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I feel this all begs the question of the point of recent unskilled migrants. The majority of advanced Western economies are struggling to generate sufficient employment for their native population, unskilled labor is increasingly dead (and what remains is 'unskilled' service economy work which requires cultural awareness and language skills as opposed to the manufacturing of yesteryear) and thus all that seems to happen is a strange choice between either entrenched unemployment or pouring large amounts of resources into attempting to create economic productivity out of the unskilled.
I don't know about other places, but in the US low-skilled labor is very much alive. Obviously-recent immigrants form a large share of restaurant kitchen workers, landscaping workers, agricultural workers, and delivery drivers.
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The UK, like the US, has essentially full employment, in that everyone who wants a job can get one. There is still huge amounts of unskilled labour to be done due to a few things:
A huge number of people who could work, don't. This goes beyond the normal numbers of underclass people who are incapable or unable to hold down a job. The UK lags behind the rest of the developed world here. It seems to be a case of our easy to access welfare system coinciding with COVID idleness and people moving onto disability benefits due to 'mental health issues' (what proportion of these are malingerers are left as an question for the reader).
The previous Conservative government seemed to believe the dire warnings from business and threw open the borders to all comers to avoid labour shortages post-Brexit. It turned out that most of those being imported were inactive (either students or dependents) and lacked the high labour participation rate that previous EU immigrants showed. They later tightened up the rules a bit. So the labour market's needs weren't met by these immigrants.
Business wanting to keep down wages. This is most obvious in the care sector. The previous government explicitly allowed wages for work visas to be 20% lower than the standard in the UK, although they did abandon this after Labour flanked them on it.
Low productivity growth. UK business is addicted to cheap labour from abroad, obligingly provided by every government since Tony Blair. This means they don't invest in productivity enhancements, which means that the only way governments can generate more tax revenue and GDP growth is through yet more immigration.
Left-wing pro-immigration attitudes. In my view, these are best described as anti-anti-immigration attitudes. Left wingers don't make an explicit case for importing deliveroo drivers from Pakistan, but they (and their base) are strongly opposed to any restrictions on immigration, which smell of nativism to them.
The current government is saying that they expect immigration to reduce to 'reasonable numbers' (a net figure of 200,000 per year, still massive of course). It's unclear what Kier Starmer actually believes on immigration at the moment. His authoritarian streak has shown itself in his reaction to the recent anti-immigration riots, but whether he will follow this up with more immigration (to spite the nasty racists) or less immigration (to avoid future riots) is unclear.
They don't usually make a public case for doing it but they do defend it after it's done. Recall 'diversity is our greatest strength' and the other multiculturalism slogans. This stuff is taught in schools, it was taught to me in Australia. In the old days, everyone was white and British and that was bad. Now taxi drivers and lawyers can be Chinese or African or whatever and implicitly that's good. They didn't explicitly say bad and good but the meaning was impossible to miss.
In the UK specifically there was a letter about how the New Labour immigration program had one of its causes being to rub the Right's nose in diversity, that it was social policy as well as an economic operation: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249797/Labour-threw-open-doors-mass-migration-secret-plot-make-multicultural-UK.html
Neather was being a smug prick when he wanted to prove to the evil gammons of Norf FC that the UK would not be compromised by having poles and lithuanians come in to the UK. I believe Blair was however caught off guard when he thought France and Germany would also allow poles/lithuanians to go to their countries, when instead the UK was the one to get the brunt of eastern european migration.
The 'diversity is our strength' phrase really started taking off post-Obama, and was doubled down in the wake of the backlash towards mass MENA immigration. The problem of this message is that it automatically raises up literally everyone except the majority race, and the majority starts to notice. This can keep going so long as the pie is not rugged from under the majority, and the sheer volume of bad-faith MENA actors exploiting white british male achievements (as opposed to poles and lithuanians and indians and nigerians who didn't cause as much trouble) has come to a head. Perhaps the suspicion that Labour will do nothing to help the natives out, as opposed to the Tories who at least pretended to give a shit, has also lead to the back finally being broken.
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The point is to kill and dispossess whites. The plan is to import the browns, get them to vote, and turn the country into minority white. Then, when over half the population is foreigners, they will vote to dispossess the whites and seize their property.
It's the same plan everywhere.
Naked culture warring with inflammatory assertions backed by your feels.
You've been warned repeatedly about this, and you've made it clear that this what you're here for. Your last ban came with a note to permaban you next time, but that was ten months ago and you've earned an AAQC since then (in which you showed you are capable of dialing down the heat and engaging in good faith), which suggests you've made some effort to improve your behavior. So I'm just giving you another two-week ban which will hopefully serve as another course-correction.
left wing bias mod last two bans showing clear left wing bias
I kind of feel like his comment is such that it could be copy and pasted and dropped anywhere, and that makes it highly suspect. The original comment was talking about economic trends that could be argued to be recent and about unskilled labor more broadly, and how it relates to perhaps a reduced need for migrants. The response was a condensed polemic making approximately zero attempt to engage with the conversation. Consider for a moment the use of the word "they" which is in itself a blaring warning light too. Who the hell is "they" and why on earth would they benefit from such a plan if it even existed? Would foreigners even vote as a bloc? For that matter how do we know this is anything knowing rather than the result of larger macro forces? The comment again does not even begin to gesture at these points. It's, simply put, consummately "waging" the culture war rather than discussing it, which is at least in my eyes the 'red line' of the law here. It's just reddit behavior from a different ideology and so it sort of feels like a deserved ban in that respect, yeah?
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Several people have rolled this out lately, yet cannot articulate the alleged bias. Someone who clearly violates the rules but says things you agree with does not mean they are being modded for reasons of political bias. Both the people I banned had very long and bad track records (and had earned warnings and bans from multiple mods).
What exactly do you hope to gain with this ankle-biting? I will feel bad that you don't like my modding and it will spoil my evening? I will be convinced by your fact-free expressions of indignation that I should stop banning people if their political views align with yours?
even if you ding me when I get too out of line I appreciate your efforts Amadan.
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@remzem can correct me if I'm wrong but I think there was an implied "/s".
Very much doubt it. This isn't our first go-round with him.
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What left wing posters are there even to ban such that it could possibly go the other way? Outlaw and Stingray?
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The point is to try to prop up pension obligations without making the compromises to women's empowerment necessary to goose the fertility rate/tame inflation at the same time. If you don't acknowledge HBD or the structural problems with western economies it makes sense, and these people don't acknowledge those things.
I see this a lot. And I suppose it could be conditionally true. But considering a French banlieue of poor unemployed unintegrated immigrants or their unintegrated unemployed children: are these people propping up pensions?
Or as American, considering illegal Mexicans working for day wages. If they are paid under the table, in what sense are they propping up social security?
I get that productive employed taxpaying H1Bs are a net tax benefit. But other examples of mass immigration are not clearly net tax benefit to me.
A lot of illegal immigrants pay payroll taxes in America; roofers and meatpackers and such are usually on the payroll through fraud. Daylaborers aren't, but most illegal immigrants have more stable employment scenarios, often through contractors who commit identity fraud for them. They wouldn't be net taxpayers if they were able to access benefits from the government but they aren't, and contractors are more concerned with avoiding the wrath of the IRS than ICE.
In any case, we as a society do need some people to do low-productivity hard work for low pay on an ad-hoc basis, and local roustabouts no longer have their once upon a time single redeeming virtue(being willing to do that), so daylaborers from Latin America enable some real economic activity which eventually gets taxed that otherwise wouldn't get done.
A lot of the American elite's attitude towards immigration is driven by the assumption of these people being largely Mexican construction workers who mostly intend to retire in their home country due to cost difference and are employed by contractors who genuinely fear the IRS; I know less about France and Britain, but in America this was true up until relatively recently.
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Western states want to maintain a high ratio of working-age population to retirees and that definitely will help to achieve certain goals. Even if the immigrants are destined for low-wage roles, that means that hiring care workers won't be as expensive (higher labor supply equals lower wages) and current levels of care can be maintained. Another common reason was to address the ostensible post covid labor shortages that business interests in many Western countries were arguing for. And yet a third is that many of these countries feel it's in their strategic interests to make their populations as large as possible, which I've seen French, Canadian, and American establishments explicitly endorse. In reality, I think the first two explanations are serving a few powerful interest groups at the expense of general welfare and future prosperity, and that the third explanation is misled as it's not overall population that matters but high value HBD, but this isn't taken into account by the establishment probably because it serves other purposes to deny. There's also a dark fourth reason, which is that elite interests converge on diverse populations as they are easy to divide and conquer and thus dominate. We do live in an era of anti-competitive corporate consolidation, top-bracket tax cuts, corporate welfare, and persistent privatization of inappropriate industries despite gross failures, whilst the broader populace bickers primarily over matters of racial prestige, so if the elites indeed orchestrated this they've done a good job...
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