparatively, but a breakdown that you see as happened in Dublin won’t be welcome. Even by those who wouldn’t dream of rioting.

A breakdown is cohesion will concern people more as migration increases due to climate and other factors.

The vast majority of people don't actually see any economic benefit from migration - it mainly only benefits those at the top. Wealth trickles upwards - that is the very nature of capitalism.

So if the migrants are not actually increasing people's wages, and are instead competing for housing, education, etc, then of course people will be anti-mass-immigration.

Unfortunately climate change means that migration from the Middle East and Africa will only grow and grow. It is unstoppable.

Immigrants are also lawyers, doctors, nurses, architects and potentially civil servants. But yes I agree they are 100% not responsible for behaviour of disenfranchised youth/men.

In 2010 the Coalition government were elected with a Conservative plan to cut migration to under 100,000 a year. They were still pursuing this target in 2015 despite having the highest rates of migration ever (at that point)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/david-cameron-we-can-still-cut-immigration-to-below-100-000-a-year-10073278.html

Yet despite the Government’s terrible performance on doing anything to reduce immigration, and the absolute shambles that is Brexit, we are meant to believe this is somehow down to a comment Gordon Brown made on mic 13 years ago.

What I got from this thread and another one running is:
Immigrants should not be single men
Immigrants should be single so they won't bring their families
Immigrants should be women
Immigrants can't be women because few women want to come alone
Immigrants should be educated so they can contribute and prop up unis
But educated immigrants will take our jobs so maybe not..Let them pick fruit
Immigrants pay taxes so our taxes will be lower
But we don't care about paying higher taxes. We just want them out!

About the only thing thar everyone agrees on is that immigrants should assimilate, but who decides what assimilation is?

Accurate?

I've got to stop listening to my mother, she told me they'd closed their border months ago! Don't know why I'd expect her to read anything other the the Finnish Daily Mail equivalent.

I sometimes wonder if people especially on MN get worked up about immigration and want to be seen as very welcoming because of post imperialist guilt and colonial history. I’m not white though born here, my ancestors are from a Commonwealth country and fully integrated coming over in the late 1950’s. I even worked for the NHS for six years, what a stereotype of the sort of immigrant outcome people want.

When people mention cultural enrichment some cultures don’t bring anything that is enriching with their quite frankly medieval attitudes towards women.

I think Brexit showed that when asked directly, voters don't consider what is better for the greater good and vote for what they want (of course, that's hunan nature)

It's the same with immigration. Some people will want it to be dramatically reduced. But they also want a functioning NHS, food to be harvested and sold, nice clean well staffed hotels to stay in, care workers to lookafter them in old age etc. And they don't have enough insight into the complexities of the labour market to understand what the impact of that low immigration will be.