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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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