Polish baby boom in UK

[WendyWeber]

blimey - I know they are a valuable addition to our economy, and work v hard, but from 1300 in 2003 to 13000 in 2007; that would be 130,000 in 2011 and 1,300,000 in 2015 if they carry on at the same rate

I would rather ruty didn't say anything to me thanks.
I couldn't care less about immigration(If we did have it my dn@s wouldn't be here) what I do object to Is my dh being priced out of a job by anyone. and I don't like having to have free school dinners/council tax and housing benefit and JSA whilst people who have been her 5 mins are taking the jobs.

Much is said about them doing jobs that no one else wants to do. well my dh wants to do his trade yet can't.
(Now I shall leave this thread as fed up with threads like these)

don't know why you're being rude to me 2shoes just because I don't agree with you.

quite ridiculous that because I argue against slagging off the Poles I am made out to be being unsympathetic/whatever to a particular poster's dh.

And if one knew the extreme difficulties my dh has faced since he came here, and the poor level of work he started with, and the career changes he had to make to do better, perhaps one would see that quite a few people have it hard, thanks. Preposterous.

An interesting little side:
My sister lives in Spain, on the Canary Islands, and there is a flourishing English, German and Scandinavian Expat population. They keep to themselves, eat mostly food from tourist shops wich is familiar from "back home" when they cook themselves, have renamed all the important shops and buildings to their own language as they are unable to say it in Spanish, read only newspapers from back home, have NO CLUE as to what is happening on the island, as they neither speak nor write spanish, and need translation services to buy a car, to go to Ikea, to go to major shopping centres, to set up arrangements with cleaners or decorators or builders, and of course when utilizing the Spanish National Health system.

My sister is fluent in Spanish, and she can hear what the locals are saying about those "bloody" English/Scandinavian foreigners who cant bother to learn the Language, who waste the doctors resources as it takes forever to explain things to them through translators.... Etc.... Do they get ripped off by tradesmen, landlords, etc, hell do they??? Just like here....

It works both ways.

Yes but none of you are answering the key question:

How many people can live on a small island with limited resources? Regardless of who they are, where they come from, this is the point.

Again, I ask this as an immigrant's daughter myself.

I love all of this "they're taking our jobs" non-sense.......they are just as entitled to come to the UK as we are to move to Poland (or anywhere else) in the UK to find a job.

"i work at an airport and you would be suprised at numbers of eastern eu coming in and funnily enough barely anyone going back out."

I find that very hard to believe given the number of Eastern Europeans that DH encounters on a daily basis who make frequent trips back home (on budget airlines) to visit friends and family, and to bring back cheaper tobacco and booze!

ditto everything ruty has said

i am pretty sure i read something a while ago that made out that immigration and emigration balance each other out to a large extent...

thick question but why do so many polish want to come here anyway. what's wrong with poland?

"How many people can live on a small island with limited resources? Regardless of who they are, where they come from, this is the point."

A lot more than you may think

"i work at an airport and you would be suprised at numbers of eastern eu coming in and funnily enough barely anyone going back out."

I guess that is because after trying to live her on the high uk living costs, they are so skint they take the coach home.....

And many of those who came her shortly after joining the EU have left, realizing they need to know the language, and they cannot make as good living her as they thought.

One labourer who put up our fence said he was a production manager at a well known "Victorious" shoe factory back home, he thought he could "make it big" here, and as many others have left pretty disillusioned.

sea
why does anyone go anywhere???

what exactly is it that dont you like about the thread 2shoes?

I'm an employer and I get really Pd off with the 'low wages' thing.

We advertise jobs with a salary. If someone is interviewed and gets the job - they get the advertised salary, regardless of where they are from.

why do we strive to teach our children to share and then find it such a difficult thing to do ourselves?

Eliza2,

Less than 20% of the land in the UK is actually inhabited. The National Statistic office published results from the 2001 census - 80 per cent of the UK population live in urban areas. Urban areas make up 9% of the total land area.

There is plenty of space, what is needed is improved infrastructure and services.

Those are UK figures, including the large area of the Highlands, where few people can live and little food is grown. The proportion of built-up land is much higher for England, where most immigrants come--very understandably, as that's where the jobs are.

Where is the food going to be grown if the fertile arable land of the south continues to be built over? There isn't enough water, either, even for those of us who are here.

My son was talking about a plan to reclaim some of the marshland off East Anglia and build a new city. Frankly, that's the only way I think the country can cope. Or else people landing at Gatwick/Stansted/Heathrow will just see an endless suburban sprawl. Perhaps others don't care about this.

Public services are suffering from lack of investment, the legacy of Thatcherism etc. Greedy businesses are moving to countries like India/ China where labour is cheap.

Now services are crumbling and there is less work available for the semi-skilled workforce.

People are getting fed up and looking for a scapegoat.

Today it's Eastern Europeans as they have no voice or power.

In the 1930's Germany was facing an economic depression and the Jews got the blame.

Let's hope that the BNP don't fleece this situation, and build up support by using Polish immigrants in a hate campaign.

To be honest, I doubt they can do this. Our little village has many Eastern European youngsters working. They look exactly the same as everyone else. (Only rather slimmer and neater.) How would the BNP know to target them?

How did the Nazis know to target the jews, gay people, political dissidents, gypsies.....?

Getting back to the can-do, well-presented Eastern Europeans point--perhaps governments will get the point that these young people have skills our state education has failed to instill in many British teenagers. They're highly literate, speak other languages and have a work ethic.

Sadly in our village we have many local teenagers who've been through the school system here and can barely speak their own language. They have few qualifications and appear to be unemployable. They certainly can't compete with the youngsters from Eastern Europe (I think it's important to note that many come from Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia, too.)

we should be doing more to support them then eliza. not taking money away from teaching budgets to pay for foreign language teachers.

When my parents came here from Jamaica in the 1960s, they lived in one room in a house with about 6 other families. I'm sure they were accused of pushing down wages so that is why the indigenous population would not do those jobs.

The only difference between then and now is that the immigrants being blamed are white.

MerryKerry, I wasn't talking about the government. I was talking about the BNP. Parties like the BNP and the NF in the 1970's use situations of discontent like these to build support. Hitler's National Party were not always the party in government. They had to build support and campaign amongst the people to become a dictatorship.

In the 1970's the National Front in the UK became powerful as people were discontented with the labour government and were looking for change. They blamed immigration for the problems the country was facing then.

Mimizan, I guess it's good that we can have a thread running like this where people can discuss a complicated subject in relatively good temper and with respect. Which is what we seem to have on this discussion--people disagreeing, sometimes passionately, but respectfully, on the whole.

I think the NF/BNP find it easier to grab attention when people feel they have no outlet for debate.

I don't think I've got much more to say and I must ring my (immigrant) mother and then my (Polish) friend, whom I've having lunch with tomorrow.