We cannot continue taking on immigrants indefinitely

[MobilityCat]

I'll probably be shot down for saying this but Immigration should be strictly controlled or we'll all become significantly disadvantaged. While international law doesn't require asylum seekers to stay in the first safe country they reach, some governments argue they should. There is a belief that the UK has a fairer asylum process, more legal protections, and better opportunities for work and education compared to other countries. While the reality may be different, word of mouth and social media often spread the idea that the UK is a good place to seek asylum. Our reputation as a desirable asylum destination is straining social services, housing, and the asylum system. The NHS and schools face increased pressure, housing shortages worsen, and asylum backlogs lead to long waits and high costs. Public frustration is growing, fueling political divisions. The system is unsustainable due to financial burdens, fairness concerns, and security risks.

That Crisis link is about the housing crisis in general, not immigration or impacts of refugees and asylum seekers.

There are some very clear reasons why we are in a housing crisis:

-Extremely high mortgage rates meaning that few can afford to buy
-Increasingly inflating private rents meaning that there are fewer genuinely affordable homes available
-Welfare reform and benefit caps, including low LHA rates and TA subsidy limits meaning that fewer people who would otherwise be able to pay or top up private rent through welfare benefits cannot genuinely do this
-because of the above, local authorities are struggling to find genuine affordable options for people who are losing private tenancies, so many people are now approaching as homeless
-limited supply of social housing, RTB knock on effect and slow development meaning demand for social housing way outstrips demand
-further financial and resource pressure on homelessness services including increased duties since the Homelessness Reduction Act
-cost of living crisis meaning many people have little income left for housing costs
-loads of people have a main duty agreed under the Housing Act but councils haven't got enough social housing so loads of people are in TA, which is far more expensive than private rent (also see above re ta subsidy)

Essentially refugees and asylum seekers have nothing to do with the above. If you want to look for causes look to the greed of investors who dominate the property market, forcing up rents. Oh and the government who screwed up the economy and sent mortgage rates through the roof.

We don't need to stop immigration to end the housing crisis. We need rent control, more social housing, a fairer benefit system, more genuine opportunities for good work, selective licensing schemes, etc etc etc

It's f all to do with immigration

Damn I forgot to mention the underfunded social care and NHS systems meaning that many are less able to work than they would be if they were given the care and support they need, again leaving them in poverty and struggling to pay rent. So, health inequality is a huge issue in terms of housing

Also generally higher economic growth and population growth coincide with each other. People contribute to the economy and government by working and paying taxes and immigrants likely contribute more than average because they are younger. It's a bit strange why people think immigrants are costing the taxpayer money when I'm afraid the reality is they are saving the taxpayer money. Also it's businesses who are demanding more visas for immigrants because they like cheap labour. I am afraid older people don't contribute to the Government's coffers as much as they don't pay a lot of taxes, they take state pension which is a huge amount of money and also take up a lot of healthcare. The only way to get out of this problem is having more children or euthanase people after living a certain age. The better option is immigration!!! As for housing problem, lack of houses built and a period of time where there was low interest rates contributed to the high house prices. It was nothing to do with immigrants.

It is the Office for Budget Responsibility that has recently done a turnaround and admitted that low paid immigrants are costing the country almost half a million pounds each by the age of 75.

More if they live longer, and more if they are educated here.

This will no doubt also be true of low paid British citizens. I want the country to support low paid citizens, who I agree often do valuable jobs.

Surely you can see though, that if huge numbers of low paid people are allowed to settle here each year, while large numbers of net contributors leave each year, the country can only get poorer.

Given that GDP per capita is falling, that would suggest this is the case.

There's some evidence that increases in migration increased house prices by 1 per cent but it's not that significant to be accurate.
migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-and-housing-in-the-uk/

It's not me who's demanding millions of low paid workers come over here. It's the health care and agriculture and hospitality industry. If you are happy to pay higher taxes now to pay for UK born workers to work in social care - fair enough. Why is social and health care actively advertising for jobs in Asia? What do you think these immigrants do for their low pay? It's primarily looking after the elderly or working in agriculture or building or hospitality and tourism industry which is massive sector in the UK Those working in the social care sector mean you pay lower taxes not higher taxes! The OBR are looking at their contribution to public finances in terms of taxes over their lifetime. It won't be high because as I said UK takes low paid immigrants not highly skilled ones. But if we took highly skilled immigrants who were paid a lot, people would complain they would be taking jobs from British workers! Everyone who is not paid a lot will end up costing the UK Govt a lot of money because people tend to live a long time and tend to use up a lot of resources in terms of healthcare towards the end of their life. It's not immigrants, it's everyone who is not well paid and therefore doesn't contribute significant amount taxes. As I said Brexit made this whole situation worse because EU immigrants far more likely to return to place of birth when they are older, so they would have contributed taxes and may not have cost so much in healthcare!

If you want to get net tax contributers, UK can do so by recruiting skilled workers from Asia (there are plenty of them) rather than low skilled workers who do vital jobs in agriculture and social care. Nigel Farage is being very manipulative by pointing out that immigrants don't contribute a lot to GDP! He well knows that it's because they do low paid jobs in care and agriculture. If we encouraged highly paid programmers from China and India, things would be different.

Yes. This is it really. The Conservatives absolutely knew that would happen, they signed up to it.

I can see a lot of agitation in the Guardian of all places about Reform and migration and that Labour should think the unthinkable to make radical change on migration and employment.

The response of the Labour Party should be to totally reverse the majority of the migration policy of the last four years and to invest in the citizens we do have. I would also expect that they will also start aping a lot of more right wing policies from Europe and on DEI being dropped because of the cost to business.

You realise Thames water went bust due to asset stripping.

I wonder how much else in this post is misrepresentation.

You’re absolutely right on that front. But the rest stands. Prove me wrong on the other points. Thames is an outlier but the fact remains that however Thames water has gone bust, there isn’t enough water left to go round, even as things currently stand.

TW applied to take millions of gallons from a river recently to boost their supply and the high court blocked it.

TW is another example of numerous badly planned government initiatives that has been extremely bad value for the tax payer,

Immigration will undoubtedly be found to be another initiative that barely pays its way, at all, quite probably.

I completely agree.

If we encourage highly paid programmers from those countries all that will happen is we will fail to invest in our own young people. I listened yesterday to a phone in on LBC and a young man was saying how tough it is now to get a graduate job. There’s so much competition now, not least from people coming in from abroad. He said many of his friends who were really good at what they do, just couldn’t get jobs. You should listen to it. Between 2-3pm. It was a sad listen.

incidentally, China and Singapore have very strict immigration policies which are NOTHING like ours. Because they invest in and retain their young people.

The response to ageing population and declining birth rate is always going to be immigration unless there is a massive surge in UK economic productivity. Nigel Farage knows it and so do most of those on the right of the spectrum. They are duplicitous and take advantage of economic ignorance to get political power. And have no answers to that conundrum of declining birth rate and people living longer. He knew that there would likely be an increase in Asian immigration in response to Brexit and used this to sell Brexit to Asian communities. It's frustrating that people voted for Brexit thinking it would reduce immigration when it did no such thing and also reduce investment and growth. The proof is there now in the data. What happened after Brexit? Higher immigration from Asia likely to lead to a larger population whereas before with European immigration, people are far more likely to go back and forth. Also because of uncertainty of Brexit. UK also had much lower investment post 2016 than any other European country which has implications for growth. Before 2016, UK's investment was actually on a par with other countries. . Not sure how Thames Water going bust is anything to do with immigrants! That post is a classic for let's blame immigrants for anything going.

What is most frustrating is that Brexiteers were completely duped by Farage into voting for much more migration from places far away from the UK!

Millionaires leaving the U.K. at the fastest rate ever.

https://www.forthcapital.com/uk/articles/record-9-500-millionaires-expected-to-leave-the-uk-this-year

I can understand. The country is going downhill fast.

Singapore is a city state with 6 million people and offers no lessons for the UK. It's also got a far denser population and is a city built on immigration! I mean all those people who don't want immigration, they must know a lot of people in UK who are prepared to work long hours for very little money in social care/agriculture and hospitality and tourism. And be very happy to pay far more taxes to invest more in the young in the UK/pay more to care for the elderly and build new social housing. I am not saying that we should get higher skilled workers by the way from abroad. It's just that if we get just low skilled workers, we can't expect them to contribute a lot in taxes and GDP, unless you want to take away all their pay in taxes and not pay them anything?! How do you think all these workers get migrant visas??? It's the sectors that pressure the Government to get more working visas. We're just in denial The public says we don't want higher taxes/we don't want immigrants. But businesses are saying we need low paid/productive workers. We need immigrants.

It's not up to me to disprove everything. It's down to you to back your arguments. Until you show me that the rest is not disinformation and misrepresentation, I shall choose to not believe you.

People are complaining about millionaires leaving the country and at the same time complaining that UK citizens are having to compete harder for jobs and that we should invest in UK workers. You have to make a decision. You either want highly paid foreigners working and living here and paying taxes, or you don't. Those rich millionaires everyone is so sad are now leaving may well be foreigners who competed for jobs with those poor UK born citizens.

Well they’re all from reputable sources like the guardian so go ahead and stick your head in the sand. Just look at the links. It’s very obvious but you’ve chosen not to engage because you’ve got nothing to refute with, what I’ve written.

That’s a huge leap and you know it. What a lot of assumptions. Private wealth and entrepreneurs who’ve been here historically for long periods are not taking jobs, they’ve come here and created jobs and paid taxes because they like what we offered.

They’re leaving now because conditions have changed. Can’t say I blame them.

No that's not a reasonable comparison.

What has happened is that the UK jobs market is now globally competitive and for British graduates that is huge competition. It's not good for young British graduates to be in that position.

In terms of well paid programmers from India or China. No doubt you may need them for a while. But you keep them on a visa for that purpose alone. And you build up your own graduate skills to the level they are no longer needed.

We are mostly parents on here. If you fancy your children competing as young professionals against India or China you will find their lives are going to be very hard. The UK may make a trade deal with India where many Indian professionals come to the UK as part of services, never mind graduate jobs. Do you fancy that kind of competition?

Other economies are much more purposive and careful about who is allowed in and why. It does not have to be "immigration is the only thing that supports the economy". For the Conservatives it was simpler and cheaper.

Nobody voted for this. For years, voters have wanted less immigration, and were promised it.

Brexit did give us control over our borders. Apart from people who claim asylum, who number well below 100k, we have complete control over who is allowed to work, study and settle here.

The conservatives under Boris Johnson, having promised a strict points system to only let in the ‘brightest and best’, instead proceeded to hand out visas to low paid workers for the asking, even allowing employers to pay less than the minimum wage. They no longer had to even pretend to try and recruit British workers.

As people have pointed out on this thread, this has really screwed with the labour market. To take one example, newly qualified nurses are struggling to find jobs because hospital trusts now have contracts with countries such as Nigeria to take so many nurses a year.

To add insult to injury, hundreds of the nurses had faked their qualifications, but are still at large working as nurses.

I suppose it’s some consolation that the latest polls suggest they have destroyed their own party, and no doubt betraying their voters over immigration had a lot to do with it.

After the cost of living, the second most important issue in deciding how people would vote in the general election was immigration.

I suppose we’ll have to see if Labour takes note.

I suppose we’ll have to see if Labour takes note.

Indeed! Well they can hardly ignore the opinion polls, which show that Reform has now overtaken both Labour and the Conservatives - and what is Reform's central message? Control immigration. This is one of the lead articles in The Sunday Times today: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/pm-rails-at-complacent-liberals-as-farage-pulls-the-strings-l5pwvrfvb

The Home Office knows we need immigration for the jobs British people refuse to do. The NHS and social care industries would collapse without it.

That’s the argument that’s always used but show me the proof.

Also we don’t need 1 million new people coming in every year to do these jobs. 4 million extra in 5 years. That’s enough to do these jobs for years.

It’s a old line used over and over again to get a temporary boost to GDP without ever properly thinking through the strain or existing infrastructure, the impact of failing to incentivise our own people to do jobs (pay them better? More holiday? Better housing). With a wealth tax, a lot of this could be achieved but the government just imports cheap labour today, knowing tomorrow some other government is going to Pick up the tab.

If you care anything for this country, the numbers have to stop. And by that I mean our freshwater rivers, sewage which isn’t being processed, our biodiversity which has plummeted, our air pollution.

I would consider more people if the government would actually just run the country better and plan things like better public transport that is properly subsidised but it never happens.

In the meantime we just keep adding to the cesspit this country has become.

If you put too many rats in a box, they turn on each other and kill one another.

There are so many problems in this country. Sort them out first. Stop adding to the strain with extra people.

How long does it take you to get a GP appointment? With all these new people we should be getting one instantly but it’s proof the system of immigration doesn’t work. There’s still massive backlogs because the government has cut funding to hospitals and the nhs. Yet we have more people coming in.

It doesn’t add up. To take more people. Our productivity has stagnated for years. Extra people aren’t changing this. They only add to infrastructure loading.