Brexit is a disaster for the UK economy
There is some truth about the turmoil that would be caused by turning off the migration spigot, but an analogy might be that the country is like a patient unnecessarily dependent on a drug - take them off it and there will be pain and upset , perhaps they may even need medical intervention - but no doctor would recommend a patient continue taking a drug because it will be painful to stop.
Before mass immigration, our economy stagnated for centuries. Following industrialisation, growth was sustained through high birth rates and lots of low-hanging fruit for innovation.
Now our birth rate is low and innovation is hard. We have to sustain our workforce somehow. There are already lots of jobs going unfilled.
Don’t agree at all about the loss of purchasing power. There is good where that rings true - housing. That’s because we don’t build enough. The cost of British labour has also risen, not sure whether it has kept up with inflation. Everything else, my purchasing power far outstrips what my parents or grandparents could buy. I can fly to Greece for less than £20, I can fly across the Atlantic for £150, less than 0.5% of my annual salary. If my grandparents wanted to make the same trip in the 70s it would have cost 100% of *her* annual salary as a schoolteacher - I don’t know exactly what *he* was earning as a real estate agent but it wasn’t enough to make air travel as affordable. I have a much larger wardrobe, my television is much better, we obviously don’t need to go over computers. I have fresh fruit and vegetables all year round. I can call and write to my brother in Australia for free as part of my Wi-Fi payment of £6 per month. I can get unlimited music for less than the (unadjusted!) cost of two LPs a month. Even cars, which are energy-intensive to manufacture, seem to be getting more affordable.
“Real wages” are nearly always growing, even before you factor in things like switching from vinyl to streaming. Our standard of living is higher today than for any previous generation. Sort out the housing crisis with some regulatory changes and we’re golden.
I'm genuinely curious.
Uncontrolled immigration from mostly EU countries was perceived to put pressure on access to things like school places or doctor`s appointments, it drove up the shortage of social housing.
For indigenous British working class people in lower paid jobs they found themselves competing with economic migrants who were willing to work harder for less.
Some of these migrants shared rooms or slept in sleeping bags on hard floors. It didn't really matter because the exchange rate outside the euro made such sacrifices profitable.
A UK cleaner probably makes the same as a doctor in Moldova for example in currency terms, so a non skilled person from working in the UK would have been able to either send money left over home or save & return to their country rich once they had converted their savings to their local currency.
It was also great for the richer segment of the population as rents & house prices exploded, a lot of these people made a lot of money, not to mention suppressed wages for the lower paid that didn't keep up with property prices making business owners richer
Of course some stayed & didn't return home increasing the population further.
Not blaming these people its just economics and opportunity, but many British people started to feel used & fed up with this situation.
They felt a basic supply & demand issue was obvious, more people less housing, less medical appointment spaces, less chance of their child getting a space at the school nearest to them. Supply & demand is quite a simple thing to understand.
One cake the more people turn up less for everyone.
Even animals understand the concept which is why they are protective & territorial of their hunting grounds etc..
Anyway people got fed up of bringing this issue up and people like Nigel Farage explained in clear terms that the reason why immigration cannot be controlled is because of open borders or EU law that Britain cannot opt out of.
David Camron our PM then tried to make a deal with the EU but they basically told him to go away not interested.
Exasperated he gambled and launched a referendum on EU membership. He thought he would win & put the matter to rest once and for all.
He possibly didn't understand that his party & the majority conservative press that has been anti EU for about 30 years telling everyone how terrible it was and blaming every incompetence on Europe like Mad Cow disease in the 90`s, suddenly doing a 180 turn saying how great it was & that we should stay probably wouldn't make sense to most people who were told to blame the EU.
It didn't work & Britain voted to leave.
Some will blame the immigration issue but smarter people will blame the accountability issue, people realised they had no power over government policy & their democracy didn't stand for much.
So immigration issue was a catalyst to highlight the issue of democratic accountability that i mentioned above
There is a very simple fallacy in this:
Those immigrants provided a huge part of workforce to keep the economy going.
They worked using less housing than British workers doing the same job would - you admitted it yourself.
They used healthcare and they also provided healthcare - how many immigrant doctors and nurses have you seen? How many hospital cleaners and maintainers? How much more does keeping a hospital cost without cheap immigrant workforce?
They take a part of the cake - but they contribute to the cake even more.
Every rich country has it this way, even Poland recently became well-off enough to attract immigrants.
If you kick out immigrant workers, you simply stay with a lot of work not done.
You are correct up to a point, but not all slept in sleeping bags 10 in a room many did require housing, medical services and schools even if they contributed in other areas
Immigration tends to increase GDP which is why governments support it
GDP growth is just you turned over more than the year before
A store will have sold more potatoes this year than the year before so made more money because there’s more people buying them.
That’s all GDP growth is
Nothing is more of a killer of governments than an economic recession of negative GDP which is why they are also terrified of limiting the easiest method of increasing it i.e immigration.
However it’s a bit of a Ponzi scheme if the only way you can increase economic growth is by increasing the population maybe the government is doing something wrong.
It’s a bit like a dog chasing it’s tail
Many are now even questioning the concept of chasing unending GDP growth as a measure of a country’s well being citing limited natural resources and environmental damage
_________________
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."
- George Bernie Shaw
Everyone post-Boomers in the UK and the US. Boomers got to enjoy immigration, spending the social and financial capital they inherited on cheap childcare, cheap waiters, cheap tradesmen, cheap servants in general.
For thousands of years, most of the population were peasantry, working hard in agriculture and often operating on bare survival level.
Then, with industrial revolution, you had mass migration from countryside to cities.
Since then, the technology-economy-demography system was never stationary.
You're telling the hypothetical addict that had he not started taking the drug, then he wouldn't have enjoyed all those times he got high. You are correct in a way, but is it really in the best interests of the patient?
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Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
There's nothing wrong with treading water, which I don't think we ever really did.
You make it sound so easy. We were importing a medium size city of people every year in the UK pre-Covid. It's probably back up already, I haven't checked. Just build more houses bro.
This is technological progress, which would have made its way to Britain with or without immigration.
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
GDP growth is just you turned over more than the year before
A store will have sold more potatoes this year than the year before so made more money because there’s more people buying them.
That’s all GDP growth is
However it’s a bit of a Ponzi scheme if the only way you can increase economic growth is by increasing the population maybe the government is doing something wrong.
It’s a bit like a dog chasing it’s tail
Many are now even questioning the concept of chasing unending GDP growth as a measure of a country’s well being citing limited natural resources and environmental damage
_________________
Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
So, you basically find the modern way of life in Western world - with goods and services available - an addiction.
Well, in a way, life itself can be seen as an addiction.
Would you prefer your country to go back to the pre-industrial era when the vast majority of people had to spend their lives on hard physical work they barely survived from? And a couple of lords to benefit from it?
Personally, I don't find it a good idea.
By the way, events of mass migration have been happening every now and then from prehistoric times. From my point of view, we're living in yet another transitional episode of the history, something of a scale of the neolithic revolution or more. It will take some time and much more changes to reach some new equilibrium.
_________________
Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
Well, in a way, life itself can be seen as an addiction.
I was saying that the economy as it is, is addicted to migrant labour - it's become dependent on people willing to come over, live in boxes and work for pennies. I was saying two things really: 1) Any attempt to change the status quo will cause headaches, even if it is the right thing to do, and that is not a good argument not to do it and 2) it was not necessary in the first place - economies can do fine without mass immigration.
Personally, I don't find it a good idea.
The only other option is feudalism? Japan has had very low levels of immigration compared to the west and still have a very homogenous population and all the benefits that entails. Are they pre-industrial? They certainly have their problems, but I think they are fewer and less serious than all the problems than we have had thanks to immigration.
These events in the genetic record were likely obscenely violent, genocide by any other name. What price are you willing to pay for this transition and this new equilibrium? Peoples do not usually disappear gently into the night.
_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
I read it as you were talking about what I wrote - that mass migration in Britain started with Industrial Revolution and enclosure. So, if that was "starting to take the drug", getting to the state before it would be indeed feudalism. If you think inner mass migration was good but only "outer" migration should be stopped, I wonder what's the fundamental difference.
I haven't lived in Japan. I spent just a week in Korea and this experience made me realize what cultural differences are. I couldn't live in East Asia, I'm deeply incompatibile with the way they're organized.
I know in Korea (immigration level similar to Japan) extreme poverty among old people is a big problem. A quick google indicates something similar in Japan. So the problem of too many seniors in proportion to working people seems not entirely made up.
I'm indigenous Central European. I'm a descendant of people who lived here since Stone Age and countless waves of immigration since then, nearly all of them assimilatted - the exceptions that remained to the historical times, like Jews and Gypsies, did not come in any kind of a violent conquest. A strange irony of history is that they disappeared in an extremely violent conquest...
Various multi-ethnic political entities like Poland-Lithuania or Holy Roman Empire contribute to a large part of history here - and numbers of small duchies within the same ethnicities were also common. Within them and between them, migration happened all the time, whenever some under-populated land needed settlers.
Nationalisms in modern meaning developed only in the 19th century.
_________________
Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
Yes true
Yes agree
_________________
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."
- George Bernie Shaw
Biscuitman
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I'm genuinely curious.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
techstepgenr8tion
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When I look at Brexit I mostly see it as a reaction to a problem that was peaking in the mid 2010's as a result of the Syrian civil war, ie. the sense that EU Parliament was going to make critical decisions, for them, regarding immigration and other issues which seemed like they could have really bad turnout down the road and many Brits (again - just my outside read) got the sense that all of the EU countries, including themselves, were just places for Brussels technocrats to slot problems in a round-robin fashion. A person can genuinely be racist and just not want non-white people in their country but far more people can have concerns about pace of immigration and race has far less to do with it than economic, values, and cultural assimilation.
I don't think that instinct to want sovereignty in the face of emergencies is particularly strange, just like having a foreign country tell you what your immigration policy will be - to suit its needs instead of your own - is particularly appealing (I can't imagine the United States taking that from Brussels either).
That crisis, along with the factors Mark Blyth talked about in his 2016 lecture 'Global Trumpism', where both left and right-wing populists were winning due to dissatisfaction with economics, seemed to play a role and the migrant crisis just accelerated that.
The challenging thing now - Brexit got drawn out to such a degree that it's still in process and now it seems like the migrant crisis has died down which means a lot of the red flags that the Brits who voted for Brexit were seeing at the time are also a lot less prominant.
I think this just goes to show how tricky the proposition of the EU is, how easy it is for a centralized technocracy (still a 'foreign' body of technocrats and lawmakers) to alienate any member state to where most of that state's members want to leave, and as I remember for much of the early 2010's, even before the migrant crisis, there was the seeming permanent cycles of austerity with many of the Southern / Mediterranean countries, most prominently Greece.
I get how Brexit would be particularly challenging as well if it's putting the UK at a disadvantage with respect to trading with Europe, or forcing the UK into closer trade alliance with the US on the US's terms. At the same time, again - as a somewhat detached observer from across the Atlantic - much like in the same way genuinely sane concerns people can have get hammered down with cudgels (racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, etc.) until only very right-wing and even racist people are allowed to talk about them (because they wear the epithets and say 'So what'), the 2010's really showed the cost of delegating national sovereignty to Brussels and clearly a a lot of countries - including Hungary, Poland, and Czech Republic, didn't like what they saw and similarly it looks like both the UK and Italy also didn't like what they saw (there was some concern that Italy as well would go the same way and exit from the EU).
If I had any advice to Brussels - they're going to need to be extremely results-oriented, as impartial as possible, and see 'feels'-based political decisions as very nasty and costly, especially when they're forced to make decisions on those lines, because they'll be polarizing and they'll threaten to shed whichever member states find the costs to be unacceptable. Unlike the US federal government, which has fifty states in relative captivity, and can have batisht crazy politics, I think Brussels - to work and to hold the EU together - needs to be incredibly, incredibly boring.
_________________
The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
I'm genuinely curious.
The reasons politicians wanted it and why the public voted for it were very very different
That seems plausible. I heard tell that Boris Johnson wasn't a Brexit supporter at all until he realised that championing it could be his ticket to power.
I'm genuinely curious.
The reasons politicians wanted it and why the public voted for it were very very different
That seems plausible. I heard tell that Boris Johnson wasn't a Brexit supporter at all until he realised that championing it could be his ticket to power.
I heard the same about Ms Lettuce, pardon, Truss.
_________________
Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
I don't think that instinct to want sovereignty in the face of emergencies is particularly strange, just like having a foreign country tell you what your immigration policy will be - to suit its needs instead of your own - is particularly appealing (I can't imagine the United States taking that from Brussels either).
That crisis, along with the factors Mark Blyth talked about in his 2016 lecture 'Global Trumpism', where both left and right-wing populists were winning due to dissatisfaction with economics, seemed to play a role and the migrant crisis just accelerated that.
The challenging thing now - Brexit got drawn out to such a degree that it's still in process and now it seems like the migrant crisis has died down which means a lot of the red flags that the Brits who voted for Brexit were seeing at the time are also a lot less prominant.
I think this just goes to show how tricky the proposition of the EU is, how easy it is for a centralized technocracy (still a 'foreign' body of technocrats and lawmakers) to alienate any member state to where most of that state's members want to leave, and as I remember for much of the early 2010's, even before the migrant crisis, there was the seeming permanent cycles of austerity with many of the Southern / Mediterranean countries, most prominently Greece.
I get how Brexit would be particularly challenging as well if it's putting the UK at a disadvantage with respect to trading with Europe, or forcing the UK into closer trade alliance with the US on the US's terms. At the same time, again - as a somewhat detached observer from across the Atlantic - much like in the same way genuinely sane concerns people can have get hammered down with cudgels (racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, etc.) until only very right-wing and even racist people are allowed to talk about them (because they wear the epithets and say 'So what'), the 2010's really showed the cost of delegating national sovereignty to Brussels and clearly a a lot of countries - including Hungary, Poland, and Czech Republic, didn't like what they saw and similarly it looks like both the UK and Italy also didn't like what they saw (there was some concern that Italy as well would go the same way and exit from the EU).
If I had any advice to Brussels - they're going to need to be extremely results-oriented, as impartial as possible, and see 'feels'-based political decisions as very nasty and costly, especially when they're forced to make decisions on those lines, because they'll be polarizing and they'll threaten to shed whichever member states find the costs to be unacceptable. Unlike the US federal government, which has fifty states in relative captivity, and can have batisht crazy politics, I think Brussels - to work and to hold the EU together - needs to be incredibly, incredibly boring.
The 2015 migrant crisis did not impact UK much, it was mainly on the Hungary->Austria->Germany tract.

The main problem wasn't Brussels but Berlin - bold virtue-signalling policies of Angela Merkel inviting everyone to Germany without asking other states and her own population for opinions resulted in plenty of chaos and migrants trying to magically pop up in Germany (which meant a gold mine for human traffickers).
EU does not have a common migration policy. Never had - which can be a bit problematic with open borders. I remember partial border control was introduced during this crisis and later during covid. Temporary border control during crises seems not a bad tool in EU.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
techstepgenr8tion
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Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 46
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,692
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

The main problem wasn't Brussels but Berlin - bold virtue-signalling policies of Angela Merkel inviting everyone to Germany without asking other states and her own population for opinions resulted in plenty of chaos and migrants trying to magically pop up in Germany (which meant a gold mine for human traffickers).
EU does not have a common migration policy. Never had - which can be a bit problematic with open borders. I remember partial border control was introduced during this crisis and later during covid. Temporary border control during crises seems not a bad tool in EU.
TY for the clarification on that, and yeah I can easily imagine human trafficking taking advantage of that situation
_________________
The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
