The Student Room Group

Why do politicians want to pretend mass immigration isn't a problem?

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For a number of reasons.

Firstly because it is the fashionable, status quo opinion of metropolitan luvvies which most MPs (and journalists, academics et al) are now drawn from.

Secondly they’re generally in thrall to corporate interests which benefit from the status quo and having access to continuous cheap labour

Thirdly, because they’d have to admit that they were wrong, and that their (‘bigoted’ or ‘racist’ opponents) were right

Fourthly they have over the years lost control over the issue and as above this Does not to their sense of superiority and vanity

Fifthly because it is clearly a controversial position and in the age of consensus politics was not seen as electorally viable.

Lastly as per the first point, a swathe of MPs almost entirely amongst the Labour Party but also amongst the Tories are genuine true believers in open immigration and either believe that nations are outdated constructs or that intervention more or less worked.
White women like the immigrants, ie. more 'exotic' men to choose from
Reply 22
Original post by Davij038
Fifthly because it is clearly a controversial position and in the age of consensus politics was not seen as electorally viable.



It's controversial amongst as you say the metropolitan out-of-touch clique of MPs and mainstream media. However if they had the courage to accept the inevitable jeering from those around them I believe the silent majority would overwhelmingly be delighted and decide to re-elect whoever did it.
Original post by Audrey18
@bob072 @Chaz254 @dutchstudent123


politicians earn a fixed income for a fix period of time before the next general elections. they have to toe the party line or else face ridicule/lose out in promotion, appointment to more important portfolios or getting into cabinet. Cabinet members have a higher chance of getting into House of Lords where they'll be paid 300 quid a day for just turning up. at the end of the day it's about financial security. gone are the days when you had ministers like the late Tony Benn etc.

most politicians live in a bubble. they don't know the hardships of ordinary working people. that's why they will continue to subscribe to their party's beliefs regardless of whether it's in the best interests of the ordinary citizen. the electorate also need to share part of the blame. they need to stop voting along party lines. Cons v Lab. the politics in UK today is about musical chairs. for example boris johnson is a clown but he's the next batch of politicians along Gove to form the Conservative cabinet in time to come. thats why they made him the foreign minister, going on endless trips abroad and doing what he does best which is being an entertainer. Whether or not not his antics are entertaining is another matter.

immigration is a very sensitive topic. it's so sensitive that any attempt to have a discussion on it is immediately shut down and the people who start the topics are labelled racists. look at this forum for example. you need to be aware of the demographics of the registered members on this forum. hence the speed in which the thread starter gets banned after having started an immigration thread or having posted a fantastic post on the topic full of true but painful facts.

UK is the promiseland for millions of people in countries at war, pakistan, bangladesh, sri lanka and the poorer european countries. these people will continue to come to the UK as long as the UK government continues to be a soft bunch which is an open secret. the range of benefits on offer is amazing so you cannot fault the prospective immigrant if he wants to come to the UK.

UK is riddled with many problems. Weak government, poor policing, poor medical service, soft prisons, high knive crimes, sexual grooming of white girls and i could go on. Only 2 things stand out in the UK. it's judiciary and the football league. the rest of it is suspect.


I think your view on politicians is too pessimistic. If all they wanted was 300 quids for showing up they would've become lawyers or something. I myself am planning to go into politics one day, because I have an ideology which I want to pursue. I believe many politicians entered their profession for the same reason.

There are valid reasons for wanting immigration which I have pointed out before. The politicians aren't necessarily pretending anything.
Original post by bob072
It's controversial amongst as you say the metropolitan out-of-touch clique of MPs and mainstream media. However if they had the courage to accept the inevitable jeering from those around them I believe the silent majority would overwhelmingly be delighted and decide to re-elect whoever did it.


Ergo Trump
(edited 6 years ago)
Original post by Good bloke
No. We build about 150,000 homes a year and need 100,000 just to cope with high net immigration. Our heads would be above water if immigration were zero. High immigration transfers a mild (and fixable) problem into a crisis.


The housing crisis goes way beyond simple supply and demand. By far the most important factors are government policy and public attitudes toward housing. Immigration plays a role, but only because of these two things. 150,000 homes is an entirely unimpressive figure; the lowest in the entire post-war era. Even in the 70s, when our population was virtually stagnant, and obviously much lower than it is now, we were building on average around 300,000 year - a huge chunk of which was council housing. What proportion of the 150,000 homes we build now are council houses? Zilch. Nada. You see, that number doesn't mean **** if the houses being build are neither affordable nor accessible to those who need them most. The state has effectively transferred its house building responsibilities to private developers who use borderline fraudulent accounting to keep the amount of affordable housing they are compelled to build as low as possible. Housing, an essential public good, is now entirely subject to the fluctuations of the free market, being built only when and where big developers see a profit, when in the past the entire point of housing policy was to pick up the slack when the private sector was failing to meet the needs of the people. What's more, 'affordable' new builds are extremely poor quality and smaller on average than those being built even in Japan.

We have long since abandoned a supply-side approach to housing, bricks and mortar have been replaced by ridiculous demand-side measures that keep demand artificially high and drive up house prices. Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have gotten on the ladder while supply was high and prices were low have seen massive windfall gains in their net wealth, allowing them to use their properties as leverage to buy more property for the sole purpose of extracting rent from those who can't afford to buy, again driving up prices and taking a huge chunk out of the disposable incomes of those who might otherwise save to buy a house. You see, the 'British dream' of becoming a country of home owners is nothing more than a national myth. The reality is that boomers were born at just the right time to benefit from what could be called a golden age of home ownership. Owner-occupancy overtook private renting as the majority tenure type only in the 50s, and as of the 90s the trend is reversing. In theory there is nothing wrong with this, but the fact is the younger generations now have to contend with an exceptionally poor private rental sector that has entirely failed to serve their needs. You will note that in Germany, where net migration is higher than it is here and 60% of the population rent their homes, we are not seeing the same affordability crisis that we are here - largely because their rental sector is well managed and heavily regulated.

We've also seen a paradigm shift in the way we think of housing - homes are now seen as an investment, rather than a public good. Any policy that results in a decrease in house prices is politically unacceptable to the boomer generation. Thus, house prices are deliberately kept high by government policy. Moreover, we've seen billions in foreign capital flooding into the London property market causing a chain reaction of displacement - billionaires now 'live' where millionaires once did, millionaires live where the upper middle class once lived, the middle classes are flooding into working class areas, and young would-be home owners go off to Bristol or the North - thus the affordability crisis spreads like a disease. Meanwhile the worst off see their estates demolished to make room for luxury developments and get shipped off to live in bedsits in Margate, away from their friends, families and support networks.

This country also suffers from an artificial scarcity of land and a defective planning system. The majority of land in Britain is still owned by an exceptionally tiny percentage of the population - many of whom trace their titles back to William the B*stard and his murderous cohort. This band of parasites, whose very existence is an affront to modern sensibilities, wield a grossly disproportionate amount of influence over the rate at which land is made available for development. What's more, when they do decide to sell up to developers, they are perversely entitled to not only the market value of their ill-gotten assets as it stands - but also to a chunk of the value added when planning permission is granted, despite zero effort on their own part. And, you guessed it, this drives up prices.

Ultimately, our housing woes can be put down to extremist, 'new normal' neo-liberal policy and the rampant financialisation of the housing sector. We are allowing the fruits of economic growth to accrue to an increasingly concentrated rentier class when we should be looking at ways to capture that unearned income for the public good. Placing the lions share of the blame on immigration is, to be blunt, egregiously and outrageously ignorant.
(edited 6 years ago)
Original post by bob072
It's so blindingly obvious for anyone in the real world and basic logic.


We are spending record amounts of money on education, housing, health but are all in trouble more than before.

The reason is because the population has increased (otherwise we wouldn't need new housing, pupil places at schools etc).

90% of that increase is from immigration where for years we have accepted 300,000 net immigrants (often young so will start families).


If we slow down to something sensible, like <30k net, we could give public services a chance to catch up.

Anyone in public life, whether you are selling a book, a film or you are a politician needs to get on the telly.

The telly people, lead by the BBC, will be unlikely to invite you on if you are against high levels of immigration.

It took years and eventually an election win - and the threat of legal action - for UKIP (which favours more controlled immigration) to get some airtime on the BBC.

If you are in public life it is the kiss of death to rail against high levels of immigration.
Original post by Kenneth56
Anyone in public life, whether you are selling a book, a film or you are a politician needs to get on the telly.

The telly people, lead by the BBC, will be unlikely to invite you on if you are against high levels of immigration.

It took years and eventually an election win - and the threat of legal action - for UKIP (which favours more controlled immigration) to get some airtime on the BBC.

If you are in public life it is the kiss of death to rail against high levels of immigration.


“When you let in refugees, they bring their problems with them'', Black Panther
This is because many of the left are unintelligent to realise the problem so any negative comment about immigration and they says you 're xenophobic which is a Labour buzzword.
A propos:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Because almost every western nation is ****ed without it.

If we cut immigration to 0 now, there won't be enough young to pay for the old.

Yea housing is a problem, but it's nothing compared with the problem of old people. Especially this generations old people - they have royally ****ed over the current youth. They went to uni for free, they had ridiculously low living costs (just recently saw some figures on this that I don't remember but was something like comparing the years of average wage work to get a house then and now, and it's massively higher now), millennials are also likely to be first generation to earn less than previous. Then there's so many of them (baby boomers). Old people are a problem.
Original post by Captain Haddock
The housing crisis goes way beyond simple supply and demand. By far the most important factors are government policy and public attitudes toward housing. Immigration plays a role, but only because of these two things. 150,000 homes is an entirely unimpressive figure; the lowest in the entire post-war era. Even in the 70s, when our population was virtually stagnant, and obviously much lower than it is now, we were building on average around 300,000 year - a huge chunk of which was council housing. What proportion of the 150,000 homes we build now are council houses? Zilch. Nada. You see, that number doesn't mean **** if the houses being build are neither affordable nor accessible to those who need them most. The state has effectively transferred its house building responsibilities to private developers who use borderline fraudulent accounting to keep the amount of affordable housing they are compelled to build as low as possible. Housing, an essential public good, is now entirely subject to the fluctuations of the free market, being built only when and where big developers see a profit, when in the past the entire point of housing policy was to pick up the slack when the private sector was failing to meet the needs of the people. What's more, 'affordable' new builds are extremely poor quality and smaller on average than those being built even in Japan.

We have long since abandoned a supply-side approach to housing, bricks and mortar have been replaced by ridiculous demand-side measures that keep demand artificially high and drive up house prices. Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have gotten on the ladder while supply was high and prices were low have seen massive windfall gains in their net wealth, allowing them to use their properties as leverage to buy more property for the sole purpose of extracting rent from those who can't afford to buy, again driving up prices and taking a huge chunk out of the disposable incomes of those who might otherwise save to buy a house. You see, the 'British dream' of becoming a country of home owners is nothing more than a national myth. The reality is that boomers were born at just the right time to benefit from what could be called a golden age of home ownership. Owner-occupancy overtook private renting as the majority tenure type only in the 50s, and as of the 90s the trend is reversing. In theory there is nothing wrong with this, but the fact is the younger generations now have to contend with an exceptionally poor private rental sector that has entirely failed to serve their needs. You will note that in Germany, where net migration is higher than it is here and 60% of the population rent their homes, we are not seeing the same affordability crisis that we are here - largely because their rental sector is well managed and heavily regulated.

We've also seen a paradigm shift in the way we think of housing - homes are now seen as an investment, rather than a public good. Any policy that results in a decrease in house prices is politically unacceptable to the boomer generation. Thus, house prices are deliberately kept high by government policy. Moreover, we've seen billions in foreign capital flooding into the London property market causing a chain reaction of displacement - billionaires now 'live' where millionaires once did, millionaires live where the upper middle class once lived, the middle classes are flooding into working class areas, and young would-be home owners go off to Bristol or the North - thus the affordability crisis spreads like a disease. Meanwhile the worst off see their estates demolished to make room for luxury developments and get shipped off to live in bedsits in Margate, away from their friends, families and support networks.

This country also suffers from an artificial scarcity of land and a defective planning system. The majority of land in Britain is still owned by an exceptionally tiny percentage of the population - many of whom trace their titles back to William the B*stard and his murderous cohort. This band of parasites, whose very existence is an affront to modern sensibilities, wield a grossly disproportionate amount of influence over the rate at which land is made available for development. What's more, when they do decide to sell up to developers, they are perversely entitled to not only the market value of their ill-gotten assets as it stands - but also to a chunk of the value added when planning permission is granted, despite zero effort on their own part. And, you guessed it, this drives up prices.

Ultimately, our housing woes can be put down to extremist, 'new normal' neo-liberal policy and the rampant financialisation of the housing sector. We are allowing the fruits of economic growth to accrue to an increasingly concentrated rentier class when we should be looking at ways to capture that unearned income for the public good. Placing the lions share of the blame on immigration is, to be blunt, egregiously and outrageously ignorant.


Probably one of the best posts I've ever read on TSR.
Reply 32
Original post by yudothis
Because almost every western nation is ****ed without it.

If we cut immigration to 0 now, there won't be enough young to pay for the old.

Yea housing is a problem, but it's nothing compared with the problem of old people. Especially this generations old people - they have royally ****ed over the current youth. They went to uni for free, they had ridiculously low living costs (just recently saw some figures on this that I don't remember but was something like comparing the years of average wage work to get a house then and now, and it's massively higher now), millennials are also likely to be first generation to earn less than previous. Then there's so many of them (baby boomers). Old people are a problem.



The problem is that immigrants do get old too. So following through with mass migration being nessecary to pay for the elderly, it will only make the problem worse long term.


If they settle here and earn less than £30,000 they won't be a net benefit when you weigh up taxes against pressure on services and pensions/benefits.


So it would be sensible to accept high-skilled workers through a points-system and give time-limited work permits to others.
Reply 33
Original post by TCA2b
A propos:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"



Very true! In a democracy I would have expected MPs to be accountable to the electorate more than vested interests and their whips.


But with all the major parties agreeing under first past the post it feels like we can only vote for the least worst option.
Original post by bob072
The problem is that immigrants do get old too. So following through with mass migration being nessecary to pay for the elderly, it will only make the problem worse long term.


If they settle here and earn less than £30,000 they won't be a net benefit when you weigh up taxes against pressure on services and pensions/benefits.


So it would be sensible to accept high-skilled workers through a points-system and give time-limited work permits to others.


Oh do shut up and listen to people who actually know something about these things. You actually just want to push your agenda, don't you?

1. The long term doesn't matter if you don't get there. 2. It will only become a problem if we again have too many and too many that don't have enough children and we don't have too many because natives aren't having enough kids. Combine those things and we need immigration.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/08/15/heres-why-europe-really-needs-more-immigrants/#6b7fc06d4917
Reply 35
Original post by yudothis
Oh do shut up and listen to people who actually know something about these things. You actually just want to push your agenda, don't you?

1. The long term doesn't matter if you don't get there. 2. It will only become a problem if we again have too many and too many that don't have enough children and we don't have too many because natives aren't having enough kids. Combine those things and we need immigration.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/08/15/heres-why-europe-really-needs-more-immigrants/#6b7fc06d4917



That's the kind of attitude it's sad to see so many young people have developed: contempt of any other views because you're so certain the mainstream ideology pushed by the education system is unquestionable.


Let's see if you're able to actually engage in thinking:


Why do we need mass migration?

To pay taxes and fill jobs? Because my suggestion of work permits would satisfy that without the burden of rapid population increase.


And based on that article, how is it morally right to take away young workers from poor countries recovering from communism or poverty and shift this alleged problem to them?
(edited 6 years ago)
Original post by bob072
That's the kind of attitude it's sad to see so many young people have developed: contempt of any other views because you're so certain the mainstream ideology pushed by the education system is unquestionable.


Let's see if you're able to actually engage in thinking:


Why do we need mass migration?

To pay taxes and fill jobs? Because my suggestion of work permits would satisfy that without the burden of rapid population increase.


And based on that article, how is it morally right to take away young workers from poor countries recovering from communism or poverty and shift this alleged problem to them?


My contempt is not for your view but for your inability and unwillingness to hear something that does not affirm your biases.

Your question proves this point perfectly, because I already answered it above, I even provided a link which you obviously didn't click on because then you'd have seen the source, or do you truly consider the FT to be a mainstream liberal/left biased news outlet?

Here's some more, you'll notice these aren't tabloids but all finance/economics related.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/07/daily-chart-6

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/europe-doesn-t-have-enough-immigrants

ps of course a more elegant solution would be to have natives birth more children, but since you can't force people to have more kids, you can allow immigration.

pps irrelevant, straw man. Which further proves my point stated in the first sentence of my reply - you are willing to stoop to straw men in order to keep your 'argument' alive.
(edited 6 years ago)
Reply 37
Original post by yudothis
My contempt is not for your view but for your inability and unwillingness to hear something that does not affirm your biases.

Your question proves this point perfectly, because I already answered it above, I even provided a link which you obviously didn't click on because then you'd have seen the source, or do you truly consider the FT to be a mainstream liberal/left biased news outlet?

Here's some more, you'll notice these aren't tabloids but all finance/economics related.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/07/daily-chart-6

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/europe-doesn-t-have-enough-immigrants

ps of course a more elegant solution would be to have natives birth more children, but since you can't force people to have more kids, you can allow immigration.

pps irrelevant, straw man. Which further proves my point stated in the first sentence of my reply - you are willing to stoop to straw men in order to keep your 'argument' alive.


You haven't answered the points and have shown no reasoning but just stated we need more immigration and given links to articles. Not worth responding to.
Migration watch does better quality research than those low effort, low quality pseudo right leaning journos do. We don’t ‘need’ immigrants. Automation is a far better solution, as is improving the educational system and reforming the welfare system to stop discouraging the acquisition of skills to earn more.

Mass importation of people is short termist, is already leading to problems down the line and has no discernible long term economic benefits to it, especially so if you look at second or third gen migrants. All it does is allow politicians to avoid investing in the areas I mentioned above for a quick source of tax revenue - which even then it isn’t on net. Some of them, eg Labour, hope it will mean dependent voters, loyal to their party. They’re utter scum.

Encouraging native births is the best idea and will require politicians to have some guts and reform the welfare and tax system from the ground to the top.
(edited 6 years ago)
Reply 39
Firstly they realize it's too late to do anything about it.
Secondly many of them rely on immigrant votes to get them back into their cushy trough guzzling jobs in Westminster. They'd hardly want to bite the hand that feeds them would they!?...
Thirdly they love to appear right on at Islington dinner parties.

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