Where is this magical job opportunity? What do I need to do to get it? Please let me--
--oh. I see now, you're one of...
those people. How depressing.
There's always a "but" with you guys, isn't there? Gee, next you'll be saying that some of your best friends are coloured. Don't worry, though - one of
my best friends is racist!
Songbird already said what I was going to say about your "data", so I'll leave it. But seriously, Cyclops - back off on all the BNP/UKIP/Daily Express shit. Doesn't do you any favours.
Songbird didn't say anything about my "data" (and why is that in quotation marks? It is data.)
I don't know how to explain my position any more clearly. I'm personally for immigration. Over half my colleagues are from overseas, and I love it. I live in central London, and I love walking down the road and seeing a Bangladeshi restaurant followed by a lebanese falafal cafe, followed by a jellied eel shop. I don't think British culture is being eroded, and, as a Libertarian, I don't think that a job belongs to anyone. No one can "take our jobs" because they aren't our jobs, they're just
a job. I love that shops can be cheaper because they have lower wages staff. I don't know what else to say to champion the benefits of immigration. None of this stops me recognising the effect that immigration has on unskilled employment in the UK.
If it makes you feel better, and will actually encourage the debate rather than you dismissing me as "you guys" and throwing some random, absolutely inappropriate political organisations ("BNP/UKIP/Daily Express shit") at me, let's forget the word immigration. Let's pretend that there was an enormous baby boom 18 years ago, any now we have a ton more lovely, stout, British lads entering the work force. As in, orders of magnitude more than normal. But our growth in production hasn't increased by orders of magnitude. In fact, even during the boom it was a lot less than that, and now it's basically stagnant. What's going to happen to employment levels? Due to the flooding of labour into the employment market, its value is going to go down (just like when you print money and flood markets with it, the value of a currency goes down). In this scenario we don't have British people and Immigrants but the point stands - an over-supply of labour keeps wages down. That's an economic fact. It's not some myth cooked up by the BNP. It's the same reason why professional football players get paid so much - there are so few people with the skill to play at that level, that they're hotly sought after and clubs with one-up each other to get the player. With an over-supply of labour (which mostly only happens at the unskilled end of the spectrum), they know they don't have to offer you a higher wage, because there will always be someone else there who doesn't have a job who'll do it. It doesn't matter if it's due to an internal baby boom, immigration, work-fare or even automation of production processes,
an over-supply of labour leads to lower, or stagnant, wages.
Now to put it back in the context in which I raised it - why that's a problem in the UK. As I've said several times in this thread, the problem with welfare in this country isn't that it's too generous or that people are too lazy. The problem is the system itself incentivises people not to get a job unless it's particularly well paid, because often times the loss in the various benefits, each with their own criteria, will be more than their newly earned wages. In other instances, it's a big chunk of their new wages at least. In terms of take-home pay, for a lot of people coming off of benefits, you suffer an effective tax rate of some 70-90% of their new wages.
When you put these two things together, you get a bit of a disaster. In the UK, we have - yes, due to immigration, but try not to let that word make you punch a wall, try and read what I'm writing, that's a good chap - an enormous supply of labour. A lot of people come to the UK in search of work. These people that come, however, cannot receive the vast majority of benefits. This is why the two paragraphs above collide - on the one hand you have a welfare system that means it's often not worth a UK national going back to work unless they're getting a really quite good wage, and on the other you have a huge pool of labour that
cannot receive these benefits keeping wages down. If we didn't have a large labour pool - let's say there was no immigration, no workfare, no increase in working age population and roughly no increase in technology - companies would be forced to raise their wages, otherwise they'd get no employees. Under the current system, it's the value of the work that dictates whether someone will both coming off of welfare, and when their effective tax rate is about 80%, it's just not worth it for the extra £1.40 an hour that they'd get from a minimum wage job. As such, businesses would be forced to up their pay in order to get employees (just like Football clubs do in order to get the best talent). It's just the nature of supply and demand, with welfare acting as de facto competition to paid employment. Businesses would have to offer a better opportunity for people than welfare does. Except, of course, that in the UK they don't, because we
do have work fare, immigration, a growing internal population and greater automation of production.
Now, like I said, I'm for immigration. I'm a Libertarian. I want fully open borders. I love globalisation - the majority of my clients are over seas and I appreciate the opportunity to do business in their country, and if they can find work in mine, good on them. You do, though, need to be wilfully ignorant of the facts of the last 10-15 years, as well as the nature of economics, if you refuse to acknowledge the effect that immigration has had on the employment prospects for unskilled British people. The data above - yes, "data" - describes quite clearly what I'm explaining. It's sad that I have to end any post about immigration with a paragraph like this, because we
should be able to discuss the negative impacts of immigration (as well as the positive) without having your post content ignored and told to " back off on all the BNP/UKIP/Daily Express shit". If you're going to try and do that again, don't fucking bother. I've just written about a thousand words explaining why I think this - don't do me the disservice of meeting that explanation with inane and incorrect platitudes again, please.
