Some thoughts on the UK and immigration

[andrewducker]

British Voters are happy that UK net migration is down. But they still think it's too high. Sadly, there is no information about how much immigration voters would like, but I suspect that they think that zero is good. And probably that negative is better.

And a fair chunk of this is because Labour and the Conservatives are both backing the idea that immigration is a bad thing. Lib Dems are in favour of being more humane about it than either of them, but only the SNP seem to have a policy that recognises that if immigration doesn't go up the economy is fucked.

Britain is aging. With serious economic consequences, with insufficient people entering the workforce to make up for the people leaving it, and increasing healthcare costs.

If we want the economy to function then either we will have to have more children or to bring more people in to work here. Those are the two options. And nobody has successfully managed to get a developed society to do the former*. So either we deal with an insupportable economy or we increase immigration. But neither of the big political parties wants to deal with the Daily Mail screaming at them, so we're going to spend the next few years doing the economically** stupid thing.

* Except Israel. Who we are unlikely to emulate.
** Obviously I haven't touched on the moral case here.

Comments

[lilysea]

Do the people who are voting for less immigration not realise that many of their doctors, nurses, teachers, physiotherapists, accountants, mechanics, cleaners are recent migrants?

How do they think they are magically going to get these services with no people to provide them?

[andrewducker]

They've just been told that immigrants are taking up all of the resources, and if we didn't have the immigrants then there'd be enough NHS for everyone to live forever!

All lies, but Labour aren't interested in actually dealing with the lies of the popular press.

[lilysea]

Huh!

I thought somewhere between 30% and 40% of NHS doctors/nurses and other NHS medical staff, not to mention the hospital cleaners (who save lives by preventing Multi Drug Resistant Staph infections)

***were*** immigrants!

I definitely get the feeling from things I've read that if everyone who had migrated to Britain in the last 10 years disappeared tomorrow via a Thanos style snap, the NHS would collapse from lack of staff.

I've seen a lot of news articles about poor countries in Africa and elsewhere complaining about Britain (and also Australia) stealing their nurses away with higher wages,

resulting in an even more desperate shortage of doctors/nurses in developing countries than there would be otherwise.

[andrewducker]

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7783/

81% British, 8.5% Asian, 5% EU, 4% African.

In London, it's 70% British. So there you're correct.

[ninetydegrees]

If it's like in my country, there are "good" migrants and "bad" ones. Your heart surgeon, nice, your local café owner, bad. More importantly, if they look white, are not Muslims, they're ok-ish. It all makes sense in their racist heads, and they don't really care about long-term consequences. It's just "everything will be better without...".

[danieldwilliam]

Those are different sorts of immigrants. The Good Sort, not the Bad Sort.

[calimac]

Similar thing in the US. Trump wants to round up and deport all the "illegal" immigrants, ignoring that they're the people who do all the grunt work in this country.

[andrewducker]

It's so much easier to blame immigrants than fix the actual problems.

[autopope]

The last figure I saw for the UK's TFR (mean number of babies per woman) was 1.75.

If you want zero population growth, you need a TFR of 2.05 to 2.1. Anything less, and your population is shrinking.

Which means the ratio of dependents (children and retirees) to working-age population rises. So fewer workers supporting more dependents … and also a lower GDP by-and-by.

The only developed nation bucking the trend right now seems to be South Korea, which has been beating records for number of babies in every one of the past nine months … since the government went into full-blown panic mode over their TFR slumping to 0.5 and started passing emergency laws to provide cheap housing loans, priority social housing, subsidized child care, better maternity leave, and so on.

Obviously none of that is going to fly with the UK (or US) neoliberal conservative governments (I'm talking about Labour here, never mind MAGA or Reform UK) …

[andrewducker]

Aaah! I assume they also saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk (transcript here.

I shall go and search for the latest figures!

[channelpenguin]

Really? Gosh, that might even work. Good on them. I totally didn't expect that. Next, maybe they can cure the toxic overwork culture.

The AfD here Germany had a poster campaign a few years back with pregnant white blondes in bikinis, saying "we will make them ourselves" but no actual policies that would that possible. Not too mention the 20 year lag, even if!

[movingfinger]

South Korea's systemic sexism and corporate culture are fundamental reasons the birthrate is low. Short-term measures like credits, child care, etc., which can be yanked in a moment, might change someone's mind about having one child, but they have to be in place for a long time (an entire society's worth of them) to have an effect. If you get free child care for one, that's great, but you probably aren't going to risk another if absolutely everyone isn't gung ho about it being the norm with housing, transit, play areas, schools, etc. similarly adjusted.

[danieldwilliam]

Do you think the response to the South Korean government's policy will be a sustained increase in TFR or is it just causing a blip in people who were probably / maybe thinking about having a kid soon and decided that the incentives made it worthwhile to do so now?

[pseudomonas]

I did my bit by emigrating. Where's my medal?