“I honestly don’t understand how it can be so hard to cut immigration. The government has and has long had all the tools it needs at hand to actually do it – if it actually wants to. Especially as only around 25% of visas are actually work visas. I wonder if the way forward is just to give responsibility for incoming workers to companies. If they need workers [that they] can’t find in the U.K. they can hire abroad, sponsor, house and finance them within a 3-5 year circular visa system. [This] Takes stress of public services especially the NHS and housing; it allows workers to make money to take home and reduces long-term numbers. Japan has a system much like this.”
– Merryn Somerset Webb, columnist. These comments appeared on her Linkedin page.
While many on the free market side of the fence can be at odds on the immigration issue, what seems plain to me is that controlling legal immigration ought to be pretty straightforward if that is the policy. So why is this so hard to do in practice? I cannot help but think that it is a lack of political will, and an element of resistance to enforce democratically-enacted policy at the level of the Civil Service. In which case, it is no wonder that the Conservatives got crushed in July and that, on current trends, the current shower in government will go the same way.
There are always excuses for the failure of Britain to follow the democratic will of the people and control immigration – say that Hungary manages to control immigration and the response is “they do not have a sea coast” (as if most immigrants to Britain come in little boats – they-do-NOT), say that Australia controlled immigration and the response is “they are a long way away”, say that Sweden (yes even Sweden) has controlled immigration and the response is….. well I am waiting the latest excuse for why Britain can not do what Sweden has managed to do.
The British political system is crippled – policy is often made by officials and “experts” with politicians tagging along trying to remember their script. But it does NOT have to be this way – Parliament could, by Act of Parliament, get rid of any agency, repeal any law, scrap Blair’s Supreme Court, whatever it takes.
In the end Johnathan Peace is correct – it is lack of political will.
Cameron, May, Johnson and Sunak all promised to end mass immigration – none of them challenged the establishment (I will give Liz Truss a pass – as the lady was not in office long before being removed by an establishment coup), indeed all four of them were really part of the “liberal” establishment.
Will Kemi be better in five years time? I hope so – but five years is a long time.
But five years is a long time – there may not be much of a country to save in five years time.
By the way what is happening to Britain and other Western countries is nothing to do with libertarian “free migration” – this is government benefit and public services migration, and if anyone does not know that then it is time you did.
In my youth I was very frustrated by the “failures” of Margaret Thatcher – the failure to end the “Race Relations Industry” created by the 1965 Act (remember that Act was only 14 years old in 1979 when Mrs T. came into office) and later Acts of Parliament, the terrible handover of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia to the Marxist mass murderer Robert Mugabe, the failure to, overall, reduce taxation, the mad “Single European Act” of 1986 (Mrs T. was lied to, the officials told her it was a free trade measure – but a man in his 20s does not tend to be tolerant of other people’s mistakes “surely it is obvious that the officials are lying – why can the lady not see through such obvious lies”)
But as I have grown older I have come to understand how difficult governing is – and how someone in office is surrounded by establishment officials (and vile disloyal “colleagues” – such as the scum, and the word is well deserved, who brought down Mrs T.), looked at in the context of the terrible odds against her Margaret Thatcher was a great person and a good Prime Minister – the only good Prime Minister of my lifetime.
All the other Prime Ministers have either been failures (like poor Liz Truss – betrayed before she had a chance to do anything), or have been actively trying to do harm.
Even in the 19th century Prime Ministers did not tend to roll back the state – even Gladstone was a heroic failure, as his friend and biographer, John Morley, sadly recorded – with such things as the failure to get rid of income tax (which Gladstone had set his heart on doing).
Lord Liverpool managed that – and did many other things, but that would be a different comment.
There is also the tidal wave of lies from the “liberal” establishment – for example in France any person who stands against mass immigration gets “Nazi” spat in their face. Even though keeping Africa and the Islamic Middle East out of France was the central policy of Charles de Gaulle (a principle that was betrayed almost as soon as he was out of office) – the leader of the resistance against the Nazis.
Winston Churchill had the same view of mass Third World immigration that Charles de Gaulle had.
We live in a demented world where the opinions of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle are described as “Nazi” opinions.
This is a terrible idea, at least from a free market/small government perspective.
It may take a while for employers to finagle the details, but eventually, some will realize they have access to a labor force who can’t negotiate higher salaries (etc.) without the threat of deportation. All they have to do is claim they “can’t find” the workers they need.
It will also act as a barrier to entry for startups in the industry, unless you figure out a way for people to hire these workers they “can’t find in the U.K.” before their business even exists.
I think the bigger problem for free market supporters is the presence of a population who can be ejected from the country if they try to negotiate a better sale price for their time & skills. Treating it as a pro-market idea will only convince people that “free markets” really means more power for established companies. Admittedly, that idea’s already widespread, but making it correct makes the problem worse.
The nicest thing I can say is that it might be an improvement over your current regulations; I confess ignorance on that subject. Just remember that its effects will include a new bit of inelasticity in the demand curve for labor, that pundits who argue that government should intervene more in employment contracts will have a(nother) precedent… and that people who argue that “the system” promotes “inequality” will have newfound credibility.
I keep hammering on at the weasel words “NET Immigration” and my usual argument is that if one million white, British people emigrate per year and 1,000,001 immigrate then NET immigration is only one per year, so nothing to worry about?
I have been unable in the past to obtain any actual figures for how the population is changing but the first graph in both of these articles gives an indication.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14140319/The-WFH-civil-service-staff-missed-166-000-migrants-Workers-Office-National-Statistics-voted-strike-asked-desks-two-days-week-face-backlash-latest-migration-figures.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14140295/Foreign-nationals-THREE-times-likely-arrested-Brits-parts-UK.html
So about 1.35 Million immigrants for January 2024. You cannot keep exporting about 500,000 British people and importing 1.35 million foreigners annually and have a coherent and viable country.
With the current numbers of foreign born people already in the country, then shortly the only British people in Britain will be six feet under the ground.
I keep coming back to the idea that the complaint in the USA – that we need imported labor to do certain jobs that American workers won’t do – is more accurately stated as, we need imported labor to do certain jobs that American workers won’t do at the currently offered price.
We will never attain relative cultural peace so long as we intentionally maintain higher unemployment amongst certain low-power and low-dollar groups.
What’s good for Tyson Foods isn’t necessarily good for the USA. Talk to me about complete free-market principles once there are no more world borders, and there is no more desire to keep us at an economic level higher than the Third World.
(Because that leveling of the world is NOT a good thing if you’re on top.)
My objection to the OP is that it expands on how to restrain LEGAL, non-refugee immigration.
It has nothing to say about the real problem, which is illegal/refugee immigration.
Snorri, well it’s your opinion that the only real issue here is illegal immigration, but that’s plainly not the view here in the U.K. of politicians such as Nigel Farage and his supporters who regard the net influx of millions as a problem.
Illegal immigration is a problem, not least because it undermines respect for the law, and involves criminal smuggling gangs, imposes billions of pounds of costs on taxpayers, etc.
But if you track debates, it’s plain as daylight that many people see immigration of all kinds as a problem to be managed. I fall into a more liberal category in that I see migration as an aspect of liberty and a constraint on tyranny. The freedom to heave an oppressive place and better one’s life is a freedom to applaud. At the moment, the presumption is against it. It’s a shame.
The problem is that UK native workers are expensive and difficult. Far easier to juke-the-stats to say you can’t find someone with specific experience and then import some easily manipulable Hindu on a fraction of the salary. The costs come off the bottom line anyway.
I’ve done exactly that job as a contract project manager for Infosys in the UK. I didn’t do the job for long.
JP, you are such a squish. Many people see immigration of all kinds as a problem to be managed because the entire system is broken and needs to be managed, if not overhauled, not just in the UK but in other countries as well.
As for those who want to leave an oppressive place I’d rather they stay and fight for their freedom as many others have done. Tommy Robinson comes to mind. I assume he could have fled long ago, not to mention certain dissidents under the Soviet umbrella.
And just what freedom do you expect them to find in the UK with it’s ever increasing implementation of draconian anti-freedom laws. My guess it’s the freedom to congregrate in enclaves and ghettos and make life uncomfortable, sometimes even miserable, for folks in surrounding areas.
Nice country you had there, too bad something happenned to it.
Henry, you’ve come into this blog comment threads relatively recently so maybe you aren’t familiar with how we roll here. Debate and disagreement is fine. Insults and rudeness aren’t. The administrators are a fairly relaxed a bunch but there are limits. Don’t push it and make a smell.
JP, message received. I didn’t think the descriptor was much of an insult. I’ve used much worse on other blogs. Anyway, apologies.
” I wonder if the way forward is just to give responsibility for incoming workers to companies. If they need workers [that they] can’t find in the U.K. they can hire abroad, sponsor, house and finance them within a 3-5 year circular visa system.”
As Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons would say – Worst. Immigration policy. Ever!
Start company at Companies House (cost: less than £100), using fake details. Use those details to import as many ’employees’ as you fancy (having charged them a fat fee of course) then when the authorities come investigating (maybe), close the company and disappear. Or just disappear. Result even more mass immigration than we have today. Undoubtedly in the millions per year.
Even the legit use of such a policy would result in hundreds of thousands of people here, who would then be impossible to remove if/when their sponsoring company no longer needed them/went bust or when they just left the sponsoring company’s employment. All of whom would be using the NHS, sending their kids to State schools, being provided social housing, and claiming UK benefits (because the UK State will never enforce any requirements to check on eligibility, because to do so would be racist, as they see it). And of course who would all claim they couldn’t be sent back home because of human rights.
So we’d be right where we are today, only far far worse.
Exactly. What hope is there for oppressive countries if their best and brightest – and most liberty-oriented – are simply moved out to “freer” places? We would all do far better by finding ways to help those same people, and their countries, in place.
Even if the mass immigration was not about government benefits and taxpayer financed public services (and that is, to a great extent, what it is about) people with hostile belief systems would still not come under libertarian “free migration” ideas – as they intend to do harm, and therefore the non aggression principle comes into play.
If they intend aggression – for example against people who do not share a certain religion (who insult the founder of that religion – or will not pay the special tax and act in a way that shows them to be humble and subdued), it is actually against the non aggression principle to allow them entry.
In the United States it is not really about religion – it is, sometimes, about who the land belongs to. Were the conflicts of the 1830s and 1840s “Anglo aggression” or not? If they were, so the argument goes, the land does not “justly” belong to the present owners in Texas and so on (although the vicious “land reform” movements in Latin America, which started with the Mexican Revolution of 1910 – but carry on to this day – show lack of concern with the ethnic group of the landowner, they are basically “you have got something I want – so I am going to take it by force). Although the main problem in the post 1960s United States is the tax payer funded benefits and public services – more extreme in some parts of the United States (such as California) than in other parts of the United States (such as Texas and Florida) – but the problem is everywhere to a greater or lesser extent. Before the 1960s there was not much in terms of benefits and public services in the United States – even Food Stamps only date to 1961 (they did not exist under President Eisenhower).
As for assimilation – the modern system totally misunderstands that word. Assimilation is not about, for example, going to Association Football matches in Britain or going white-water-rafting, it is about beliefs – fundamental principles.
The CDU in Germany says that immigrants must adopt Western principles – but what if they do not? And what if they pass on their hatred of the West to their children and children’s children – which seems to be the case?
What do you do then? Mass deportations of people actually born in the country? That would NOT be acceptable. So the demographic balance of the country will get worse and worse over time – till there is some horrible conflict, or till the previous population of the country surrenders to humiliation and tyranny – hardly in line with the non aggression principle.
Hungary has the correct approach – do not let them into the country in the first place.
This also matters in the case of Russia – Mr Putin has long imported people from Central Asia both to act as “cheap labour” and to, to some extent, man his war machine. The late Mr Navalny, the Russian opposition leader imprisoned by Mr Putin (Mr Navalny died in captivity) argued that this was a betrayal of the Russian people to forces who had been their enemies for a thousand years – that was the opinion of the person the Western establishment said they admired.
No Snorri – in the United Kingdom and in such countries as France, Germany and-so-on, much of the problem has been legal (not illegal) immigration.
Saying that the problem is just, or mostly, illegal immigration – is wrong, at least in Western Europe since the 1960s.
Governments in France and Germany actively invited in people in the 1970s – and allowed them to bring their families.
This was a terrible blunder.
Both France and Germany, in different ways, tried to assimilate the migrants and their children and children’s children – but as Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill predicted, such policies have failed. In France, in Germany, in Belgium – and in your own Netherlands.
Perhaps part of the failure is the collapse in the West of faith in its own principles – why should migrants (or their children and children’s children) adopt principles which the establishment in Western countries no longer believe in, indeed despise, themselves.
Dying cultures do not tend to attract converts.
Well, then, the solution is easy. Just outlaw all immigration, and don’t enforce immigration law.
… Wait, you don’t want illegal immigration to be a problem?
bobby b:
Considering the millions, if not tens of millions, of people who have fought and died for their freedom why should so-called freedom loving immigrants get a pass just because they say that’s what they want. And a lot of them are fighting age males.
Just to throw this out there:
I spend the cold third of every year in a place where it is helpful to habla espanol. I’m there now. I’m vastly outnumbered.
And I’m surrounded by Americans. People who want to be here, people who value what being here means, many of whom sacrificed a lot to get here (or their parents did.) Trump supporters by and large. Hard workers, family people, people who want their kids’ lives to be better than their own lives.
We’re better off having these people here.
The other 2/3 of the year, I’m in a place where, if I go into the city, it would be helpful to speak Somali. Little Mogadishu, they call part of that city.
Completely opposite culturally. They will never assimilate, they hate America, they despise women, their neighborhoods are dangerous to everyone, even themselves. They demand and get huge subsidies, essentially for life. They do not seek employment, they do not strive to better themselves.
(ETA: out of fairness, they are not ALL like that. But far too many are.)
Immigration numbers are too high overall, but where we’ve really failed is in not choosing which cultures to import from that will benefit both them and us.
bobby b, is it too late to do anything (legal!) about the Somalis?
Could we say “We’re sorry but we (Obama) screwed up and moved too many of you here, and did not prepare you (educate you on what it is to be American, get your Oath to the Constitution up front (and hook you to a lie detector while swearing the Oath!). But now we’re going to fix this and here’s how…” It’s that last bit I don’t know about.
One possibility: enforce the law. Not safe to go somewhere in Minnesota? Send in plainclothes cops, just walking the streets. Maybe female cops wearing revealing clothing (nothing outrageous…just the norm for any large city)…with their brother cops watching close by! Make sure the police “managers” (Sergeant up to the Chief) are in line as well as the DA and local judges, then give them a good hard policing!
I realize that none of this is possible in the People’s Republic of Minnesota, but what is possible? What’s legal? What’s politically feasible in Red State jurisdictions?
I’d like to clarify that my previous comment was based on my following American politics much more closely than the politics of any other country. There is something about it that fascinates me, morbidly.
I’d also like to point out that i wrote “illegal/refugee”. Refugees are, i suppose, legal immigrants; but in my (poor) understanding they are hardly distinguishable from illegal immigrants. Of course, some of them are “legitimate” refugees — but how many of them aren’t?
That’s key. This is the state that gave us Mondale, and Wellstone, and Walz. About 45% sane people outstate, and 55% pink-haired city crazies who still want to defund the police and bring in more immigrants. They admit the new crime and unsafeness, but revel in how we can now get cool “ethnic” food.
And Lutheran Social Services knew what they were doing when they brought them all in. They’re documented sufficiently to avoid deportation.
All we can do is close off more entrants. And Minn won’t do that.
Snorri Godhi: I, too, was not really thinking in terms of illegal v legal. There’s not a huge difference in my mind when we have no qualifications for “legal. Our Somalis are “legal.” Some of our “illegals” are far better for us.
Actually, with the votes sprinkled about between four parties, plus the SNP in Scotland, the current shower can retain its majority with 28% of the vote. Recall that it only got 34% to win its current landslide.
There’s a lot of ruin in six years.
I imagine that your previous government was listening to the same economists as were the Biden people, who were telling them that they needed those extra people in order for the country – i.e., the large corporations – to prosper.
So I cannot imagine how much worse your levels will get if your current gov believes that, PLUS believes the leftist view that charity begins and ends at home.
(Which gives me an entre to throw in one of my favorite immigration-philosophy videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE ) (The famous gumball vid.)
Bobby:
And as i understand the Haitians in Ohio are “legal” too!
I can’t stand that we’ve been subjected to this experiment, but Britain does provide a good example to expose claims about immigration supposedly being an economic boon.
For the past twenty years immigration to Britain has been on a scale totally unprecedented, and since COVID/Brexit has been turbocharged further. Economically, what is to show for this? Britain’s economy has been growing about 1pc GDP per year since 2008. It may be objected that immigration isn’t the fundamental reason for such low growth. Even if that’s the case, the massive scale of immigration versus such low economic growth over such a long period would suggest economically mass immigration is no panacea to anything.
Meanwhile, social cohesion is completely collapsed.
In different circumstances encouraging immigration may be justified. I don’t think in the Britain of the past 20 years it has been. Based on the extreme demographic experiment of these decades, the only immigration I think that should be strongly encouraged to Britain for a while is to encourage and facilitate those aboard who have British ancestry to come live in Britain to help rebalance the demographics and buttress our culture. My fiancé is South African of English descent (grandparents from London) and she is over here with an ancestral visa, so you may think I’m just special pleading, but I have always thought those with British ancestry should be given preference.
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
C. P. Cavafy
It’s not that natives won’t do at the currently offered price, it’s that they cannot AFFORD to do the jobs at the currently offered price.
bobby b it is interesting how Minnesota followed the same policies as Sweden – where the ancestors of many old families in Minnesota came from.
High taxes and government spending, and inviting in hostile migrants – yes (as you know) governments and other institutions actively asking these people to enter – and offering them benefits, public services, and other inducements.
Sweden is now facing up to its problems and trying to deal with the situation – let us hope that Minnesota does the same.
Ending the election corruption would be a good start – so the Democrats do not take total control of the State Legislature. “Sorry we tossed away certain votes – it has an innocent error”