Anybody else starting to think Brexit might actually INCREASE immigration?

[fakenamefornow]

All this talk about special exception for this, that and the other industries. Free movement for anybody with a job offer (this seems to me very close to what we have now anyway) free movement for students. India has said no special trade deal for us without movement on immigration. Immigration is counted numbers in V numbers out so if we have free movement of workers and students, there has been no mention of pensioners, these are one of our big exports so will keep our numbers up if they can't move easily, as they can now.

Yes, maybe they could work in our care homes? We could pay them in mackerel?
Flipper was quite a helpful sort wasn't he?

Wider pool of potential talent, and numbers more closely aligned with what employers want. It might still be a large number

Do people not realise the impact of Brexit and before that Home Office policies on our brand amongst professionals and academics?

It is the same mindset that thinks we all be able to sell more to the rest of the world even with the effect it has had on our brand overseas and losing the sources of competitive advantage in global markets we derive from membership of the EU for our main export sectors, financial and creative services, science and tech.

The reality is that business and science and tech have been complaining for a long time that the Home office's policies were preventing them from freely recruiting talent, now they are not even getting applications. I know of only EU and non EU professionals who are leaving, not of any arriving. The number of students applying to British universities from India, an important pool of talent for graduate recruiters has halved, particularly after the language test debacle saw many of them illegally deported back to India. You cannot treat people like that and expect them still to come.

Still less jobs, fewer overseas applicants is probably the only way May can achieve her 10k target which is in their manifesto, so she might just manage to achieve that, and that is the important thing isn't it?

It might still be a large number, but it would be a number of the government's determining.

The government already has the power to determine how many people from the EU stay here –or, more precisely, the mechanism by which they can stay here. They just choose, to whip up the masses for whatever reason, not to exercise this power.

What pisses me off is me and my kids and my parents losing rights to go elsewhere in the EU. This is what I'm mot incensed about too, on a personal level. Assuming FOM disappears, or changes radically, it will be a great loss.

On May's self harming obsession with reducing immigration....www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/27/theresa-may-obsession-immigration-weakness-immigration-foreign-students

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/27/theresa-may-obsession-immigration-weakness-immigration-foreign-students

What pisses me off is me and my kids and my parents losing rights to go elsewhere in the EU

Me too. And some posters sarcastic comments about this. Ooh, Petronella Posh won't get to brush up her French with a year in Paris, heart bleeds. Some seem to see the lose of FOM as a way to punish the rich and their children. The irony is that Petronella Posh and her parents will probably have the resources to still enable experiences like living abroad. The kid growing up on council estates in places like Sunderland, Knowsley or Middlesbrough 'playing with shopping trolleys' (as described by one poster) won't. University abroad might still be a remote possibility for these people (as it might be in the UK) but a cheap package to Spain wasn't. With FOM they would then have the chance to stay on if they didn't want to go home, get some summer job handing out flyers or bar work or whatever, learn the language, meet people they wouldn't have met otherwise. This was my life. I grew up at the absolute bottom of the heap on a sink estate attending a special measures school. The only reason I got to live abroad and learn a language and look beyond the life around me was because of FOM and the EU. Some people seem determined to remove these rights from kids like me.

What fake said! Exactly the same here - my opportunity to move abroad, learn a language etc was purely down to EU opportunities as without that and being from a poor background I would not have had a chance in hell of doing what I did. More dressing up the EU as being purely for the "elite" to suit propaganda purposes / indulge ignorant prejudices.

Well yes, exactly. I went to a state school too and going abroad with Erasmus and university enabled me to escape the shackles of the UK Class system under which employers in my nearest city were only interested in my accent, what my dad did and what school I had attended. So yes, making the UK more insular is definitely going to narrow opportunities for the less well off. Hence my rage.

I am really really raging here!!! Think I might have to step away from this whole thing.... Also sorry to hear the Polish mums at my son's schools divided over whether they were "British" enough to be able to stay... Brexit is really having some uplifting effects already ! (joke, of course)

Not ONE of you ever seem to give a flying fuck about our own who cannot get fucking jobs (NOT BY LACK OF TRYING BEFORE THAT IS PULLED OUT) .. But let's call those against it all racist !! Its a cop out and immigrants bring wages DOWN so the bosses get away with that all the time .. I blame the employers ,greed.

Rachel, the UK has virtually full employment at the moment.

The problem in the UK is that the jobs and the unemployed are not in the same places. I shall have very little sympathy with brexit voter claiming the dole being forced to leave behind their families to take care work or farm jobs hundreds of miles away. Be careful what you wish for.

I blame the employers ,greed.
True, but the one thing the EU gave us was some level of worker's rights that our own governments were loathed to do. Once we leave, it'll be a race to the bottom; we'll look back in fondness at the current world of tax-credits, zero hour contracts and 'self-employed' car wash people.

"Not ONE of you ever seem to give a flying fuck about our own who cannot get fucking jobs"

...Bit harsh. I care a lot about this! I just don't see how crashing our economy by sabotaging trade with a "cliff edge" Brexit will help.

I don't have any problems with anyone coming to the UK to work provided they can prove they are who they say they are, they have no criminal record and have a job offer from a UK company as opposed to just joining an agency.

If I was going to work abroad I would have no objections to being expected to do the same. If it becomes harder to get a job in Spain doing bar work then maybe it will mean more jobs for Spanish people.

Yes, quite, Draylon. I eagerly await the UK's slide into damp obscurity and global pariah-dom.

Yes, and those (I mean specifically Boris Johnson here) who seem to think that places like India will bend over and allow us to charge them £££££ for exported goods, without any quid pro quo.