If you consider yourself to be left wing

[MaryMaryVeryContrary]

Do you believe there should be limits on migration (as a net figure) and benefits (as total % of GDP/cap per household), or do you think there should be no limits at all?

I’m a centrist, but whenever these topics are discussed I notice people claiming to be left wing become a bit uncomfortable, and usually make aspersions on the person talking about it before trying to move the conversation on. It’s like they know deep down we can’t just allow them to spiral but equally they’re at loathe to actually say it out loud because of how it looks.

This!
Left and right are outdated categories.
The traditional ‘working class’ has shrunk and is no way aligned with the metropolitan luxury beliefs left(who despise them anyway)

We haven't always welcomed migrants.

Life is always more complex than that.

But we have encouraged at least some types of migrants:

We gave 5.4 million Hong kongers who had BNO passports the right to come to the U.K. following the actions of China

migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/qa-the-new-route-to-citizenship-for-some-hong-kong-residents/

More complex and less encouraged were the Ugandan Asian British passport holders who were expelled from Uganda in 1972.

newlinesmag.com/essays/when-uganda-expelled-its-asian-population-in-1972-britain-tried-to-exclude-them/
The article I think makes clear that this was primarily about race and culture not migration.

Since 1945 we have had a scheme to encourage seasonal agricultural workers to come to the U.K. it was shut in 2013. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7987/

I don’t think ‘allowing migrants to fill roles in care, agriculture and other areas with labour shortages’ is well represented by your post

Interesting question, OP.

I’m on the centre left, my background is very working class and I was the first in my family to go to university. I voted Remain and I will be voting Labour at the election.

My views on immigration are nuanced, and have changed in recent years. In summary: Highly skilled immigration in strictly limited numbers = good. Uncontrolled mass immigration (which is what has happened for the past 20 years) = bad. Current immigration numbers are far too high, which is one of the main reason the Tories who have enabled this situation are going to lose the election, and lose it badly.

When German engineers, Spanish vets, American techies, French doctors etc etc choose to come to the U.K. our economy and our society benefit. Conversely, limitless numbers of unskilled migrants put unsustainable pressures on our housing stock, our schools and our NHS. They also damage cohesion in our communities and undermine the wages & workplace conditions of working class British people.

Those of us on the left have to face political reality. We lost the argument on open borders in the Brexit referendum and at the 2019 elections. Free movement has ended and it isn’t coming back.

I believe in global free movement. It’s the only way to reduce global inequality.

I accept this would mean a drop in “western” living standards for those currently enjoying them, however they have been achieved through the exploitation of others. I would prefer all humans to have access to the same standard of living, opportunities and freedoms.

Preventing migration is simply hoarding resources and perpetuating global inequality.

In my own personal utopia there would be no borders at all. We would be “patriotic” to our planet alone, because that is the only boundary we as a species cannot reasonably transcend.

"Unskilled" care workers are currently propping up our social care system.

Care workers, whether in nursing homes or home care (those 15 minute visits) are overwhelmingly immigrants.

One of the reasons migration is so high is that after Sunak tried to reduce it the care system was struggling so much he needed to open up new visas for them.

m.economictimes.com/nri/work/uk-almost-doubled-health-and-care-worker-visas-in-2023/amp_articleshow/108112738.cms

The current migration is being at least partially driven by the bad state of the nhs, social care and teaching all of which increasingly have to recruit from abroad.

Elderly people are stuck in hospitals because there are no care home spaces or there's no home care and that's because the pay is so bad few people want to do it. He opened up the visas to try to help the health crisis.

I can't stand this argument.
The first census taken in England & Wales which asked about place of birth was in 1861, when we had a population of about 29m.

The foreign-born cohort? 84,000.

Do tell me more about how 0.3% of the population 'built this country' and was vital to it.

I think there should be restrictions but not a % cap. It’s a bit irrelevant what the % is. We need the number we need for the particular industries that need them. Asylum is different from economic migration and should be treated entirely differently. I would like us to take part in UNHCR schemes to take a share of refugees like other countries do.

The problem with a cap on private sector rents is that it would result in an even greater shortage of rental properties: if property prices go up, or if interest rates go up, or if requirements placed on landlords get stricter (which they should), then the rent needed in order to earn a fair return also goes up. One could say “screw the greedy landlords” but landlords are people, often relying on property instead of a pension fund to fund their living expenses, and if renting properties out becomes too unattractive they will sell to owner occupiers and invest in something else instead, and that is entirely normal behaviour.

The only way to make housing more affordable is to build more houses.

A reform of the planning system to make it easier to build houses is, in turn, one of the essential requirements to do that. Another requirement is probably making it less profitable for large homebuilding companies to hold large land banks for many years, to encourage them to get on with it and build.

Unfortunately Brexit has also reduces the supply of housing, probably to a greater extent than the reduction in demand, because large numbers of people who know how to build things properly felt unwelcome and went home.

That's genuinely funny. You should write material for stand-up.

For sure, the current Conservative party represents a triumph of logic, a thorough understanding of economics and an ability to add, subtract and multiply.

I would be considered a traditional left winger. I think a lot more should and could have been done to improve the countries where people are coming from.
If the West and Britain hadn't colonised the world, and then purged so many countries of their wealth, and inflicted English and a Western educational system on these countries then we wouldn't have people coming here in the numbers we do.
Obviously we can't do anything about the past but what we can do is to improve fair trade between these countries to ensure that producers and investors see these as good places to go and we can also help alleviate absolute poverty.
This won't stop everyone from wanting to come but will reduce it. We also need to act much more fast on the environment to prevent worst climate change as this is only going to lead to more poverty in these countries and thus further migration.

I think this is a good approach

I’d consider myself ‘left’ (although as another poster pointed out, left and right are pretty crude and outdated categories).

I always liked the multicultural aspect of Britain and am sympathetic to both humanitarian and economic migration.

That being said, I think people’s concerns around immigration are dismissed too readily. I found the idea of ‘somewheres and anywheres’ as a way of understanding the key distinctions between brexit voters useful. While it’s not a concern I share, I do appreciate that if you come from a smaller, more tight-knit community where you and your family have always lived, you might feel protective of the character of your community and the consensus that’s developed on shared values, traditions and social bonds.

I also don’t necessarily think all the thinking behind new visa and sponsorship rules for sourcing workers from overseas is so awful. The restrictions introduced mean that employers cannot simply fill labour gaps by underpaying immigrant workers from less prosperous economies (which in turn also reduces the remuneration available to British-born workers for those roles). It also encourages employers to train up apprentices and invest in workers entering the industry (for eg trades and construction), which is a longer term investment in the workforce.

Re benefits claimants, I think this is an issue which is massively overstated and used cynically for political gain. I think in the wider scheme of things, it’s an irrelevance.

Yes but that’s because economically the Western EU countries were similar and like for like to the UK. The poorer Eastern European countries weren’t so of course that’s where most of the movement came from.

I completely understand why the Eastern EU citizens came here, I would if I was in their situation. The pull wasn’t the same for Brits to make a better life for themselves there though.

I agree with your point about us being more like Australia and the US. Don’t cap it just make it worthwhile.

Do you think everyone who has a different opinion to you is an uneducated moron? or just politically?

Classy

I would invite you to act in accordance with your values, in the following way:

Global median household income is about USD 3,000 per year ,or $250 per month.

I would therefore invite you to allow you and your family to live on a total monthly budget of $250 / month, and donate the rest of your household resources to charities in the Global South.

If you don’t do that then you are also hoarding resources and perpetuating inequality.

As others have said, it is not as simple as saying all migration is good or bad.

refugees and asylum seekers - I think there should be safe, legal routes to this country, or the ability to apply for asylum from abroad

migration for labour shortages - should be encouraged via a visa system for specific skills shortages

Mass migration due to geopolitical factors beyond our control, particularity climate change - is a reality that requires international collaboration, particularly across the global north. We have to face up to the fact that some parts of the world are becoming less habitable, and there will have to be a shift in global populations. There is likely to be a lowered standard of living for middle class people in the west. How can we collectively work together to manage this painful change without conflict? (Ignoring it won’t make it go away) I think this should involve a UN level agreement that includes political representation from national governments and migrant communities.

what worries me most about the right wing/ reform approach to migration is that it is nostalgic for an earlier time when the welfare state was stronger, and the geopolitical factors affecting migration were very different. That feels like a position routed in fear that is not facing up to the changed reality we’re living in now. Likewise, as a left winger I could point out that there were no limits on migration into the UK until the early 20th century, when border controls were introduced in response to an influx of Jews escaping persecution in Russia. I could hark back to a 19th century ideal of free movement. But of course that would be bonkers because the world moves forward, not back.

They are not propping up the care system. They are propping up the business model of care where wages are kept artificially low by importing unskilled Labour while the proportion of working age unemployed continues to rise in this country.

This soundbite about low skilled migration being a virtue is propaganda used by successive governments and their cronies and lobbyists who benefit from it while the general public suffers the adverse impact.

This is hilarious.
The Tory party forced through brexit which is causing long term economic damage to the country.
Then gave us Johnson making us a laughing stock and then truss which screwed the economy more than any other policy
The Conservative manifesto wants to do away with self-employed people paying NI another economic mistake. Completely uncosted.
The pathetic attempt to control migration through the populist idea of the Rwanda scheme was complete economic rubbish and would have cost so much per head of person and yet not solved the problem in any way. Instead of creating a huge backlog in asylum cases which in the long run is much more expensive.

Search utter ignorance and belief in these fools have landed us to where we are today.

It’s a nice idea, but humans are not able to form a coherent tribe of 7 billion people

This country really is built on immigrants, almost as much as America is.

Admittedly it depends on how far you go back.

But the history of Britain in the history of invasion after invasion and refugees from other invasions.

Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Norman French, expulsion of the Jews, Cromwell's reintroduction of the Jews, the French more times than you can shake a stick at, French Huguenot refugees, Dutch (I count 1688 as a Dutch invasion), Germans, French refugees from napoleon, Indian nabobs and Anglo-Indians, etc etc

It's like a when a white American says they're anti immigrants. Unless you're a Native American you are descended from immigrants!

There's very little ancient British ancestry in the U.K. it's been part of a Scandinavian empire with pretty free movement and part of a medieval and modern Europe with pretty free movement. You are almost certainly mostly descended from immigrants.

The U.K. is just as much an immigrant nation as the US is.

I'm not sure how you could put caps on benefits as there will always be unpredictable events like pandemics which have left a lot of people disabled with long term conditions and unable to work.

In terms of benefit claims, most migrants have no recourse to public funds and have to pay an NHS surcharge. So I don’t think that’s relevant.

For most working class and lower middle class the continued erosion of wages has been the biggest issue. New Labour subsidised businesses (and ultimately product and services costs) through working and child tax credit, which had a slow taper and high salary cut off. It was a solution.
The Tories then reduced the taper and the upper limit to the point enough people didn’t get it that they could claim “benefit scroungers” - convienent forgetting the majority were working families being paid less than a living wage.
They then borough in UC but intentionally under-funding with the fully predicted outcome of causing child poverty. So much so they stopped collecteding the data and the conservative architect of universal credit resigned in protest.

To blame immigrants for the poverty being felt by working families is a gross misrepresentation.

@ll09sm yes, all left wing people are woke idiots who think money grows on trees, and all right wing people are racist xenophobic morons.

Only one of those things are true, btw.

(Sorry for the typos, it happens when I’m rage typing!)

This is a flippant response to be brutally honest. I want systematic change, not a handful of matyrs.