Migration Watch are the folks who insist that we shouldn’t supply our silver girt island with dirty foreigners. When considering the French they are of course correct but other than that? There’s perhaps just a little bit too much of the insistence about Johnny Foreigner about them for any rational adult to be comfortable.
Take this for example, this is a story built up by them:
UK seasonal agricultural workers being recruited from dictatorial regimes
At least 30,000 foreign workers are being sought from countries including Belarus and Russia to come quarantine-free to the UK
How many hot buttons are being pressed there then? Dictators! Virus! Workers, foreign!
A first brief thought might be that if we are to take foreign workers of any stripe then we should preferentially recruit from places ruled by dictators. That way we get the labour we desire and the workers get at least a modicum of the freedom they too desire.
Actually, any thought at all would lead to that conclusion rather than this word salad of bad things to mention.
Hundreds of seasonal agricultural workers are being recruited from dictatorial regimes as Britain triples the number of foreign migrants used to bring in the Summer harvest.
At least 30,000 foreign workers are being recruited from countries including Belarus and Russia to come quarantine-free to the UK, despite both nations being under international sanctions.
Ministers decided not to re-start last year’s Pick for Britain campaign to recruit UK workers on furlough despite having spent at least £58 billion protecting 11.4 million UK jobs.
They have instead expanded the scheme from 10,000 last year to 30,000 with more recruits from Belarus and Russia where the economies are so crippled that recruitment agencies are receiving up to five applications for every UK farm vacancy.
And triple! Dear God, we’re being swamped!
D’ye recall those screams from before Brexit? About how it would all be terrible, the death of British farming, as those Romanians and Poles wouldn’t come over to pick the crops? This being why we must remain in the European Union,. pay Ursaula’s expenses and pensions, so that raspberries would be plucked?
Those varied insistences that we dealt with the problem before the EU easily enough and would do again seemed to get missed, didn’t they? That system whereby we licenced folks with temporary work permits to come pick the crops…. well, we used to do it, in fact we still did do it and we’d continue to do so.
Here we are, we are licencing folks to come pick the crops. But why has the system tripled in size? Because for the period 2004 to 2020 those Poles and Romanians and so on haven’t needed one of these special visas. Now they do again. So, the system has been expanded to allow them to have one.
And that, really, is all there is to this. Whatever Migration Watch might have to say about it.
‘… dictatorial regimes…’
Are there now any on Earth that are not? And look no further than home.
The penny has still not dropped for most people had it?
Seems preferable to who-knows-who coming across the Channel. Ah, those don’t arrive to work.
Being racist, I’d argue that those of the agricultural workers who manage to stay in the UK will adapt more easily, since their skin colour, culture and religion will be more like that of the locals.
Of course, as you point out, they’ll also have come to the UK prepared to work.