[Riderz]

(Original post by Tackla)
They are trying to do that, if immigrants dont earn above 35k they will told to leave the country, thus highly skilled workers are allowed in. Dont when this will come into effect though.

They wont. See my post above. If UK workers wanted the jobs then it might be possible, but in reality cheap European labour makes some industries profitable.

The average wage in this country is 22k. Everyone now thinks they can go to uni and walk straight into a 30k job. The 2 dont add up... Somewhere people must work for low wages, but every British kid wants more, and arnt prepared to work for less then move up.

[Flying Cookie]

Highly skilled immigrants need to bring their family with them, and their family are not always going to be self sufficient later on. Just one of the many facts of life which trespass the apparently simple boundaries of immigration, policy and the economy.

Instead of focussing on the consequences of the disastrous economic downturn, we should focus on the causes.

[Maker]

(Original post by Flying Cookie)
Highly skilled immigrants need to bring their family with them, and their family are not always going to be self sufficient later on. Just one of the many facts of life which trespass the apparently simple boundaries of immigration, policy and the economy.

Instead of focussing on the consequences of the disastrous economic downturn, we should focus on the causes.

If immigrants married British men/women, no doubt anti immigration people would accuse them of stealing their men/women.

[That Bearded Man]

(Original post by bahjat93)
I think the only one that is false it the "Coming over here stealing our jobs"

How many people from Eastern Europeans have you seen in professional carriers like Economists, Engineers, Doctors?
1 in every 1million

Have you ever been in a hospital? Local doctors tend to be in the minority.

[That Bearded Man]

(Original post by marshymarsh)
So an employer wanting an employee who will commit to the company for the long term is bad? He should prefer the 'top grade applicants' who want it for short term work?

Well it is, if someone over here can't commit to 5 days a week because of school and university.

[harufi]

What am I reading?
A lot of immigrants "take" our jobs because we don't want to do them.
Lost track of how many times I've heard people complaining where I live that they're sick of "****ing poles" coming and taking jobs, then five minutes later going on about how they don't want to apply for jobs because its beneath them.

[Jackmaxwell]

Everyone keeps spewing 'Eastern Europeans only come here to claim benefits and sponge from our country' when they probably don't know any Eastern Europeans that actually do this.

I'm friends several Eastern Europeans, and all of their parents are in work. I also work with a very nice young lady who comes here to work so she can afford to raise her two children. But guess what? The job she does, anyone could do. But that vacancy was open for several months. MONTHS. So the fact that anyone could even bother to argue that they come here and take jobs that many British workers would have is just an untruth.

To say that this country is supposedly desperate for jobs, I was incredibly surprised that nobody took it sooner. I got the job even without an interview, and I even recommended it to several of my friends and family, none of whom were interested.

So if she wants to come here and fill that vacancy, then why the hell shouldn't she? Cos I'll tell you for free, she is one of the most hardworking people you will ever meet. Not the brightest or the best skilled, but boy does she do her job. And she loves having it, too.

[viffer]

So many of the indigenous population with no interest in even trying to secure employment in work they consider beneath them.

It's a tough s**t job but somebody's got to do it eh?

The economic situation is a red herring

[bahjat93]

(Original post by That Bearded Man)
Have you ever been in a hospital? Local doctors tend to be in the minority.

I know that but the doctors are never Eastern Europeans

[That Bearded Man]

(Original post by bahjat93)
I know that but the doctors are never Eastern Europeans

Yes, I'll give you that one.

So your problem isn't immigrants? It's specifically Eastern Europeans? Hmmmm...

[FDR]

From Eduardo Porter of the New York Times. I don't know how well the US' situation can be compared to the UK's, however it's an interesting read on the topic nonetheless.

ECONOMIC VIEW
Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye

By EDUARDO PORTER
CALIFORNIA may seem the best place to study the impact of illegal immigration on the prospects of American workers. Hordes of immigrants rushed into the state in the last 25 years, competing for jobs with the least educated among the native population. The wages of high school dropouts in California fell 17 percent from 1980 to 2004.

But before concluding that immigrants are undercutting the wages of the least fortunate Americans, perhaps one should consider Ohio. Unlike California, Ohio remains mostly free of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio's high school dropouts from 1980 to 2004? They fell 31 percent.

As Congress debates an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, several economists and news media pundits have sounded the alarm, contending that illegal immigrants are causing harm to Americans in the competition for jobs.

Yet a more careful examination of the economic data suggests that the argument is, at the very least, overstated. There is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have caused any significant damage to the wages of American workers.

The number that has been getting the most attention lately was produced by George J. Borjas and Lawrence F. Katz, two Harvard economists, in a paper published last year. They estimated that the wave of illegal Mexican immigrants who arrived from 1980 to 2000 had reduced the wages of high school dropouts in the United States by 8.2 percent. But the economists acknowledge that the number does not consider other economic forces, such as the fact that certain businesses would not exist in the United States without cheap immigrant labor. If it had accounted for such things, immigration's impact would be likely to look less than half as big.

Mr. Katz was somewhat taken aback by the attention the study has received. "This was not intended," he said.

At first blush, the preoccupation over immigration seems reasonable. Since 1980, eight million illegal immigrants have entered the work force. Two-thirds of them never completed high school. It is sensible to expect that, because they were willing to work for low wages, they would undercut the position in the labor market of American high school dropouts.

This common sense, however, ignores half the picture. Over the last quarter-century, the number of people without any college education, including high school dropouts, has fallen sharply. This has reduced the pool of workers who are most vulnerable to competition from illegal immigrants.

In addition, as businesses and other economic agents have adjusted to immigration, they have made changes that have muted much of immigration's impact on American workers.

For instance, the availability of foreign workers at low wages in the Nebraska poultry industry made companies realize that they had the personnel to expand. So they invested in new equipment, generating jobs that would not otherwise be there. In California's strawberry patches, illegal immigrants are not competing against native workers; they are competing against pickers in Michoacán, Mexico. If the immigrant pickers did not come north across the border, the strawberries would.

"Immigrants come in and the industries that use this type of labor grow," said David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Taking all into account, the effects of immigration are much, much lower."

In a study published last year that compared cities that have lots of less educated immigrants with cities that have very few, Mr. Card found no wage differences that could be attributed to the presence of immigrants.

Other research has also cast doubt on illegal immigration's supposed damage to the nation's disadvantaged. A study published earlier this year by three economists — David H. Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Katz of Harvard and Melissa S. Kearney of the Brookings Institution — observed that income inequality in the bottom half of the wage scale has not grown since around the mid-1980's.

Even economists striving hardest to find evidence of immigration's effect on domestic workers are finding that, at most, the surge of illegal immigrants probably had only a small impact on wages of the least-educated Americans — an effect that was likely swamped by all the other things that hit the economy, from the revolution in technology to the erosion of the minimum wage's buying power.

When Mr. Borjas and Mr. Katz assumed that businesses reacted to the extra workers with a corresponding increase in investment — as has happened in Nebraska — their estimate of the decline in wages of high school dropouts attributed to illegal immigrants was shaved to 4.8 percent. And they have since downgraded that number, acknowledging that the original analysis used some statistically flimsy data.

Assuming a jump in capital investment, they found that the surge in illegal immigration reduced the wages of high school dropouts by just 3.6 percent. Across the entire labor force, the effect of illegal immigrants was zero, because the presence of uneducated immigrants actually increased the earnings of more educated workers, including high school graduates. For instance, higher-skilled workers could hire foreigners at low wages to mow their lawns and care for their children, freeing time for these workers to earn more. And businesses that exist because of the availability of cheap labor might also need to employ managers.

Mr. Borjas said that while the numbers were not large, the impact at the bottom end of the skill range was significant. "It is not a big deal for the whole economy, but that hides a big distributional impact," he said.

OTHERS disagree. "If you're a native high school dropout in this economy, you've got a slew of problems of which immigrant competition is but one, and a lesser one at that," said Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.

Mr. Katz agreed that the impact was modest, and it might fall further if changes in trade flows were taken into account — specifically, that without illegal immigrants, some products now made in the United States would likely be imported. "Illegal immigration had a little bit of a role reinforcing adverse trends for the least advantaged," he said, "but there are much stronger forces operating over the last 25 years."

[Barua-Darfur]

Stop all polish immigration. They have views on blacks which date back to he 50's . This shouldnt be allowed to happen in this day and age. Polish ppl also commit a lot of crimes mainly against other races.

[plimsolls]

(Original post by letsbehonest)
I moved to London in 2007 - used to live in Holland.
My parents were unemployed for 2 years before they got proper jobs here.
People in the EU should be allowed to live wherever they want, skilled or not!

Nice of you and your parasitic family to come and sponge off the uk/ sit on your big fat backsides for two whole years with a smug sense of entitlement.

[plimsolls]

(Original post by Barua-Darfur)
Stop all polish immigration. They have views on blacks which date back to he 50's . This shouldnt be allowed to happen in this day and age. Polish ppl also commit a lot of crimes mainly against other races.

All my dealings with Polish have been pleasant.

[Barua-Darfur]

(Original post by plimsolls)
All my dealings with Polish have been pleasant.

We don't need poles. They're Nazi sympathisers ( nt all many) which means more problems and BNP

[Barua-Darfur]

(Original post by harufi)
What am I reading?
A lot of immigrants "take" our jobs because we don't want to do them.
Lost track of how many times I've heard people complaining where I live that they're sick of "****ing poles" coming and taking jobs, then five minutes later going on about how they don't want to apply for jobs because its beneath them.

Exactly British people are only living from colonozation. Britain stole to fulfill the empire. If not for that, Britain would be an Afghanistan.

& or your info Poles do not work, they make Neo-Nazi's look like kittens.

[bahjat93]

Hahaha, if it was with all immigrants i'd have a problem with my self :P.

[polin_na]

(Original post by Barua-Darfur)
We don't need poles. They're Nazi sympathisers ( nt all many) which means more problems and BNP

uuuu, somebody watched BBC program... many are not Nazi sympathizers, very small number maybe, but the same can be said for UK.

[harufi]

well all the Poles in my town work harder than anyone else. Maybe thats just because everyone else is too lazy to do anything though.

[Sugar.And.Spice]

I cannot STAND people who go on about immigrants as if they ruined this country.

They are not a problem in the least, in fact this country has WAY bigger problems than the so called 'benefit cheating, lying, stealing immigrants'.

Anyone who believes that immigrants are harming this country are clearly the type who read right-wing crap like the Daily Mail, who are just tory bastards.

/End rant.
Sorry, but since i personally know alot of immigrants, have done alot of work with them i know just how much they are scapegoated in this country, and they are one of the most vunerable people in society.