Don't flame me ....but immigration .....

[Noangelbuthavingfun]

Listening to our Immigration minister on good morning re Rwanda plan. The government ard going to preventvorvmake it harder for anyone coming to work here to bring their family... so.... the view is that say care jobs or jobs in NHS should be filled by British people...snd his message to businesses is not to firstly aim for overseas labour that could be cheaper.. and aim to get UK people into jobs. He says we have over a million consistent work avoiding individuals in UK as a statistic... and they are making it pay to work from now on hence benefit changes.
That's all good and well as a concept... but 2 things bother me here !! Well many...but 2 stand out:
Firstly, UK businesses that have traditionally made use of overseas labour like construction or leisure do not pay enough to entice people in the UK to take those jobs .
Secondly... if you are a UK citizen and you don't want to work... I Don't think forcing those individuals into critical jobs like caring or nursing is a good idea as they are probably not wired for those caring roles, and I would be worried about being looked after by someone that hasn't chosen this as a profession but essentially being forced into these roles.!! Admin or something fine... but what a ridiculous idea for the NHS! It's a tough job and some overseas nurses are better than our hone grown ones as its a calling I feel... to serve and to care.
Aibu to think I don't Want people that don't even want to work in these roles ?
The theory of it makes sense....but you can't practically apply it to industries like the NHS, etc.
I dread to think....

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We’re not known for our work ethic and it’s justified. We’re an inherently lazy nation, partly due to the fact that the benefits system sometimes offers an easier alternative to working a minimum wage job which has created generations of unemployed families. We need immigrants and lots of them. The NHS would collapse without them.

Why do you think refugees coming by boat don't want to work?

I never understand people who go on about employers needing to pay British people higher wages to entice them to work. Presumably people do realise that those employers will pass on the costs of those higher wages to consumers, so we'll all be paying higher prices for everything. We might end up earning more on paper, but that doesn't mean that we'll actually feel any better off. So what's the point?

Do you imagine that, given the option of a pool of people forced into work, construction companies are going to put wages up out of the goodness of their hearts? Why would they? And just how happy would you be about the effect that would have on house prices?

"Currently, UK needs a certain level of immigration because the very low birth rates in UK mean that there's not enough young people to replace the older population, and working and paying taxes for services/pensions etc"

But immigration won't solve this problem, because as the article says worldwide population is dropping. It's effecting every country, if we encourage immigration to the UK other countries will suffer even more.

I'm not sure what the care solution is given this but I don't think it's going to be prity.

The point is people will be pulling down a fair wage for the work they do, not working for pennies to keep you in cheap goods and services.

I am just amazed on the whole mindset. Immigration is hugely beneficial from economic, social, cultural point of view. If we balance the net effect of immigration I would overwhelmingly be positive.

The Prime Minister is not talking about forcing British people to get into univeristy to get a degree then having them going to fill degree level professions, the government are trying to force British people into roles such as carers. The OP is the one who has confused the two.

Would you be ok with 750k (or higher) net migration a year?

It does have positives but is there a number where you think it might get tricky to maintain?

If Daily Mail readers stopped to think objectively and then admitted that immigration is on the whole positive for the UK they would have nothing to blame all our problems on. They might then turn to the government for answers, and the government couldn’t possibly have that happen.

care workers need to be paid more. its disgusting that they are paid so little for such an important job.
its not a random job that the unemployed should be forced into.

a lot of posters are missing the point. the bastards in power government made a number of key changes which created this current situation:

1. taking away the training bursary from nurses - a lot of mums go into nursing and this amount enabled them to go back to education. with this taken away fewer people are able to come into nursing
2. changes in 'junior' doctors contracts which equate to a massive paycut and also unsafe conditions in hospitals. as a result medical schools have had a drop in applications and places have gone unfilled.
3. brexit meant a lot of highly qualified doctors and nurses left the UK and it cut off a significant source of qualified professionals. the NHS is replacing them from individuals from countries where training is not great

immigration is not the problem here, its a red herring to distract from the real issues. we have to sort out our own system. actually pay teachers, nurses, carers a decent wage. I know of nursing and carer colleagues having to resort to food banks and that is fucking outrageous. in the mean time we are all so enthralled with immigration, that we voted the tories in over and over again while they set fire to our public institutions.

They can’t be paid less than NMW. They can be paid a minimum of 20% below the average U.K. salary/hourly pay rate for the role, this is so that if a company hires a foreign worker to work outside London, they can be paid below the U.K. average in line with other workers hired locally for that region in the U.K. The average salary/hourly pay rate is calculated by the Government and published so it’s not even 20% below the average pay within a company. At least half of all domestic U.K. workers make less than the average pay so this isn’t exploitation of foreign workers in the way you think it is.

OK, but if those same people who are now earning a "fair wage" for their work now need to pay more for all of their other goods and services so that everyone else can have a "fair wage" too, how exactly are they going to be better off, except on paper? Is it a win if they earn a better figure but don't actually see any improvement in their overall standard of living?

I'm not against the idea of employers paying a fair wage at all - far from it - and I don't think employers should be able to undercut the wages of local people by exploiting migrant workers from overseas. However, I don't think it's as simple as some make out.

If wages are pushed up, the chances are that the cost of living will be pushed up as well, as companies won't willingly take the hit to their own profits and they will pass on cost increases to their customers. We need a more progressive taxation system that incentivises employers to pay a decent wage without passing the extra costs on, but we don't have that at the moment.

This is completely accurate. However the current issue of people working in care because its an easy job to get rather than because they care is also an issue that needs fixing.
Have come across multiple young British care workers and immigrants alike who have gone into it as it's an easily available job who were completely unsuited to it and not the kind of people you'd want looking after family members.

Its not so much an issue of immigration, its an issue of needing to require more training and personality assessments for care workers before recruiting, and in order to be able to do that it needs to be a more appealing job with a higher wage.

@EasternStandard
I would agree that there are problems in housing, social care, child care, schools and so on. But to blame immigration for these problems is completely incorrect. I have many friends and colleagues who gave this country many years of their working lives, paid all taxes contributed enormously. Once they become parents and see unimaginable childcare costs, horrendous schools and unaffordable housing most of them said good buy.

The main problem in this country is low wages. They have only just slightly increased them for the very lowest paid but in reality the majority of people are hugely underpaid for the work they do. A minority of people are paid way too much. After that issue comes the housing crisis which I've noticed no politicians are even mentioning as it's a beast no one wants to tackle.

When my parents were dying their careers came from south Africa and Greece (all hired through a private agency). They were in short supply. And came over working 3 months on, 6 weeks off when they went home. I wouldn't have cared if they'd come here permanently with their families. They were fabulous professionals who we were lucky enough to pay well. And that's the problem isn't it? We can't afford social care. The well off can, but the government isn't prepared to help those who can't to the extent that those carers are properly remunerated.

My plan for immigration:
-invest in doctor and nurse training
-invest in increasing pay in the care sector and improving conditions
-invest in the home office to quickly process applications to save significantly on accomodation and years wasted in frustration and limbo for asylum seekers
-stop setting meaningless targets which are hugely effected by student numbers
-improve legal migration routes

Yes re: the training bursary. Also, there are some mums who go into nursing but also many graduates who enter nursing, partly because of the bursary which they wouldn't receive to study other subject areas.

I'm in Scotland where there is still a bursary to go to university and study nursing. I had previously completed a biochemistry degree and wanted to do further study, however finance was a barrier. Ultimately, because of the bursary system that we still have in place, I chose nursing whereas I probably wouldn't have went back to uni had there not been funding. Around a third of my nursing cohort were graduates in various disciplines, many of whom were enticed into choosing nursing, in part because the bursary enabled them to return to uni.

I don’t like the announced immigration changes. I think the intentions are two-fold, to copy Singapore. Sunak and his backers are all for this free port, tax shelter, make the rich richer and the poorer poorer type of society. Not being able to bring family, or to get residency as a skilled worker is how Singapore controls its immigration. It also does not allow dual citizenship- perhaps that is next up such that British born abroad will no longer be entitled to British citizenship. Second intention is clearly targeting the primary way the NHS has weathered massive shortfalls in staffing, it’s a further stab in the back to kill the NHS off so it can be replaced by privatised healthcare, a long term objective of the Tories. There are over 130,000 vacant nursing positions in the NHS last I looked even with easy immigration, this will worsen that staffing shortage.

The idea that these jobs should be preferred for British people is already built into the system as employers have to pay an immigration surcharge for every skilled worker visa they sponsor. I agree to with a pp that there are not enough nursing schools, bursaries or student nurses in the U.K. pipeline to fill all these vacant positions. It is true too that it takes years of medical training and education to be a nurse, so it’s not like they can implement these changes and hey presto 250,000 British nurses are filling positions within a few months.

The benefits changes are mostly targeted against the disabled under the impression that they can work from home. There are no WFH nursing jobs at all. Not even admin NHS WFH jobs as all civil service now have to be 60% of their work hours in an office. I also don’t know if disabled would be physically capable of nursing? (Moving patients, rushing around the wards, etc) Or have the mental stability to handle the mental stress and trauma of nursing? (Trauma injuries, dying patients, children with cancer)

Net legal immigration last year was 606,000 people. 40,000 people arrived in small boats.

From the outset I do not think this will work. Care work is hard. It requires shifts at irregular hours and it requires a caring nature. Even if wage rates rise there would not be a pool of unemployed UK people willing and able to do this work and do it reliably and with the care and good nature required. Given restrictions, the UK will now struggle to recruit from abroad and the very flexible European recruitment route is of course closed. The overall impact is that care homes will close, those of us with elderly dependent relatives will struggle to find care at all and when we do find it, it will be more expensive. This is a classic case of politicians responding to a dog whistle.

@Anisette they're illegal immigrants, not refugees. They've already passed multiple safe countries before they get to the UK. Letting them in is also totally unfair on the immigrants who want to come in legally as well as supporting the human trafficking and illegal migration mafias.

I tried to qualify as a nurse in the late 1990s. It's flipping hard work. Very technical, more maths required than you think, and you aren't just trying to help patients you are dealing with budgets, (lack of) staffing and the whole poliics of the thing. I didn't pass

I support people with technical qualifications lije nursing, IT or engineering who want to come to the UK and work. The minimum wage sponsorship bollocks for partners will not encourage these people to come here, they will go elsewhere.

It's not professional people with skills we should be targeting. It's the people fresh off the boats who disappear into the grey and black economy. How can we stop people coming illegally by boat? So far, the Govt has spectacularly failed on this point.