Monday 25 March 2013

Immigration is (mostly) a good thing...

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And perhaps politicians need to stop telling us how bad it is - not just the tinpot poujadist Farage but all the others too. Miliband, Clegg and Cameron all lined up to tell us how jolly awful immigration is, how something must be done, how (in Miliband's case) how sorry they were that they'd not said nasty things about immigrants before. All accompanied by a stream of lunatic policies and controls - designed less to do anything about those dreadful immigrants than to get the juices flowing in a certain sort of upper lower middle working class person that the focus groups have spotted.

Let's be clear folks, what Britain has gained from immigrants so vastly outweighs what it has lost that to start on some ghastly line of "they don't speak English" or "they take our jobs" is to entirely miss the point. A point that goes like this:

Immigration is good for us. With every major party now promising to ‘get tough’ on immigration, it’s easy to forget that immigrants bring new skills to the country, allow for more specialization, tend to be more entrepreneurial than average, pay more in to the welfare state than they take out, and make things cheaper by doing the jobs that Britons won't.

So a little bit of me despairs when the last generation of immigrants turns on the latest arrivals - here's Rashid Awan from Bradford Pakistan Society:
 
“If anyone is coming to this country, he or she should have a job to go to or study,” he said. “Students coming here should have their financial backing in place. In my view it does make sense.

“Maybe some people will be affected by this, but I think this policy has to be observed. To bring back the economic situation of this country to normality, these small steps are necessary.
“I am not here to say people who are here genuinely should be penalised, but I think these people coming here genuinely are taken care of. We are in a very acute economic situation and we need to make sure no abuse is created as far as benefits are concerned.” 

But I'm not surprised.

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4 comments:

Joshua said...

All true enough, and I find the current orgy of immigrant-bashing rather distasteful, but I think it would be unwise to focus exclusively on the economic advantages of immigration. Integration simply isn't possible at the current rate of migration, or so it would seem, given the racial and cultural ghettoisation of many inner cities. And the result of this may, alas, be greater support for 'tinpot poujadists' rather more dangerous than Farage.

Twenty_Rothmans said...

As an immigrant, I hope you don't mind if I comment.

Importing cheap, uneducated labour en masse to cover the gaps left by a lenient benefits system will fix everything, will it?

It is this sort of attitude that will cost the Conservatives power in our lifetimes. It will cost Britain far more dearly.

Barman said...

Immigration is fine to the point where parts of the UK are not recognisable any more...

Get off the Train at Wembley Central and (if it wasn't for the red buses) you would have no idea you were in the UK.

That is deeply wrong.

It isn't so much immigration people are upset about but the pandering to immigrants, their failure to integrate and the turning of large parts of the UK into ghettos.

Anonymous said...

The problem with the issue of immigration, is that whatever the arguments for or against it.

People don't seem to want it, but are having it rammed down their throats.

And so every-time someone tries to defend it, it just causes people to feel entrenched in their views.