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**Alternate Sources**
Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story:
* [UK growth since 2010 has been lacklustre and largely driven by immigration, says report](https://theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/09/uk-growth-since-2010-has-been-lacklustre-and-largely-driven-by-immigration-says-report), suggested by peakedtooearly - theguardian.com
Mass immigration to a tiny island can't improve living standards. It can theoretically improve the economy (which it also hasn't done, lol) but not living standards.
But raising living standards was never the goal of mass immigration. The goal of it under Labour was to "rub the noses of the right in it" (Tony Blair's words), and the goal of it under the "Conservatives" has been to use it to funnel taxpayer money to their mates and family businesses, and to make sure wages are kept low for the working classes due to an over-abundance of workers for whom the national minimum wage is like a kings' ransom compared to the part of the world they came from.
Want to be asking how our economy would be looking without immigration.
There's a reason people complain about GDP per capita dropping and not a recession.
Growing the GDP by means of stuffing as many people into the country as possible doesn’t actually benefit anyone.
If gross GDP was an indicator of the wealth of a countries people then we’d be looking at China and India as havens, they aren’t though and their GDP numbers are only so high because they have so many people.
What route do we want to go down? High GDP per capita or just aim for making GDP as high as possible at the detriment of everything else.
Depends on which people you import. The average FAANG engineer paying 100k+ in taxes per year is a pretty good deal for the amount of living space and services they take up (have to pay 5k for NHS charge just for the visa too). Someone working minimum wage in a chippy probably not so much.
The average FAANG engineer imported at £100k salary however means that is a skilled job which gets taken from the native population. If there are no skilled workers then they must be trained.
To just import skilled workers is fueling the lack of graduate jobs as trainee roles are pointless if you can just get an experienced worker in at half price plus no training. Great for business but terrible for society
Also taking doctors from third world countries is bad for those countries. In my hometown (port harcourt, Nigeria) we have a major shortage of doctors as they have all moved to the UK or usa. Some rural parts of Nigeria have one doctor for thousands of people. Other places have unqualified doctors that are basically trained laymen rather than medically qualified. And they are performing c sections and other surgeries with no qualifications & a few weeks training (rules and regulations are a bit more lax there). We have a doctor shortage in the UK too but it is NOTHING like the shortage in Nigeria.
I didn’t know this. Is it home places that are capped or international? I think they probably cap home places because international places are the money makers. Bit if the government is serious about reducing immigration (as they keep claiming to be) they’re going to have to start training home grown doctors rather than importing them, even if it loses the universities money. They will have to start subsidising home places because nobody is going to pay £5m to become a doctor or whatever the going rate is for international students these days.
It's shocking but home places. Shortage of medical staff, lots of bright young Brits want to train but the government needs 1 doctor. They'll pay the salary either way so why bother paying for training too when they can, as you said, bring in a Nigerian doctor that's trained and save that cost.
It's short sighted but the government regardless of who leads is not serious about immigration reduction. It's popular because immigration fuels stagnant wages and lower job opportunities as training positions are removed in favour of migrants and unskilled is worked by cheaper workers. That's before the strain in housing and services from the hundreds of thousands every year with no planning by the government for it.
Sadly shocking, but planned. And many people who question it get called racist which in turn makes an atmosphere of hostility
I totally believe it. I get called racist all the time because i have major concerns about the immigration model in the UK (yes i am myself an immigrant but i still have concerns). Lots of UK Nigerians and minorities have huge issues with the current immigration model - kemi badenoch for example is a very outspoken Nigerian critic. Another huge critic of the current immigration system is Suella Braverman - again a BAME minority.
People online either assume i am not really Nigerian or call me an uncle Tom when they look through my post history and realise i am. Its very frustrating.
Look up the Brunel medical school, opened a couple years ago. Every student was international because the UK government decided it didn't want to fund home students. They are only going to be getting their first intake of home students this September after media pressure a couple years after opening.
Which is now self-perpetuating as the number of consultants and more senior junior doctors available to train students and junior junior doctors is dwindling with the NHS being so staff strapped that releasing them for such duty would further compromise day to day clinical delivery.
We don’t have a shortage of doctors we have a shortage of training.
There’s currently mass GP unemployment and low GP training numbers. And we have some of the lowest doctor to population ratios. Doctors are being replaced with noctors like PAs and causing unemployment.
We have graduate doctors this year who didn’t secure any foundation training so can’t find jobs. Because the Uk is one of the only countries in the world that allows international doctors to compete 1:1 with UK school grads for limited training. So we don’t even train everyone who finishes med school. Yet all the government does is talk about increasing med school places.
On top specialist training is so bad some have 10x as many applicants as spots. So those doctors either don’t secure work, get stuck in a low paid job with no progression or leave the country to train.
Not to mention the rates of GMC referral and loss of registration are highly inflated in international doctors from certain countries due to variations in quality of education. In a time of inability to train we recently had a case of a doctor who joined straight out of medical school from abroad who proceeded to put his phone number if a young female patients phone in mental health crisis. He then proceeded to visit her multiple times at home and did experimental cupping therapies on her (which requires her to be partially unclothed) until the university reported him visiting a vulnerable woman. He did this within 3 months of moving to the UK. He wasn’t even struck off for this and his first tribunal it was noted he didn’t even consider the impact on the patient and only spoke about the effect it has on him and had to have a further tribunal.
The whole system is a mess. Don’t fall for the lies the international recruitment is to fill gaps - we can’t even train those we have. It’s to lower competition and suppress working conditions and wages.
The real solution is to prioritise UK school grads, and increase training and doctor jobs. Internationals in most countries are used to fill training or positions that cannot be filled locally. Which is not how the NHS has been doing it.
Speak to older international doctors and they also hate it. They had to fight hard to work here and be better than average just to have a chance before the changes and now they watch their own kids who can’t even get jobs in medicine.
You misread, the imported FAANG engineers are getting more like 200k, and paying 100k in taxes, these aren't grad roles, they've at least a couple of years experience
As someone who is working in those 100k FAANG jobs this is a bullshit argument. First there are plenty of English people that I a work along with as a colleague. They also didn’t get some magical training that made them eligible for the jobs. None of us in those jobs received special training to be eligible to get those jobs. A lot of the skills needed to get there come due to self learning. Training doesn’t really have anything to do with it
>If there are no skilled workers then they must be trained.
That's not how it works, if you can't find the highly skilled workers in a market then you simply don't open an office there.
Currently, a bit of both, but the government is hard at work figuring out how to further shaft the highly paid engineer to discourage any more of them whilst giving out freebies to anyone who washes up on the beach without documentation.
Isn’t it cheaper importing a FAANG engineer than training one? Also look at how the NHS is grabbing medical staff from other Countries due to staff shortage crisis that they have and don’t know how to address except through immigration.
Lol. Recessions are temporary and inevitable and in every possible way better than unlimited, unchecked, and seemingly unstoppable immigration.
We need to stay again with a zero based budget for immigration. Allow only those we need to come for only the time they're useful. Citizenship the only right to remain and only after 15 years of crime free work or study, or it's off to the airport. Like Singapore has always done.
>Like Singapore has always done.
nah we have the same problem, including a population that has grown by 40% since 2000 entirely on the back of immigration while politicians repeat the mantra that it's "good for the economy"
If you actually read the report, rather than the Telegraph's headline, what they are saying is that the only thing propping up our economy since 2010 is immigration. Without that we would be in a **worse position**.
Citizenship as the only means to stay, with a 15 year residence requirement? Unless you significantly lift salaries (I’d argue more than double), you’d kill a good chunk of the academic research sector and a bigger chunk of pharma/biotech R&D. Which isn’t to say that it shouldn’t happen, I’m just saying that those sectors would struggle to attract the international talent they need under those rules. There’s probably other sectors with the same problem - ie any sector that needs foreign talent and cannot just train more (there’s only so many people that can actually be trained to eg the STEM R&D level).
Without immigration, if the Government and businesses had invested in automation and better training (take Germany as an example) the. GDP, GDP per capita, and living standards would have ridden. This would have relied on companies not wanting to squeeze every bit of profit from the companies, whilst offshoring, outsourcing, and doing the easy things.
Given the UK Government and UK firm owners are lazy and wanting the quick cash, if they did not go down the immigration route their costs would have rise due to less cheap labour, and those earning an income would have been better off.
Imagine a country with 100 people in it and a GDP of £100. This gives it both a GDP per capita and Labour productivity per capita of £1.
Then imagine 10 people immigrate to the country. If they are on average just as productive as natives then GDP will increase to £110 but since there are 110 people then GDP per capita stays at £1.
Last year net migration was 1% of population while the economy grew 0.4% year on year. So everyone got poorer
GDP per capita dropping per person while GDP rising due to too many people arriving means that people are suffering a recesion yet it is never spoke about due to a loophole technicality
A comment made by u/kento218 on this topic was insightful on this:
"Exactly right. And even when they stayed longer they went back home to retire putting pressure on their local health systems instead of ours.
That‘s supported by the fact that the average EU migrant paid to HMRC £2,300 more a year than the average Briton whereas the average rest of the world migrant actually cost us £900 a year (since so many of them, being dependants, consume services without producing).
”An average adult migrant from one of the original 13 EU member states (excluding the UK and Ireland) contributed £3,740 more to Britain’s exchequer than an average UK citizen; an eastern European migrant accession countries paid an average of £1,040 more.”
“The report estimates that the typical European migrant who arrived in 2016 will make a total lifetime contribution to the UK public finances of £78,000”
[https://www.ft.com/content/797f7b42-bb44-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5](https://www.ft.com/content/797f7b42-bb44-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5)
Put it another way, we should want as many EU migrants as we can get. In the last 3.5 years (since we left the single market) net EU migration has been negative.
So we lost our own freedom of movement just to double migration with less valuable migrants. Another great Brexit success."
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/oeWsqrXuER
That's based on pre brexit numbers, so kinda irrelevant now.
Also, average brit is also net negative. To the treasure, that study just puts it at zero for simplification.
Also, the average brit includes the average retiree, which drags down the numbers quite a bit.
> Also, the average brit includes the average retiree, which drags down the numbers quite a bit.
The average retiree has also taken more out of the system than they've put in.
"Mass immigration to a tiny island can't improve living standards"
No shit. It can lower them, though. I'm pretty sure we've got enough Uber Eats drivers already, and we don't have enough affordable housing for our own citizens so we don't need families with 8+ kids turning up either. 1.45mil in the last 2 years. And that's the official, recorded ones so reailstically that's probably closer to 2mil? Maybe more? Meanwhile our systems like the NHS are on the verge of collapse. Our welfare system is also very attractive to a lot of these people, too. Close the borders already until we at least stabilise some of these vital systems. Continuing to put more strain on them is madness.
God forbid we ran out of having a plethora of take away drivers, barbers and workers for stewarding companies (event, retail and bouncer ‘security’) that barely have a lick of English. Our whole economy would collapse! Working for a Uber eats shop, I see different blokes show up for the same lassie called Alina, definitely a lot of undocumented cash being paid.
I understand the need to import carers, nurses, doctors but let’s be serious, we’ve not imported a couple million over the years of people in these professions.
Every time I use a service like Uber Eats it's always someone who can barely speak English and they're very rude. They're paid to bring the order to your door but every time, I get a phone call "telling" me to "come outside my car" because they can't be bothered to get out of the car. I refuse and make them come to my door like I've paid for. Every time I order from a pizza place near me the delivery staff are locals, very cheerful and polite and actually ring my doorbell and hand me the food. I never expected to grow into someone saying these things, but this is my exact experience over the last 5 years or more.
We need a system where people have to prove they have something to offer the country to get in. Qualifications, a job offer, something. We don't need more people doing minimum wage jobs, that a lot of is actually not on the books so our country isn't benefiting from it at all.
Just tried to clarify what you've said about "Tony Blair's words" there and can find no evidence of that at all. Closest thing is one of his advisors saying that they had the impression that some immigration policies were designed to "rub the right's noses in diversity." Nigel Farage then accused Mandelson of having said that but that doesn't seem to be true either. Just interested to see if there's actually any truth to what you claim
There was no NHS surcharge when I immigrated to the UK on a fiance visa in 2005. Your problem was caused by rule changes based on anti-immigration sentiment. It wasn't caused by immigrants.
>So I’m being punished as a British citizen for having a foreign wife
See also the spouse visa threshold which were having to double to stop it being an easy route for chain migration from existing immigrant communities.
Not Tony Blair's words. The original quote comes from a 2012 article in the Evening Standard by his former speech writer:
>Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.
>But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
>I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
>Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote.
https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/don-t-listen-to-the-whingers-london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html
The biggest improvements to the life quality of the working classes have been massive reductions in manpower. Making said efforts more valuable in the market place. Great Plague, WW 1 and 2 etc.
Importing any kind of labour is a detriment to existing labour. Why train people if you can import “skilled” labour cheaper. Why give the slightest fuck about your minimum wage workforce if there’s a queue of people to replace them.
As someone in the IT industry that's been massively negatively impacted by the massive (over 400,000 plus families since 2021) influx of poor quality Indian IT staff I'd say that unless this is reversed it's genuinely game over for the UK IT industry.
I'm Indian so this isn't from a racist standpoint but a factual industry view. Market is dead, quality is poor, wages are down and it's a significant pressure on the housing market as they're typically middle earners (UK standards) and bring immediate and extended family to the UK.
Unless this is reversed (unlikely) it's going to have a lasting impact on housing, rents, wages, NHS demand etc.
https://www.itpro.com/business-strategy/careers-training/359408/india-trade-deal-to-create-2000-uk-tech-roles
Nah, the real problem is offshoring when it comes to IT. The amount of cheap, dogshit analysts hired in India and Sri Lanka is insane.
And you're not even getting good Indian or Sri Lankan analysts, because that would cost almost as much money as getting good British analysts; the point is to pay as little as possible in countries with low wages so you can fill a vacancy.
Who cares if they fuck everything up and destroy your app/website/infrastructure/whatever? That's a problem for next quarter!
Immigration used to be about economics. The Tories are only going for mass immigration to artificially make raw GDP go up though.
We've moved from economic migration to migration for the purposes of rigging a metric.
We've only been saying this for years now.
It isn't racist or xenophobic to question that maybe the huge and unsustainable immigration problem is contributing to things like the housing crisis.
Not only that, but a vast majority are a net minus to the country and are only being exploited to help push wages down for the working class.
In other countries you can't just move there and do a random low level job. You need to actually have skills that contribute and your hiring company needs to justify why they need you instead of a local person.
We should be doing the same.
everyone knows this. Tories just helping the big corps suppress wages and bring fruit pickers in. all money must flow to the corporations at all costs of the society
It affects the salaries in more skilled roles too.
For example post covid, IT salaries went through the roof and everyone was trying to hire IT professionals.
Then in the past few years they’ve flooded the market with Indian IT professionals who will obviously work for way less.
I don’t know if this was an ideological move from Sunak (especially considering his wife’s father owns the biggest outsourcing company in the world). But i have noticed a lot of the Indian IT professionals looking for work in London for example previously worked for her company.
Either way, it’s almost like just as the UK was starting to be somewhat competitive in terms of salary, we get it absolutely crashed down by opening up immigration.
We used an Indian IT company that’s very well known and honest to god they were fucking awful absolutely fucking abysmal. They were so bad we sued them. We’ve never done that before ever.
Was it HCL?
I worked there for a short period to be farmed out as a contractor to other companies and they broke so many employment laws you would not believe.
> It affects the salaries in more skilled roles too.
This needs talking about more. People always focus on the lowest paid work but being able to import skilled workers makes pay stagnation in those jobs worse and also gives employers a means to avoid investing in education or apprentices. It's like a national level equivalent of employers not investing in staff because they can just poach existing skilled workers that someone else has paid to train.
Yup and as of 2022 all Indian higher education qualifications bar a few small exceptions are now valid/equivalent in the UK. So you can just import from India all your tech support, care workers, planners, etc.
Did I mention that India's student population is larger than the whole of the UK's workforce?
I got banned from another sub for merely stating that the person who agreed this deal with India was of Indian heritage, so I'm not going to point that out again, and instead I will state that this trade deal benefits the UK, and was signed 100% in good faith, and didn't having anything to do with our current politicians ethnic backgrounds, nor the cheap labour requirements of infosys.
Life sciences are also facing it as well, because there are tons of people who do biology related degrees but don't have the industry local to them, so employers here exploit that to get them over on a skilled worker visa, and it's really crushed salaries for the industry, 5-6 years masters degree you'll still be lucky to get £28k, despite the UK having the people will the skills and experience.
I am a biomedical scientist in the NHS and we have not hired someone from the UK in three years. The graduates are there but low salaries and the expectation of 24/7 work puts them off applying, so we are hiring Nigerians for every vacancy these days. It means we still only earn £28k as a starting salary.
People seem to forget the fact that if things are good for you in your exclusive club, school, organisation, country, adding more people will pretty much only ever make it worse, no matter who you are adding.
> A social experiment imposed on the British without their consent.
Experiment implies a lack of understanding of the result.
Immigration is not an experiment, it's economic terrorism to keep wages low and worker's rights undermined. It's all intentional.
They literally will never admit they were wrong or humble themselves enough to openly (and honestly) discuss the failures of their stupid experiment. These people would unironically be denying the rape gangs if they could get away with it.
> It isn't racist or xenophobic to question that maybe the huge and unsustainable immigration problem is contributing to things like the housing crisis.
The people who did play the "that's racist!" card also know this. They were just trying to silence people.
The past twenty years has been an utter triumph for the British upper classes (lowercase 'u', anything higher than "upper middle") over the British working class.
They've been playing a Class Cold War that whole period and most people haven't even noticed.
I'm amazed to see this much sense in Reddit. What I dont understand is why people here feel this way about mass immigration but don't support the reform party... Which is pretty much the only one that will seriously try to reduce numbers. Is the Nigel farage hate just for show?
Because Farage is a con man, the party is made up of incompetent cartoon characters and there are far more to the problems with this country than the single issue they are running on.
It's one of the factors. The housing crisis also happened due to the fact that houses were targeted and seen as an investment through buy to let mortgages, the stupidest thing ever. YouTube is full of videos of people teaching you how to buy houses to make multilet properties. "how to get rich" sort of things
I have noticed that myself. However, British were the first in taking advantage of this. Maybe this madness should have been stopped much earlier, especially when you are putting at risk primary needs such as having a roof on our heads
>In other countries you can't just move there and do a random low level job.
Seems to be a common theme across Commonwealth countries. New Zealand, Australia, and Canada all have the same problem and the same results.
This is happening here in Canada now, too. It’s beyond frustrating when people refuse to acknowledge that mass immigration is the common denominator in many of the issues we (and the UK) are facing.
It's not inherently racist to want stricter immigration controls. The issue is that *all* the actual racists hide behind any legitimate looking argument they can find. Meaning the entire argument then gets wrongly labelled as racist.
That's only half the picture. Fast immigration can be fine if your economy is growing rapidly.
The UK has been using immigration to mask a stagnant economy for pretty much the whole period the Tories have been in power.
We need to be measuring our progress by GDP per capita and not overall GDP to avoid making the same mistakes again.
The UK was already one of the best places to live on the planet, with some of the highest living standards humanity has ever known before it started a mass immigration policy.
We needed no such thing to make our lives better.
I think it's more a case of stopping it getting worse. We have high living standards but we have a pensions time-bomb as the worker to non-worker ratio worsens.
It's not a time bomb if you tax the rich and limit immigration, as well as invest in solutions to an aging population.
That doesn't make some billionaires people slightly richer though so we're not allowed to do that.
It is if there’s no one to replace the younger workforce as they age. You can either make the young do more for less, or use immigration to make up the shortfall
Except that the report says that the only thing propping up the post-2010 UK economy is immigration and without it things would be even worse. You haven't even read the article, have you.
The majority of those non-working and unskilled migrants are either here on student Visas and are subsidising Brits educations, or are dependents of migrants working in needed sectors like healthcare.
This cant be right. There have been numerous whitepapers by think tanks that have told us that immigration is wonderful and we cant exist without it. Also that immigrants built this country too.
Given time and some money, you could probably come up with a study which would show or justify any opinion you wanted, especially if you are choosy with the headline or title of the report, since so few people read it.
Anyone who's lived in an area which has been utterly transformed by mass immigration needs no study to judge the policy as a terrible failure which has contributed to cultural unrest, a wholesale change in our communities, huge downward pressure on wages, a monstrous burden to our infrastructure, racial tensions and racism - not just from our own people, but those who have arrived.
>burden to our infrastructure, racial tensions and racism - not just from our own people, but _those who have arrived._
An irony of UK multiculturalism is that numerous minorities themselves often become the most anti-multiculturalist as they entrench their own culture here.
We've spent so long educating white Brits not to be racist, and totally ignored the rampant bigotry in minority communities towards other minorities.
An example is the Libyan community in Manchester where Salman abedi lived. Yes the majority are nice, lovely people, but they don't integrate and keep to themselves and become closed off communities. Where I live there's a huuuggee Nigerian community who keep to themselves and treat whites and Asians like utter shite.
More people are good for the capatalist machine. More workers and more consumers. More of both these things in many (not all) cases reduces living standards.
More workers being available makes you more disposible, it also means more people who are willing to do a job for less money. It has the effect of reducing places in literally everything, less school places, less housing, trasnport becomes more congested, more waste etc
We don't need to be building 400,000 more homes a years and wrecking what is already one of the most ecologically dead countries in Europe. We need less people. People hate this uncomfortable fact. I am contributing to this by not having children as an active choice, so yes I do practice what I preach
https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/news/landmark-report-shows-uk-wildlifes-devastating-decline
Ironically not having children will increase immigration long term, as there will be fewer young people to work and pay for the growing pensioner population. Either immigrants fill the gap in the birth rate or the future will work until you drop.
It's quite ironic that many of the most militant mass immigration supporters are also hugely pro environment and offer a great deal of support to climate change movements and the notion that we must stop polluting.
Pretty obvious we get poorer the more third world immigrants we import. What's frustrating are the people who are useful idiots for the super rich and pretend like this isn't the most obvious thing.
it's not obvious at all, in fact it's exactly the opposite. The issue is that the huge economic gains from immigration are not shared with the people, they're kept by the 0.1%.
99% of the issues that non-racist people have with immigration are actually issues with wealth redistribution and funding of public services and nothing to do with actual immigration. In other words they are entirely the fault of the government of the day's policies and not the actual numbers of migrants.
Except the two are literally in tandem - you can't have mass immigration without worker suppression, wage suppression, and siphoning of the wealth to the already wealthy.
Public services are crumbling in large part because the vast majority of immigrants being imported from the third world (aka most of the UKs immigrants) are net-negative tax contributers, who will take more than they contribute in their lifetimes. How do you expect a social wellfare system to function when we're increasing the pressure on it massively year over year while having less effective tax revenue to fund it with?
And if the answer is "tax the wealthy more", the reality is that in a globalised world, the only people whose money being taxed more will make a significant difference are so entrenched offshore that it's functionally impossible without global coordination between nations, and you're really going to struggle to tell middle to upper middle class people why they should accept a lower quality of life and higher taxes to pay for the mass immigration that's already causing this country to crumble
> In other words they are entirely the fault of the government of the day's policies and not the actual numbers of migrants.
I really don't think you understand the sheer quantities of immigration we're experiencing. The UK is importing the equivalent of another 1/3 of Northern Ireland's population every year now. Where do you think we put all of these new people? Are we building a new major city for them to live in every year? Even though we don't have the infrastructure to even take care of the people living here already?
And these aren't the same as population increase from births, they're adults who immediately need housing of their own, put an extreme demand on healthcare services from the getgo, and require taxpayer funding to pay for their existence here quite literally immediately unless they happen to be in a well paying line of work, which is not the case for 90% of the UKs current source of immigrants.
Seems obvious? Improving living standards is a wealth distribution problem. What about adding more people to the working pool improves anything at all about wealth distribution in any meaningful way?
The problem is a Tory government not wanting to do anything but enrich their friends. The other problem is idiots voting for Brexit, giving less money to spread around. Immigration doesn't increase or lower living standards, but it can add more money to the economy, which can then be used to improve living standards...if you have a government that way inclined, which we don't. They've been OK so far because they've a significant proportion of people who will ignore them filling their own and their friends pockets to blame other poor people
Immigration props up our otherwise aging population.
Living standards would go down if we had fewer tax payers and the same number of pensioners / children.
Either the government would need to raise taxes to maintain the welfare state or the welfare state would need to be scaled back.
Of course the government *could* only raise taxes on the richest in society but we both know that’s not going to happen.
27% of nurses in the NHS are immigrants lol.
https://www.nhsconfed.org/articles/immigration-harming-nhs#:~:text=Recent%20NHS%20data%20shows%20that,nurses%20and%20health%20visitors%20recorded).
Maybe we wouldn't need as many immigrant nurses if we made nursing more a more attractive career instead of keeping the wages low, hours high, and filling the gaps with immigrants.
That's the difference between skilled workers who can help grow the economy and vast numbers of unskilled workers who are an additional drain on the economy.
Absolutely. Pushing everyone to go to University was a massive fuck up and there should have been equal effort to get people onto apprenticeships to learn a trade. When I was at uni, there were people who should not have passed even 1st year and when this was raised with the lecturer he just said 'everyone must pass'. That was the direction staff were given by the Dean.
So the people who have been saying this for years - and being called racist and xenophobic - are correct. Immigration is too high and is having a negative impact on the general public. Colour me shocked.
In a surprise to literally no one but a chunk of online and IRL bleeding heart people.
Same people: I don't understand why Farage has a popular following. Hurr durr idiots.
Ah but Farage is only popular as he's brainwashed us. We can't possibly be capable of independent thought and were not thinking it before he said it. /s
The same Farage who's grand idea has knocked 5% off our GDP, given us a "gold standard Australian style points based immigration system" and replaced immigration from culturally similar countries with immigration from Asia, Africa and the middle East? That Farage?
Who would have guessed that getting rid of skilled European migrants who would expect a reasonable standard of living, for skilled migrants from third world countries willing to work for a pittance, would suppress wage levels for everyone?
Well not really, because Brexit voters wanted less immigrants, not for our political class to immediately just circumvent the electorate and replace the European migrants with a different category of migrant.
At least this way the politicians have to take responsibility for this, instead of just saying "But muh EU free movement".
The article says that it has also propped up the economy. I'm guessing nobody here bothered to read it.
You can't vote consistently vote for a party that openly despises the working class, the NHS and public services and then complain when living standards for the 99% stagnate or collapse.
No the headlines already confirmed my biases and allowed me to place blame on people who can’t fight back so that I never have to question the leaders of the country because that’s actually hard to do.
Good lord this is a classic example of people not reading the story, and leaping to conclusions based on their own personal bias. It's like when the Mueller document uncovered extensive Russian collusion, but people boldly announced there was no evidence of Russian collusion.
What the article says is that economic growth in the UK over the past decade has been extremely poor, and the only thing that has helped it is immigration. Immigration has propped growth up, and without it this country woudl probably have been in recession for most of the last decade.
So the conclusion is clear, the Tories have allowed immigration at high levels to prop up a failing economy because they didn't have any other plan to increase growth. (No doubt because their primary focus was on making the rich richer and performing a smash and grab on what was left of the nations wealth.)
Please people, read more than the Telegraphs deliberately misleading headline, look at the Guardians version on the same story, and understand how and why the Telegraph is deliberately manipulating you by toying with your internal biases about migrants.
You can preach but the masses won't listen. Just carefully selected headlines to create, sustain and support a specific narrative.
The country had been mismanaged for years/decades and the political parties are getting away with it by finding the usual scapegoats to blame it on.
Because overall GDP means fuck all when per Capita is stagnant. It’s obvious, and the impact on mass immigration in bringing that down is also obvious.
This headline is misleading information and obvious bait, the article itself has barely anything to do with immigration apart from the first few lines and last few lines and the kicker?
**The article is saying immigration has been keeping the economy afloat, but has masked the economic problems this country has been facing — without it, the economy would be even worse.**
It’s like they’re hoping you look at the headline and go “I knew it!” Or “yeah that’s right!” And not read the bloody thing.
Judging by the comments here, this spin has been very effective, I’d be impressed if it wasn’t so fucking depressing.
> **Record immigration has failed to make Britons richer** and is masking a crisis in productivity, a leading think-tank has warned.
What kind of nonsense is this lmao?! It’s the government’s job to make us richer. Immigration can help to boost an economy and offset an ageing population, but it won’t “make us richer” if the government and businesses do not play ball or capitalise on it.
But, the Tory’s have been doing the opposite by squeezing every last penny out of the public purse while immigration has helped paper over the economic cracks.
> The Resolution Foundation said **the fastest population growth in a century had propped up the British economy since 2010**, with three quarters of the six million increase accounted for by inward migration.
> However, it added that Britain’s “middling growth record” since the Tories took power had done little to boost GDP per person – which economists believe is a better proxy for living standards because it accounts for population growth.
Here we go, now we get to what’s actually going on, and it’s nothing to do with immigration, just Tory policy failure for the past decade and a half-ish.
And when you click on the link provided it takes you to an article with this intro:
> **Income growth under the Tories has been the “worst in generations”,** the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said, as households are squeezed by a growing tax burden.
> **The average Briton would be almost £5,000 richer if living standards had grown at the rate recorded in the 50 years prior to the Conservatives coming to power in 2010, the IFS said.**
So, what’s this got to do with immigration failing to “make us richer”?
Now back to the main article:
> Separate analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that **surging debt interest and a ballooning benefits bill meant Rishi Sunak had presided over the biggest increase in the size of the state of any post-war Conservative government.**
> The IFS said the size of the state was likely to remain bigger than before the pandemic, **as an ageing population and geopolitical tensions pile pressure on the public purse.**
The ageing population rears its head once again and it’s only going to apply more pressure on people’s purses if things don’t change to account for the increased lifespan.
> **”Britain’s middling growth record has been propped up by a booming population.** The extra six million people in Britain have certainly made the economy bigger, but has done little for GDP per capita. In fact, **the UK’s record on productivity – which is what really matters for living standards – is exceptionally bad.**
> “There is widespread consensus on the need to turnaround the UK’s productivity record, which is far easier to talk about than deliver. But if the next government is looking for encouragement, it should seek to build on Britain’s already booming services exports, which could really go gangbusters over the coming decade.”
Again, immigration has helped boost the economy and keep it afloat, but productivity is in the crapper [(it’s important to know what “productivity” means in this context).](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/productivity.asp)
I know a lot of people here hate immigration, but come on guys, read the article, this headline is obvious propaganda and you’re eating it up.
Yep, the research by the Resolution Foundation and the IFS mentioned in the article literally state the opposite. This is literal misinformation by the Telegraph, they are saying that without immigration things would be much worse.
Sadly anti-immigration people don't care about actual evidence, coming not just from think tanks but the OBR, ONS, Bank of England etc. They're not eating it up, they're just extremists who made up their mind and can only use slogans and click bait headlines as ammunition
i think theres plenty of us, its just that the ones with a chip on their shoulder often shout first and shout loudest. They shout first because the rest of us are actually reading the article while their typing their reaction to the headline...
The Canadian liberals have been doing similar things. Something like 1.7m in a year, I'm generally left wing and pro-immigration (since I myself am an immigrant here) but numbers do need to be balanced to not disrupt everyone's wellbeing.
My understanding is that the libs were doing this to correct longer term structural deficits in the economy - the theory being stagnant population growth harms the economy and bringing in high reproducing immigrants we can sustain growth for far longer.
It's not wrong, I suppose, but the pace of it messed everything up.
Well I don't know about that, *some* people have been enjoying the same jumps in pay and conditions enjoyed in the 90's and earlier.
Percentile of hourly pay|Annualised growth rate, 1975-1999|Annualised growth rate, 1999-2023
:--|:--|:--|
**5**|**1.7**|**2.0**
**10**|**1.5**|**1.6**
20|1.6|1.2
30|1.8|0.9
40|1.9|0.8
50|2.1|0.7
60|2.3|0.6
70|2.5|0.6
80|2.7|0.5
90|2.9|0.4
[hourly pay growth by pay percentile - March 2024](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/real-annualised-hourly-pay-growth-by-pay-percentile/real-hourly-pay-growth-by-pay-percentile-uk-1975-1999-and-1999-2023)
A cynic might think a lot of people have been let in to depress wages at the lower end of the scale. 🤔
Massive con that it’s helped GDP whilst overwhelming infrastructure and public services and ignoring the plummeting GDP per person which is more reflective of living standards
Meanwhile the far left will try to guilt trip you for not voting Corbyn who wanted an unregulated, open border policy. Their inferiority complex to conservatives and even liberals will always be a renewable source of comedy to me.
But Corbyn never got into power. Its the tories who have broken immigration records this past decade after promising brexit and their policies would close borders.
Is the far left in the room with us now?
I wouldnt find comedy in the fact youd happily ignore whats actually happening to try and laugh at some imaginative scenario or people. It sounds rather sad.
Call 116 123 to talk to Samaritans
Hang on.. this think tank say the last 16 years there’s been little improvement to living standards..and they put it mostly on immigration?
And the decade before that there was migration and there was living standard growth?
A bit contradictory for my small brain.
Don’t government policies play a big roll living standards..
Who’s been in charged of government for the last 14 years?
What else impact living standards other than migration and government?
Lack of housing?
Personal health?
Education?
Debt and income?
Social services?
Environmental quality?
They actually say that immigration has flattered the UK economy that would otherwise have suffered more due to poor productivity. The DT are trying to spin it the other way. Not-smart people are lapping it up.
Always worth going to the source with these things. Eg. [The Resolution Foundation’s press release. ](https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/britains-economic-growth-has-been-flattered-by-a-booming-population-but-rising-productivity-holds-key-to-stronger-growth-in-the-next-parliament/)
Who’d have thunk it. It’s the evidence that was staring people in the face in areas which experienced high immigration. Take Boston where, last time I checked, 26% of the population are now immigrants. It was never that nice of a town, but it had enough to support a Marks and Spencer’s and an independent department store of high quality. All that’s gone. While one can’t say that the decline was *caused* by migration, it certainly hasn’t mitigated it.
> and an independent department store of high quality. All that’s gone.
Immigration has nothing to do with that, the changing retail & high street landscape in the face of the internet and the rising costs of running bricks and mortar businesses is to blame.
You're telling me that importing massive amounts of what has mostly been uneducated Muslim men has been a bad thing for a western/liberal country that those same men hate?
No Wai!?!
The controversial opinion is we need to automate as many of the low skilled jobs as possible and only accept highly skilled immigrants, who pay high amounts of tax.
I find myself conflicted over this. I’m an immigrant worker who does an office job (good pay too) so I like to think my presence is positive. But then there’s also this narrative that immigration equals bad, and from an economic standpoint I totally get it, we truly do not need _that_ many people. Is there a middle-ground? 🤔
Brother, immigrants are people, immigration is a system. Most people are not angry at the people but at the system failing to work for them. The country has a duty to provide a good standard of living to those who legally reside in it, which includes yourself and other immigrants. However the current system is geared towards the interests of big business. Keeping wages low, conditions and perks poor, not being willing to train people etc
That’s exactly it though! I don’t want to be one of those people who would take the ladder away (Sunak and Braverman comes to mind)… but at the same time the current situation is unsustainable.
There's only a finite amount of business to be done so increasing the population just means more picking off the same carcass.
Seen it happen in the transport industry, in particular the Courier game.
We all knew this already. Remember when that woman in Question Time said "but who's going to serve me my coffee in Pret?!"
The goal of mass low skilled migration was to keep wages low so middle class London types didn't have to pay a bit more for their lattes.
We used to get called xenophobes for pointing out the very real consequences of this policy. Now we're living with those consequences the former advocates of it are stood there doing surprised pikachu face
Serious questions: As everyday I read in the papers that we are short agricultural workers, carers & restaurant workers... Why not let those who are proficient in English just work?
We have a minimum wage in place, so why not let them work & pay taxes? The current system spends too much to keep them helpless. At least let them pick strawberries or push wheelchairs & contribute to the tax base.
If you're referring to asylum seekers (a small subset of immigrants), you're right, refusing them right to work manufactures a completely unnecessary state dependence for which they can then be criticised.
Because that’s horrific for competition. In a healthy job market, if a job isn’t being filled then it’s because the working conditions are to poor, and the wages are too low to make it worth while. Especially for low skilled roles like you just mentioned.
You’re just kicking the can down the road by importing people from third world countries that will accept those conditions for the time being.
Unfortunately there will still be people who blindly shout racism when this topic comes up. I haven’t looked through the comments yet but I’d bet that at least a few will complain at ‘what this sub has become’.
The Tories have clearly turned a blind eye to mass immigration in order to benefit the owners of capital. Labour will be the same or worse, only it will be for ideological reasons, rather than to benefit capital. Either way I really see no change.
Ah, the fault of migration - and definitely not Brexit.
The problem with the analysis on the article is that the UK actually has only middling migration compared to other major European economies, but we have seen the largest fall in living standards in the OECD compared to pre-COVID levels and we are the only major European economy who's GDP per capita is still below pre-COVID levels.
I think, as a third world country resident, the problem is the demographic of the immigrants that are accepted.
Employers want cheap workers since british locals doesn't want shitty jobs with abysmal wage.
Public wants skillful workers like engineers, doctors etc. to do harder, more time consuming and tiring jobs than average in order to raise life standards without forcing themselves since they used their own countries' resources for their education and the work they have done is profitable so they are positive net gain for public.
Power balances between middle and upper classes are inverse because middle class uses the upper class' resources in order to elevate their living standards and thus while upper class getting poorer they also have hard time with low wage workers since the public doesn't accept this type of agreement anymore, they are not desperate.
Politicians side with upper class of course and producing anti immigrant propaganda for retaining public anger while in real life they are actually opposing it.
Many of my successful friends are rejected while other hardcore sharia muslim, ignorant, disrespectful and low class people are accepted for those reasons.
But it's raised the living standards of the nurse from a Hyderabad slum, ain't it? Gotta look at that big picture - we should pull up the world.
Give me your tired, your poor, your Filipino doctors, your Iraqi deliveroo riders.
Why would anyone rely on immigration itself to raise living standards? What an absolutely ass-backward idea.
You raise living standards with investment, growth and productivity. These can be aided (or not) by immigration.
BREAKING NEWS: Water is wet!! This is the same brain numbing shit I have to read in Canada about our insane immigration quotas, the reason immigration historically has raised quality of life is because the immigrants would work jobs for shit pay that padded out the economy and live in horrible tenements nobody else would go near. Nowadays, corporate greed has made it so everyone works for shit wages in sub-par housing, most of which is rented. All this insane immigration is doing is putting strain on social services that are heavily underfunded and sparse for all the locals who now desperately need them, breeding resentment between them and the new immigrants that’s capitalized on by far-right politicians and political movements. Another problem is that a lot of immigrants are coming to Britain and Canada then becoming angry and misanthropic because their quality of life is actually lower than the country they came from, driving up crime and antisocial behaviour. Both the UK post-brexit and Canada post-covid need to work on fixing their stagnant economies without using foreign labour as a bandaid and increase investment into social services, otherwise these massive waves of immigrants will just destabilize the country and allow for political extremism to take hold.
This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/09/record-immigration-britain-failed-raise-living-standards/) for an archived version. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.* --- **Alternate Sources** Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story: * [UK growth since 2010 has been lacklustre and largely driven by immigration, says report](https://theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/09/uk-growth-since-2010-has-been-lacklustre-and-largely-driven-by-immigration-says-report), suggested by peakedtooearly - theguardian.com
Mass immigration to a tiny island can't improve living standards. It can theoretically improve the economy (which it also hasn't done, lol) but not living standards. But raising living standards was never the goal of mass immigration. The goal of it under Labour was to "rub the noses of the right in it" (Tony Blair's words), and the goal of it under the "Conservatives" has been to use it to funnel taxpayer money to their mates and family businesses, and to make sure wages are kept low for the working classes due to an over-abundance of workers for whom the national minimum wage is like a kings' ransom compared to the part of the world they came from.
Want to be asking how our economy would be looking without immigration. There's a reason people complain about GDP per capita dropping and not a recession.
Growing the GDP by means of stuffing as many people into the country as possible doesn’t actually benefit anyone. If gross GDP was an indicator of the wealth of a countries people then we’d be looking at China and India as havens, they aren’t though and their GDP numbers are only so high because they have so many people. What route do we want to go down? High GDP per capita or just aim for making GDP as high as possible at the detriment of everything else.
Depends on which people you import. The average FAANG engineer paying 100k+ in taxes per year is a pretty good deal for the amount of living space and services they take up (have to pay 5k for NHS charge just for the visa too). Someone working minimum wage in a chippy probably not so much.
The average FAANG engineer imported at £100k salary however means that is a skilled job which gets taken from the native population. If there are no skilled workers then they must be trained. To just import skilled workers is fueling the lack of graduate jobs as trainee roles are pointless if you can just get an experienced worker in at half price plus no training. Great for business but terrible for society
Also taking doctors from third world countries is bad for those countries. In my hometown (port harcourt, Nigeria) we have a major shortage of doctors as they have all moved to the UK or usa. Some rural parts of Nigeria have one doctor for thousands of people. Other places have unqualified doctors that are basically trained laymen rather than medically qualified. And they are performing c sections and other surgeries with no qualifications & a few weeks training (rules and regulations are a bit more lax there). We have a doctor shortage in the UK too but it is NOTHING like the shortage in Nigeria.
The worst part is people want to train but places are capped by the UK government
I didn’t know this. Is it home places that are capped or international? I think they probably cap home places because international places are the money makers. Bit if the government is serious about reducing immigration (as they keep claiming to be) they’re going to have to start training home grown doctors rather than importing them, even if it loses the universities money. They will have to start subsidising home places because nobody is going to pay £5m to become a doctor or whatever the going rate is for international students these days.
It's shocking but home places. Shortage of medical staff, lots of bright young Brits want to train but the government needs 1 doctor. They'll pay the salary either way so why bother paying for training too when they can, as you said, bring in a Nigerian doctor that's trained and save that cost. It's short sighted but the government regardless of who leads is not serious about immigration reduction. It's popular because immigration fuels stagnant wages and lower job opportunities as training positions are removed in favour of migrants and unskilled is worked by cheaper workers. That's before the strain in housing and services from the hundreds of thousands every year with no planning by the government for it. Sadly shocking, but planned. And many people who question it get called racist which in turn makes an atmosphere of hostility
I totally believe it. I get called racist all the time because i have major concerns about the immigration model in the UK (yes i am myself an immigrant but i still have concerns). Lots of UK Nigerians and minorities have huge issues with the current immigration model - kemi badenoch for example is a very outspoken Nigerian critic. Another huge critic of the current immigration system is Suella Braverman - again a BAME minority. People online either assume i am not really Nigerian or call me an uncle Tom when they look through my post history and realise i am. Its very frustrating.
Look up the Brunel medical school, opened a couple years ago. Every student was international because the UK government decided it didn't want to fund home students. They are only going to be getting their first intake of home students this September after media pressure a couple years after opening.
Which is now self-perpetuating as the number of consultants and more senior junior doctors available to train students and junior junior doctors is dwindling with the NHS being so staff strapped that releasing them for such duty would further compromise day to day clinical delivery.
We don’t have a shortage of doctors we have a shortage of training. There’s currently mass GP unemployment and low GP training numbers. And we have some of the lowest doctor to population ratios. Doctors are being replaced with noctors like PAs and causing unemployment. We have graduate doctors this year who didn’t secure any foundation training so can’t find jobs. Because the Uk is one of the only countries in the world that allows international doctors to compete 1:1 with UK school grads for limited training. So we don’t even train everyone who finishes med school. Yet all the government does is talk about increasing med school places. On top specialist training is so bad some have 10x as many applicants as spots. So those doctors either don’t secure work, get stuck in a low paid job with no progression or leave the country to train. Not to mention the rates of GMC referral and loss of registration are highly inflated in international doctors from certain countries due to variations in quality of education. In a time of inability to train we recently had a case of a doctor who joined straight out of medical school from abroad who proceeded to put his phone number if a young female patients phone in mental health crisis. He then proceeded to visit her multiple times at home and did experimental cupping therapies on her (which requires her to be partially unclothed) until the university reported him visiting a vulnerable woman. He did this within 3 months of moving to the UK. He wasn’t even struck off for this and his first tribunal it was noted he didn’t even consider the impact on the patient and only spoke about the effect it has on him and had to have a further tribunal. The whole system is a mess. Don’t fall for the lies the international recruitment is to fill gaps - we can’t even train those we have. It’s to lower competition and suppress working conditions and wages. The real solution is to prioritise UK school grads, and increase training and doctor jobs. Internationals in most countries are used to fill training or positions that cannot be filled locally. Which is not how the NHS has been doing it. Speak to older international doctors and they also hate it. They had to fight hard to work here and be better than average just to have a chance before the changes and now they watch their own kids who can’t even get jobs in medicine.
You misread, the imported FAANG engineers are getting more like 200k, and paying 100k in taxes, these aren't grad roles, they've at least a couple of years experience
As someone who is working in those 100k FAANG jobs this is a bullshit argument. First there are plenty of English people that I a work along with as a colleague. They also didn’t get some magical training that made them eligible for the jobs. None of us in those jobs received special training to be eligible to get those jobs. A lot of the skills needed to get there come due to self learning. Training doesn’t really have anything to do with it
>If there are no skilled workers then they must be trained. That's not how it works, if you can't find the highly skilled workers in a market then you simply don't open an office there.
I completely agree with you, what one do we currently have right now though?
Neither, we have deliveroo drivers. (Which is a god send this morning, thanks Abdul)
Everyone hates immigration until you need someone to deliver your hangover scran. Then it's all, thanks Abdul. Smh
Currently, a bit of both, but the government is hard at work figuring out how to further shaft the highly paid engineer to discourage any more of them whilst giving out freebies to anyone who washes up on the beach without documentation.
Isn’t it cheaper importing a FAANG engineer than training one? Also look at how the NHS is grabbing medical staff from other Countries due to staff shortage crisis that they have and don’t know how to address except through immigration.
Well,it obviously benefits someone or it would have been clamped down on. Companies that provide temp accommodation have been making bank.
Obviously high GDP per capita would be an excellent outcome. But that wasn’t the strategy.
Lol. Recessions are temporary and inevitable and in every possible way better than unlimited, unchecked, and seemingly unstoppable immigration. We need to stay again with a zero based budget for immigration. Allow only those we need to come for only the time they're useful. Citizenship the only right to remain and only after 15 years of crime free work or study, or it's off to the airport. Like Singapore has always done.
>Like Singapore has always done. nah we have the same problem, including a population that has grown by 40% since 2000 entirely on the back of immigration while politicians repeat the mantra that it's "good for the economy"
If you actually read the report, rather than the Telegraph's headline, what they are saying is that the only thing propping up our economy since 2010 is immigration. Without that we would be in a **worse position**.
Citizenship as the only means to stay, with a 15 year residence requirement? Unless you significantly lift salaries (I’d argue more than double), you’d kill a good chunk of the academic research sector and a bigger chunk of pharma/biotech R&D. Which isn’t to say that it shouldn’t happen, I’m just saying that those sectors would struggle to attract the international talent they need under those rules. There’s probably other sectors with the same problem - ie any sector that needs foreign talent and cannot just train more (there’s only so many people that can actually be trained to eg the STEM R&D level).
But GDP per capita is better linked to living standards than GDP itself. Why should the focus be on GDP as a whole?
Quantity over quality is at play, for sure
Without immigration, if the Government and businesses had invested in automation and better training (take Germany as an example) the. GDP, GDP per capita, and living standards would have ridden. This would have relied on companies not wanting to squeeze every bit of profit from the companies, whilst offshoring, outsourcing, and doing the easy things. Given the UK Government and UK firm owners are lazy and wanting the quick cash, if they did not go down the immigration route their costs would have rise due to less cheap labour, and those earning an income would have been better off.
> (take Germany as an example) Germany has had immigration in the last few decades that makes ours look tiny.
Germany also has an area over 3 times larger than us but not even double the population
Imagine a country with 100 people in it and a GDP of £100. This gives it both a GDP per capita and Labour productivity per capita of £1. Then imagine 10 people immigrate to the country. If they are on average just as productive as natives then GDP will increase to £110 but since there are 110 people then GDP per capita stays at £1. Last year net migration was 1% of population while the economy grew 0.4% year on year. So everyone got poorer
Probably better. There are examples of the Scandinavian countries that show immigration from certain areas does not increase GDP.
Recessions are never permanent. I’d rather have the occasional recession than the continual decrease in GDP per capita.
GDP per capita dropping per person while GDP rising due to too many people arriving means that people are suffering a recesion yet it is never spoke about due to a loophole technicality
Who cares about GDP? GDP per capita is what needs to increase, not just GDP. GDP doesn't help the average person.
A comment made by u/kento218 on this topic was insightful on this: "Exactly right. And even when they stayed longer they went back home to retire putting pressure on their local health systems instead of ours. That‘s supported by the fact that the average EU migrant paid to HMRC £2,300 more a year than the average Briton whereas the average rest of the world migrant actually cost us £900 a year (since so many of them, being dependants, consume services without producing). ”An average adult migrant from one of the original 13 EU member states (excluding the UK and Ireland) contributed £3,740 more to Britain’s exchequer than an average UK citizen; an eastern European migrant accession countries paid an average of £1,040 more.” “The report estimates that the typical European migrant who arrived in 2016 will make a total lifetime contribution to the UK public finances of £78,000” [https://www.ft.com/content/797f7b42-bb44-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5](https://www.ft.com/content/797f7b42-bb44-11e8-94b2-17176fbf93f5) Put it another way, we should want as many EU migrants as we can get. In the last 3.5 years (since we left the single market) net EU migration has been negative. So we lost our own freedom of movement just to double migration with less valuable migrants. Another great Brexit success." https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/oeWsqrXuER
That's based on pre brexit numbers, so kinda irrelevant now. Also, average brit is also net negative. To the treasure, that study just puts it at zero for simplification. Also, the average brit includes the average retiree, which drags down the numbers quite a bit.
> Also, the average brit includes the average retiree, which drags down the numbers quite a bit. The average retiree has also taken more out of the system than they've put in.
Also includes children. Not needing to pay for schooling is a massive saving to the government.
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"Mass immigration to a tiny island can't improve living standards" No shit. It can lower them, though. I'm pretty sure we've got enough Uber Eats drivers already, and we don't have enough affordable housing for our own citizens so we don't need families with 8+ kids turning up either. 1.45mil in the last 2 years. And that's the official, recorded ones so reailstically that's probably closer to 2mil? Maybe more? Meanwhile our systems like the NHS are on the verge of collapse. Our welfare system is also very attractive to a lot of these people, too. Close the borders already until we at least stabilise some of these vital systems. Continuing to put more strain on them is madness.
God forbid we ran out of having a plethora of take away drivers, barbers and workers for stewarding companies (event, retail and bouncer ‘security’) that barely have a lick of English. Our whole economy would collapse! Working for a Uber eats shop, I see different blokes show up for the same lassie called Alina, definitely a lot of undocumented cash being paid. I understand the need to import carers, nurses, doctors but let’s be serious, we’ve not imported a couple million over the years of people in these professions.
Every time I use a service like Uber Eats it's always someone who can barely speak English and they're very rude. They're paid to bring the order to your door but every time, I get a phone call "telling" me to "come outside my car" because they can't be bothered to get out of the car. I refuse and make them come to my door like I've paid for. Every time I order from a pizza place near me the delivery staff are locals, very cheerful and polite and actually ring my doorbell and hand me the food. I never expected to grow into someone saying these things, but this is my exact experience over the last 5 years or more. We need a system where people have to prove they have something to offer the country to get in. Qualifications, a job offer, something. We don't need more people doing minimum wage jobs, that a lot of is actually not on the books so our country isn't benefiting from it at all.
You say it as though I disagree with you, but I don't.
Just tried to clarify what you've said about "Tony Blair's words" there and can find no evidence of that at all. Closest thing is one of his advisors saying that they had the impression that some immigration policies were designed to "rub the right's noses in diversity." Nigel Farage then accused Mandelson of having said that but that doesn't seem to be true either. Just interested to see if there's actually any truth to what you claim
It’s a false quote. No evidence of blair saying anything near that.
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Just out of curiosity, what does your wife do for a living?
There was no NHS surcharge when I immigrated to the UK on a fiance visa in 2005. Your problem was caused by rule changes based on anti-immigration sentiment. It wasn't caused by immigrants.
>So I’m being punished as a British citizen for having a foreign wife See also the spouse visa threshold which were having to double to stop it being an easy route for chain migration from existing immigrant communities.
You post in the HENRYUK forum (£125k+ pa) yet you want a waiver aimed at the lowest paid.
Not Tony Blair's words. The original quote comes from a 2012 article in the Evening Standard by his former speech writer: >Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case. >But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. >I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far. >Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote. https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/don-t-listen-to-the-whingers-london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html
The biggest improvements to the life quality of the working classes have been massive reductions in manpower. Making said efforts more valuable in the market place. Great Plague, WW 1 and 2 etc. Importing any kind of labour is a detriment to existing labour. Why train people if you can import “skilled” labour cheaper. Why give the slightest fuck about your minimum wage workforce if there’s a queue of people to replace them.
That wasn't Tony Blair's words, it was a speech writer who used to work for the Labour Party.
I’m sorry, what part of this record immigration happening under the Tories who have been in power for the last 14 years did you miss?!
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As someone in the IT industry that's been massively negatively impacted by the massive (over 400,000 plus families since 2021) influx of poor quality Indian IT staff I'd say that unless this is reversed it's genuinely game over for the UK IT industry. I'm Indian so this isn't from a racist standpoint but a factual industry view. Market is dead, quality is poor, wages are down and it's a significant pressure on the housing market as they're typically middle earners (UK standards) and bring immediate and extended family to the UK. Unless this is reversed (unlikely) it's going to have a lasting impact on housing, rents, wages, NHS demand etc. https://www.itpro.com/business-strategy/careers-training/359408/india-trade-deal-to-create-2000-uk-tech-roles
Nah, the real problem is offshoring when it comes to IT. The amount of cheap, dogshit analysts hired in India and Sri Lanka is insane. And you're not even getting good Indian or Sri Lankan analysts, because that would cost almost as much money as getting good British analysts; the point is to pay as little as possible in countries with low wages so you can fill a vacancy. Who cares if they fuck everything up and destroy your app/website/infrastructure/whatever? That's a problem for next quarter!
Apparently though immigrants contribute more than they take out. By now the streets should literally be paved with gold
CTRL C, CTRL V = AUSTRALIA
Immigration used to be about economics. The Tories are only going for mass immigration to artificially make raw GDP go up though. We've moved from economic migration to migration for the purposes of rigging a metric.
FYI the same thing is happening in Canada (obviously the furthest thing from a tiny island) with the exact same results...
We've only been saying this for years now. It isn't racist or xenophobic to question that maybe the huge and unsustainable immigration problem is contributing to things like the housing crisis. Not only that, but a vast majority are a net minus to the country and are only being exploited to help push wages down for the working class. In other countries you can't just move there and do a random low level job. You need to actually have skills that contribute and your hiring company needs to justify why they need you instead of a local person. We should be doing the same.
everyone knows this. Tories just helping the big corps suppress wages and bring fruit pickers in. all money must flow to the corporations at all costs of the society
It affects the salaries in more skilled roles too. For example post covid, IT salaries went through the roof and everyone was trying to hire IT professionals. Then in the past few years they’ve flooded the market with Indian IT professionals who will obviously work for way less. I don’t know if this was an ideological move from Sunak (especially considering his wife’s father owns the biggest outsourcing company in the world). But i have noticed a lot of the Indian IT professionals looking for work in London for example previously worked for her company. Either way, it’s almost like just as the UK was starting to be somewhat competitive in terms of salary, we get it absolutely crashed down by opening up immigration.
We used an Indian IT company that’s very well known and honest to god they were fucking awful absolutely fucking abysmal. They were so bad we sued them. We’ve never done that before ever.
Was it HCL? I worked there for a short period to be farmed out as a contractor to other companies and they broke so many employment laws you would not believe.
Thats the problem when quality becomes quantity Nd these people have no passion in the field just a means to make money
> It affects the salaries in more skilled roles too. This needs talking about more. People always focus on the lowest paid work but being able to import skilled workers makes pay stagnation in those jobs worse and also gives employers a means to avoid investing in education or apprentices. It's like a national level equivalent of employers not investing in staff because they can just poach existing skilled workers that someone else has paid to train.
Yup and as of 2022 all Indian higher education qualifications bar a few small exceptions are now valid/equivalent in the UK. So you can just import from India all your tech support, care workers, planners, etc. Did I mention that India's student population is larger than the whole of the UK's workforce? I got banned from another sub for merely stating that the person who agreed this deal with India was of Indian heritage, so I'm not going to point that out again, and instead I will state that this trade deal benefits the UK, and was signed 100% in good faith, and didn't having anything to do with our current politicians ethnic backgrounds, nor the cheap labour requirements of infosys.
Easier immigration for Indians was promised by the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum - it's what people voted for.
Life sciences are also facing it as well, because there are tons of people who do biology related degrees but don't have the industry local to them, so employers here exploit that to get them over on a skilled worker visa, and it's really crushed salaries for the industry, 5-6 years masters degree you'll still be lucky to get £28k, despite the UK having the people will the skills and experience.
I am a biomedical scientist in the NHS and we have not hired someone from the UK in three years. The graduates are there but low salaries and the expectation of 24/7 work puts them off applying, so we are hiring Nigerians for every vacancy these days. It means we still only earn £28k as a starting salary.
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People seem to forget the fact that if things are good for you in your exclusive club, school, organisation, country, adding more people will pretty much only ever make it worse, no matter who you are adding.
> A social experiment imposed on the British without their consent. Experiment implies a lack of understanding of the result. Immigration is not an experiment, it's economic terrorism to keep wages low and worker's rights undermined. It's all intentional.
They literally will never admit they were wrong or humble themselves enough to openly (and honestly) discuss the failures of their stupid experiment. These people would unironically be denying the rape gangs if they could get away with it.
> It isn't racist or xenophobic to question that maybe the huge and unsustainable immigration problem is contributing to things like the housing crisis. The people who did play the "that's racist!" card also know this. They were just trying to silence people. The past twenty years has been an utter triumph for the British upper classes (lowercase 'u', anything higher than "upper middle") over the British working class. They've been playing a Class Cold War that whole period and most people haven't even noticed.
I'm amazed to see this much sense in Reddit. What I dont understand is why people here feel this way about mass immigration but don't support the reform party... Which is pretty much the only one that will seriously try to reduce numbers. Is the Nigel farage hate just for show?
Because Farage is a con man, the party is made up of incompetent cartoon characters and there are far more to the problems with this country than the single issue they are running on.
It's one of the factors. The housing crisis also happened due to the fact that houses were targeted and seen as an investment through buy to let mortgages, the stupidest thing ever. YouTube is full of videos of people teaching you how to buy houses to make multilet properties. "how to get rich" sort of things
I know quite a few immigrants that have moved to this country and bought up tons of houses in Birmingham then rented them out.
I have noticed that myself. However, British were the first in taking advantage of this. Maybe this madness should have been stopped much earlier, especially when you are putting at risk primary needs such as having a roof on our heads
Ask yourself, why BTL was able to be so abundant
>In other countries you can't just move there and do a random low level job. Seems to be a common theme across Commonwealth countries. New Zealand, Australia, and Canada all have the same problem and the same results.
We have been turned into the world's dumping ground by successive government's, dodgy lawyers and halfwit activists
This is happening here in Canada now, too. It’s beyond frustrating when people refuse to acknowledge that mass immigration is the common denominator in many of the issues we (and the UK) are facing.
It's not inherently racist to want stricter immigration controls. The issue is that *all* the actual racists hide behind any legitimate looking argument they can find. Meaning the entire argument then gets wrongly labelled as racist.
You haven’t made a point here?
Are we very slowly waking up to the idea that fast paced mass immigration doesnt work. It needs to be slow, selective and well integrated.
That's only half the picture. Fast immigration can be fine if your economy is growing rapidly. The UK has been using immigration to mask a stagnant economy for pretty much the whole period the Tories have been in power. We need to be measuring our progress by GDP per capita and not overall GDP to avoid making the same mistakes again.
The UK was already one of the best places to live on the planet, with some of the highest living standards humanity has ever known before it started a mass immigration policy. We needed no such thing to make our lives better.
I think it's more a case of stopping it getting worse. We have high living standards but we have a pensions time-bomb as the worker to non-worker ratio worsens.
It's not a time bomb if you tax the rich and limit immigration, as well as invest in solutions to an aging population. That doesn't make some billionaires people slightly richer though so we're not allowed to do that.
It is if there’s no one to replace the younger workforce as they age. You can either make the young do more for less, or use immigration to make up the shortfall
I agree the Tories have hidden behind this issue yes, especially in the last 4/5 years.
Everyone keeps talking about economics, yet seems to forget that bread and games are simply not enough to keep a society together
Except that the report says that the only thing propping up the post-2010 UK economy is immigration and without it things would be even worse. You haven't even read the article, have you.
How would we be worse off without millions of non-working and unskilled migrants?
The majority of those non-working and unskilled migrants are either here on student Visas and are subsidising Brits educations, or are dependents of migrants working in needed sectors like healthcare.
Canadian :🥲
This cant be right. There have been numerous whitepapers by think tanks that have told us that immigration is wonderful and we cant exist without it. Also that immigrants built this country too.
You need to drink water to survive so clearly it can’t hurt you and it’s impossible to drawn in it, right?
Not to mention every centrist celebrity on Twitter: "Fish and Chips are Turkish acksherlly!" ❤️ 4000 🔁 2476 💬 475
You're racist if you don't agree with unlimited immigration
Given time and some money, you could probably come up with a study which would show or justify any opinion you wanted, especially if you are choosy with the headline or title of the report, since so few people read it. Anyone who's lived in an area which has been utterly transformed by mass immigration needs no study to judge the policy as a terrible failure which has contributed to cultural unrest, a wholesale change in our communities, huge downward pressure on wages, a monstrous burden to our infrastructure, racial tensions and racism - not just from our own people, but those who have arrived.
>burden to our infrastructure, racial tensions and racism - not just from our own people, but _those who have arrived._ An irony of UK multiculturalism is that numerous minorities themselves often become the most anti-multiculturalist as they entrench their own culture here. We've spent so long educating white Brits not to be racist, and totally ignored the rampant bigotry in minority communities towards other minorities.
An example is the Libyan community in Manchester where Salman abedi lived. Yes the majority are nice, lovely people, but they don't integrate and keep to themselves and become closed off communities. Where I live there's a huuuggee Nigerian community who keep to themselves and treat whites and Asians like utter shite.
More people are good for the capatalist machine. More workers and more consumers. More of both these things in many (not all) cases reduces living standards. More workers being available makes you more disposible, it also means more people who are willing to do a job for less money. It has the effect of reducing places in literally everything, less school places, less housing, trasnport becomes more congested, more waste etc We don't need to be building 400,000 more homes a years and wrecking what is already one of the most ecologically dead countries in Europe. We need less people. People hate this uncomfortable fact. I am contributing to this by not having children as an active choice, so yes I do practice what I preach https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/news/landmark-report-shows-uk-wildlifes-devastating-decline
Ironically not having children will increase immigration long term, as there will be fewer young people to work and pay for the growing pensioner population. Either immigrants fill the gap in the birth rate or the future will work until you drop.
It's quite ironic that many of the most militant mass immigration supporters are also hugely pro environment and offer a great deal of support to climate change movements and the notion that we must stop polluting.
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He's being sarcastic. Notice the final sentence "immigrants built this country."
Most intelligent tory
British people built this country
Have you considered the amazing food? Please only think about the food.
Pretty obvious we get poorer the more third world immigrants we import. What's frustrating are the people who are useful idiots for the super rich and pretend like this isn't the most obvious thing.
When you're super rich, 'mass immigration' in your neighbourhood just means more French patisseries and well-behaved Japanese schoolkids.
it's not obvious at all, in fact it's exactly the opposite. The issue is that the huge economic gains from immigration are not shared with the people, they're kept by the 0.1%. 99% of the issues that non-racist people have with immigration are actually issues with wealth redistribution and funding of public services and nothing to do with actual immigration. In other words they are entirely the fault of the government of the day's policies and not the actual numbers of migrants.
Except the two are literally in tandem - you can't have mass immigration without worker suppression, wage suppression, and siphoning of the wealth to the already wealthy. Public services are crumbling in large part because the vast majority of immigrants being imported from the third world (aka most of the UKs immigrants) are net-negative tax contributers, who will take more than they contribute in their lifetimes. How do you expect a social wellfare system to function when we're increasing the pressure on it massively year over year while having less effective tax revenue to fund it with? And if the answer is "tax the wealthy more", the reality is that in a globalised world, the only people whose money being taxed more will make a significant difference are so entrenched offshore that it's functionally impossible without global coordination between nations, and you're really going to struggle to tell middle to upper middle class people why they should accept a lower quality of life and higher taxes to pay for the mass immigration that's already causing this country to crumble > In other words they are entirely the fault of the government of the day's policies and not the actual numbers of migrants. I really don't think you understand the sheer quantities of immigration we're experiencing. The UK is importing the equivalent of another 1/3 of Northern Ireland's population every year now. Where do you think we put all of these new people? Are we building a new major city for them to live in every year? Even though we don't have the infrastructure to even take care of the people living here already? And these aren't the same as population increase from births, they're adults who immediately need housing of their own, put an extreme demand on healthcare services from the getgo, and require taxpayer funding to pay for their existence here quite literally immediately unless they happen to be in a well paying line of work, which is not the case for 90% of the UKs current source of immigrants.
Seems obvious? Improving living standards is a wealth distribution problem. What about adding more people to the working pool improves anything at all about wealth distribution in any meaningful way?
The problem is a Tory government not wanting to do anything but enrich their friends. The other problem is idiots voting for Brexit, giving less money to spread around. Immigration doesn't increase or lower living standards, but it can add more money to the economy, which can then be used to improve living standards...if you have a government that way inclined, which we don't. They've been OK so far because they've a significant proportion of people who will ignore them filling their own and their friends pockets to blame other poor people
Immigration props up our otherwise aging population. Living standards would go down if we had fewer tax payers and the same number of pensioners / children. Either the government would need to raise taxes to maintain the welfare state or the welfare state would need to be scaled back. Of course the government *could* only raise taxes on the richest in society but we both know that’s not going to happen.
Improve living standards mean making the entire pie bigger.
Sure, as long as there isn't a capitalist elite class constantly trying to eat the whole pie.
Weird that record immigration has also failed to plug the many gaps we have in the job market.
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Exactly. we definitely don't need thousands of takeaways, and it's evident when you see them mostly empty. Cl
27% of nurses in the NHS are immigrants lol. https://www.nhsconfed.org/articles/immigration-harming-nhs#:~:text=Recent%20NHS%20data%20shows%20that,nurses%20and%20health%20visitors%20recorded).
Maybe we wouldn't need as many immigrant nurses if we made nursing more a more attractive career instead of keeping the wages low, hours high, and filling the gaps with immigrants.
That's the difference between skilled workers who can help grow the economy and vast numbers of unskilled workers who are an additional drain on the economy.
The UK should be training and developing its own skilled workforce, not relying on cheap labour out of a reluctance to pay, train and retain
Absolutely. Pushing everyone to go to University was a massive fuck up and there should have been equal effort to get people onto apprenticeships to learn a trade. When I was at uni, there were people who should not have passed even 1st year and when this was raised with the lecturer he just said 'everyone must pass'. That was the direction staff were given by the Dean.
> vast numbers of unskilled workers who are an additional drain on the economy. *Workers* drain the economy? Where did you learn economics?
Maybe a poor word choice but they're certainly helping to stagnate wages.
Low productivity workers drag down GDP/capita.
Unskilled =/= low productivity.
So the people who have been saying this for years - and being called racist and xenophobic - are correct. Immigration is too high and is having a negative impact on the general public. Colour me shocked.
In a surprise to literally no one but a chunk of online and IRL bleeding heart people. Same people: I don't understand why Farage has a popular following. Hurr durr idiots.
Ah but Farage is only popular as he's brainwashed us. We can't possibly be capable of independent thought and were not thinking it before he said it. /s
Stop noticing stuff.
The same Farage who's grand idea has knocked 5% off our GDP, given us a "gold standard Australian style points based immigration system" and replaced immigration from culturally similar countries with immigration from Asia, Africa and the middle East? That Farage?
Who would have guessed that getting rid of skilled European migrants who would expect a reasonable standard of living, for skilled migrants from third world countries willing to work for a pittance, would suppress wage levels for everyone?
Basically Brexit was a huge own goal for this country.
Well not really, because Brexit voters wanted less immigrants, not for our political class to immediately just circumvent the electorate and replace the European migrants with a different category of migrant. At least this way the politicians have to take responsibility for this, instead of just saying "But muh EU free movement".
So bringing in huge numbers of poor unskilled people doesn’t make a country richer Would never have guessed
The article says that it has also propped up the economy. I'm guessing nobody here bothered to read it. You can't vote consistently vote for a party that openly despises the working class, the NHS and public services and then complain when living standards for the 99% stagnate or collapse.
No the headlines already confirmed my biases and allowed me to place blame on people who can’t fight back so that I never have to question the leaders of the country because that’s actually hard to do.
Good lord this is a classic example of people not reading the story, and leaping to conclusions based on their own personal bias. It's like when the Mueller document uncovered extensive Russian collusion, but people boldly announced there was no evidence of Russian collusion. What the article says is that economic growth in the UK over the past decade has been extremely poor, and the only thing that has helped it is immigration. Immigration has propped growth up, and without it this country woudl probably have been in recession for most of the last decade. So the conclusion is clear, the Tories have allowed immigration at high levels to prop up a failing economy because they didn't have any other plan to increase growth. (No doubt because their primary focus was on making the rich richer and performing a smash and grab on what was left of the nations wealth.) Please people, read more than the Telegraphs deliberately misleading headline, look at the Guardians version on the same story, and understand how and why the Telegraph is deliberately manipulating you by toying with your internal biases about migrants.
You can preach but the masses won't listen. Just carefully selected headlines to create, sustain and support a specific narrative. The country had been mismanaged for years/decades and the political parties are getting away with it by finding the usual scapegoats to blame it on.
Because overall GDP means fuck all when per Capita is stagnant. It’s obvious, and the impact on mass immigration in bringing that down is also obvious.
If record Immigration was successful we'd be swimming in cash. Anyone can see we plainly aren't
This headline is misleading information and obvious bait, the article itself has barely anything to do with immigration apart from the first few lines and last few lines and the kicker? **The article is saying immigration has been keeping the economy afloat, but has masked the economic problems this country has been facing — without it, the economy would be even worse.** It’s like they’re hoping you look at the headline and go “I knew it!” Or “yeah that’s right!” And not read the bloody thing. Judging by the comments here, this spin has been very effective, I’d be impressed if it wasn’t so fucking depressing. > **Record immigration has failed to make Britons richer** and is masking a crisis in productivity, a leading think-tank has warned. What kind of nonsense is this lmao?! It’s the government’s job to make us richer. Immigration can help to boost an economy and offset an ageing population, but it won’t “make us richer” if the government and businesses do not play ball or capitalise on it. But, the Tory’s have been doing the opposite by squeezing every last penny out of the public purse while immigration has helped paper over the economic cracks. > The Resolution Foundation said **the fastest population growth in a century had propped up the British economy since 2010**, with three quarters of the six million increase accounted for by inward migration. > However, it added that Britain’s “middling growth record” since the Tories took power had done little to boost GDP per person – which economists believe is a better proxy for living standards because it accounts for population growth. Here we go, now we get to what’s actually going on, and it’s nothing to do with immigration, just Tory policy failure for the past decade and a half-ish. And when you click on the link provided it takes you to an article with this intro: > **Income growth under the Tories has been the “worst in generations”,** the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said, as households are squeezed by a growing tax burden. > **The average Briton would be almost £5,000 richer if living standards had grown at the rate recorded in the 50 years prior to the Conservatives coming to power in 2010, the IFS said.** So, what’s this got to do with immigration failing to “make us richer”? Now back to the main article: > Separate analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that **surging debt interest and a ballooning benefits bill meant Rishi Sunak had presided over the biggest increase in the size of the state of any post-war Conservative government.** > The IFS said the size of the state was likely to remain bigger than before the pandemic, **as an ageing population and geopolitical tensions pile pressure on the public purse.** The ageing population rears its head once again and it’s only going to apply more pressure on people’s purses if things don’t change to account for the increased lifespan. > **”Britain’s middling growth record has been propped up by a booming population.** The extra six million people in Britain have certainly made the economy bigger, but has done little for GDP per capita. In fact, **the UK’s record on productivity – which is what really matters for living standards – is exceptionally bad.** > “There is widespread consensus on the need to turnaround the UK’s productivity record, which is far easier to talk about than deliver. But if the next government is looking for encouragement, it should seek to build on Britain’s already booming services exports, which could really go gangbusters over the coming decade.” Again, immigration has helped boost the economy and keep it afloat, but productivity is in the crapper [(it’s important to know what “productivity” means in this context).](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/productivity.asp) I know a lot of people here hate immigration, but come on guys, read the article, this headline is obvious propaganda and you’re eating it up.
Yep, the research by the Resolution Foundation and the IFS mentioned in the article literally state the opposite. This is literal misinformation by the Telegraph, they are saying that without immigration things would be much worse. Sadly anti-immigration people don't care about actual evidence, coming not just from think tanks but the OBR, ONS, Bank of England etc. They're not eating it up, they're just extremists who made up their mind and can only use slogans and click bait headlines as ammunition
I’m glad I found someone else in here who carefully read the article. A quick scroll shows loads of fuckers did not.
i think theres plenty of us, its just that the ones with a chip on their shoulder often shout first and shout loudest. They shout first because the rest of us are actually reading the article while their typing their reaction to the headline...
> but has masked the economic problems this country has been facing. Turns out you cant hide the problems if you keep the tories around for too long.
The Canadian liberals have been doing similar things. Something like 1.7m in a year, I'm generally left wing and pro-immigration (since I myself am an immigrant here) but numbers do need to be balanced to not disrupt everyone's wellbeing. My understanding is that the libs were doing this to correct longer term structural deficits in the economy - the theory being stagnant population growth harms the economy and bringing in high reproducing immigrants we can sustain growth for far longer. It's not wrong, I suppose, but the pace of it messed everything up.
It wasn't ever intended to raise living standards, it was intended to raise multinational companies profits.
Well I don't know about that, *some* people have been enjoying the same jumps in pay and conditions enjoyed in the 90's and earlier. Percentile of hourly pay|Annualised growth rate, 1975-1999|Annualised growth rate, 1999-2023 :--|:--|:--| **5**|**1.7**|**2.0** **10**|**1.5**|**1.6** 20|1.6|1.2 30|1.8|0.9 40|1.9|0.8 50|2.1|0.7 60|2.3|0.6 70|2.5|0.6 80|2.7|0.5 90|2.9|0.4 [hourly pay growth by pay percentile - March 2024](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/real-annualised-hourly-pay-growth-by-pay-percentile/real-hourly-pay-growth-by-pay-percentile-uk-1975-1999-and-1999-2023) A cynic might think a lot of people have been let in to depress wages at the lower end of the scale. 🤔
And listening to the Torygraph hasn't done so either.
Massive con that it’s helped GDP whilst overwhelming infrastructure and public services and ignoring the plummeting GDP per person which is more reflective of living standards
Meanwhile the far left will try to guilt trip you for not voting Corbyn who wanted an unregulated, open border policy. Their inferiority complex to conservatives and even liberals will always be a renewable source of comedy to me.
But Corbyn never got into power. Its the tories who have broken immigration records this past decade after promising brexit and their policies would close borders. Is the far left in the room with us now? I wouldnt find comedy in the fact youd happily ignore whats actually happening to try and laugh at some imaginative scenario or people. It sounds rather sad. Call 116 123 to talk to Samaritans
Hang on.. this think tank say the last 16 years there’s been little improvement to living standards..and they put it mostly on immigration? And the decade before that there was migration and there was living standard growth? A bit contradictory for my small brain. Don’t government policies play a big roll living standards.. Who’s been in charged of government for the last 14 years? What else impact living standards other than migration and government? Lack of housing? Personal health? Education? Debt and income? Social services? Environmental quality?
They actually say that immigration has flattered the UK economy that would otherwise have suffered more due to poor productivity. The DT are trying to spin it the other way. Not-smart people are lapping it up. Always worth going to the source with these things. Eg. [The Resolution Foundation’s press release. ](https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/britains-economic-growth-has-been-flattered-by-a-booming-population-but-rising-productivity-holds-key-to-stronger-growth-in-the-next-parliament/)
Who’d have thunk it. It’s the evidence that was staring people in the face in areas which experienced high immigration. Take Boston where, last time I checked, 26% of the population are now immigrants. It was never that nice of a town, but it had enough to support a Marks and Spencer’s and an independent department store of high quality. All that’s gone. While one can’t say that the decline was *caused* by migration, it certainly hasn’t mitigated it.
> and an independent department store of high quality. All that’s gone. Immigration has nothing to do with that, the changing retail & high street landscape in the face of the internet and the rising costs of running bricks and mortar businesses is to blame.
You're telling me that importing massive amounts of what has mostly been uneducated Muslim men has been a bad thing for a western/liberal country that those same men hate? No Wai!?!
Nothing will improve if you keep importing freeloaders instead of tax payers
The controversial opinion is we need to automate as many of the low skilled jobs as possible and only accept highly skilled immigrants, who pay high amounts of tax.
I find myself conflicted over this. I’m an immigrant worker who does an office job (good pay too) so I like to think my presence is positive. But then there’s also this narrative that immigration equals bad, and from an economic standpoint I totally get it, we truly do not need _that_ many people. Is there a middle-ground? 🤔
Brother, immigrants are people, immigration is a system. Most people are not angry at the people but at the system failing to work for them. The country has a duty to provide a good standard of living to those who legally reside in it, which includes yourself and other immigrants. However the current system is geared towards the interests of big business. Keeping wages low, conditions and perks poor, not being willing to train people etc
Just await until you get a British citizenship and then you can start complaining against Inmigrants. You know... Like Sunak grandparents.
That’s exactly it though! I don’t want to be one of those people who would take the ladder away (Sunak and Braverman comes to mind)… but at the same time the current situation is unsustainable.
There's only a finite amount of business to be done so increasing the population just means more picking off the same carcass. Seen it happen in the transport industry, in particular the Courier game.
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We all knew this already. Remember when that woman in Question Time said "but who's going to serve me my coffee in Pret?!" The goal of mass low skilled migration was to keep wages low so middle class London types didn't have to pay a bit more for their lattes. We used to get called xenophobes for pointing out the very real consequences of this policy. Now we're living with those consequences the former advocates of it are stood there doing surprised pikachu face
Serious questions: As everyday I read in the papers that we are short agricultural workers, carers & restaurant workers... Why not let those who are proficient in English just work? We have a minimum wage in place, so why not let them work & pay taxes? The current system spends too much to keep them helpless. At least let them pick strawberries or push wheelchairs & contribute to the tax base.
If you're referring to asylum seekers (a small subset of immigrants), you're right, refusing them right to work manufactures a completely unnecessary state dependence for which they can then be criticised.
Because that’s horrific for competition. In a healthy job market, if a job isn’t being filled then it’s because the working conditions are to poor, and the wages are too low to make it worth while. Especially for low skilled roles like you just mentioned. You’re just kicking the can down the road by importing people from third world countries that will accept those conditions for the time being.
But I thought all these future doctors and scientists would help us
Would you look another thing we were all told we were racists for saying 20 years ago but turns out factual.
Shocked Pikachu face. Come on who really thought a mass influx of unskilled immigrants would raise living standards!
Unfortunately there will still be people who blindly shout racism when this topic comes up. I haven’t looked through the comments yet but I’d bet that at least a few will complain at ‘what this sub has become’.
Elected government officials is a problem number 1. And uncontrolled immigration is the problem number 2. These can coexist.
The Tories have clearly turned a blind eye to mass immigration in order to benefit the owners of capital. Labour will be the same or worse, only it will be for ideological reasons, rather than to benefit capital. Either way I really see no change.
Ah, the fault of migration - and definitely not Brexit. The problem with the analysis on the article is that the UK actually has only middling migration compared to other major European economies, but we have seen the largest fall in living standards in the OECD compared to pre-COVID levels and we are the only major European economy who's GDP per capita is still below pre-COVID levels.
I think, as a third world country resident, the problem is the demographic of the immigrants that are accepted. Employers want cheap workers since british locals doesn't want shitty jobs with abysmal wage. Public wants skillful workers like engineers, doctors etc. to do harder, more time consuming and tiring jobs than average in order to raise life standards without forcing themselves since they used their own countries' resources for their education and the work they have done is profitable so they are positive net gain for public. Power balances between middle and upper classes are inverse because middle class uses the upper class' resources in order to elevate their living standards and thus while upper class getting poorer they also have hard time with low wage workers since the public doesn't accept this type of agreement anymore, they are not desperate. Politicians side with upper class of course and producing anti immigrant propaganda for retaining public anger while in real life they are actually opposing it. Many of my successful friends are rejected while other hardcore sharia muslim, ignorant, disrespectful and low class people are accepted for those reasons.
Immigration wasn't about raising living standards. It was about getting cheap labour for businesses. The average worker knew that all along.
But it's raised the living standards of the nurse from a Hyderabad slum, ain't it? Gotta look at that big picture - we should pull up the world. Give me your tired, your poor, your Filipino doctors, your Iraqi deliveroo riders.
Why would anyone rely on immigration itself to raise living standards? What an absolutely ass-backward idea. You raise living standards with investment, growth and productivity. These can be aided (or not) by immigration.
I feel like this exact article and discussion could have come from the r/Canada sub.
Gosh, who would’ve thought importing a large mass of poor people wouldn’t improve living standards.
BREAKING NEWS: Water is wet!! This is the same brain numbing shit I have to read in Canada about our insane immigration quotas, the reason immigration historically has raised quality of life is because the immigrants would work jobs for shit pay that padded out the economy and live in horrible tenements nobody else would go near. Nowadays, corporate greed has made it so everyone works for shit wages in sub-par housing, most of which is rented. All this insane immigration is doing is putting strain on social services that are heavily underfunded and sparse for all the locals who now desperately need them, breeding resentment between them and the new immigrants that’s capitalized on by far-right politicians and political movements. Another problem is that a lot of immigrants are coming to Britain and Canada then becoming angry and misanthropic because their quality of life is actually lower than the country they came from, driving up crime and antisocial behaviour. Both the UK post-brexit and Canada post-covid need to work on fixing their stagnant economies without using foreign labour as a bandaid and increase investment into social services, otherwise these massive waves of immigrants will just destabilize the country and allow for political extremism to take hold.