It used to be argued that immigrants “come over here and take our jobs”.
But do they?
Certainly when a skilled migrant comes to Britain to work as a doctor, they take a job that a British doctor might have done, right? After all, the NHS can only afford to employ so many doctors – the NHS budget is not a bottomless money pit into which we throw taxpayers money?
Wait………
Never mind.
But this a bad example – the NHS is SHORT of doctors, so we have to recruit from aboard. And skilled doctors are very welcome here – we certainly don’t care what colour their skin is (although the ability to speak English properly might keep a few more patients alive?)
What about the unskilled migrants? The people coming here to pick strawberries, or clean toilets, or sweep the floors? Are they taking jobs away from unskilled British workers?
In short, is an immigrant working in a car wash taking away from young British workers their ability to get their first job and learn the vital basic skills they need in order to get their next one?
Is unskilled migration causing hysteresis in our young people?
Well, let’s see what our Progressive friends have to say on the matter.
On the one hand they claim that it’s all very well the older generations insisting that young Brits should get off their arses and get jobs, but tell us that the jobs just aren’t there.
On the other, they claim that very few migrants are claiming the dole, regardless of what any poundshop Enoch Powells might be saying.
Wait, which is it?
Are the immigrants working, in which case those jobs WERE available to our youngsters (before the migrants took them)?
Or there are no jobs, in which case how can the migrants be doing them?
It’s a conundrum, for sure.
One that we could unpuzzle quite easily if we wanted to.
If all migrants are skilled, a points-based system won’t affect them at all – the number of skilled migrants coming here (lots) will stay the same and so will the number of unskilled migrants (none).
Whereas if the number of unskilled migrants is actually LOTS, then the jobs they are doing are those jobs that our unskilled Brits might have done. If they go home and therefore stop doing them, there will be lots of jobs for British youngsters.
It’s pretty straightforward – unskilled migrants are either claiming welfare (if there are few jobs for unskilled workers, as progressives claim) or taking away jobs from British youngsters (if few unskilled migrants claim the dole, as progressives ALSO claim)
It’s definitely one of these.
Unless it’s both.
There’s a tiny problemette with the NHS example. The NHS will only train a few Brits. You need some pretty good A-levels to get into a course. OTOH, (so rumour goes) foreign doctors don’t need anything but a medical degree gained who-know-where. True? Either way the NHS should be able to use imports to fill the gaps, but it shouldn’t be stealing doctors from poor countries rather than train Brits.
If other industries are doing the same, similar injunctions apply.
Communists control the supply of UK trained doctors.
https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a748
The result is vacancies which can be filled from abroad or not be filled.
It’s the ‘We need foreigners to keep out NHS going’ is the one core part of the Remain project that I just could not support. ‘We need to destroy foreign countrie’s ability to have a health servcies so that we can have a health service’ was something I just could not sign up to. As a wishy-washy limp liberal I want to help poor oppressed foreign countries by helping them build up their infrastructure, not taking it away from them. That’s the economics of Empire! Sod competing with ’em, we can’t be arsed to do that, we’ll just stop them… Read more »
“You need some pretty good A-levels to get into a course”
The kind of A-levels that would get you onto lots of university degree courses and lead to good salaries without stupid working hours, medical malpractice suits, unionisation and constant vilification
I wonder why more students don’t go into medical training?