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The usual answers given revolve around economic prosperity, which doesn't exactly seem to have materialized.
The other argument is around caregivers for the NHS and the aging population. Which doesn't have to map well to prosperity.
But I'm not sure just how many of the migrants are selected for that specifically.
I will speak specifically to Singapore, though to be honest the USA had a version of this previously: guest workers are a fantastic deal for everyone involved.
Short term migrant workers for the most part do not want to live in the new land they are working in. Earning 3x their home salary is still 1/2 the required salary in their work country, so they prefer to suffer temporarily then go home to their families and live like kings there. It is the surplus of exploitable social resources that incentivizes staying on and bringing the family over. Guest workers certainly are exploited relative to local standards, but willing buyer willing seller. Even the UAE kafala has improved significantly since 2016, and for all the complaints of slavery there is still no shortage of applicants for construction and care jobs in these places.
Except displaced citizens. If there are citizens who would do the job the guest workers did, but would charge more for it (because their cost of living was necessarily higher), they're going to lose out from a guest worker program. Sometimes this isn't true because the if you had to hire people at citizen prices, the job just wouldn't get done, but it's hard to tell in many cases.
That certainly is true for the PMC here, where we are constantly reminded of our inferiority by an endlessly imported class of Chinese and Indians and Malaysians, but the cultural dissonance is only moderate, with no welfare resources to be exploited by foreigners and lead to local resentments.
Guest workers here are primarily in the construction and domestic worker segments, where there was never sufficient local population that existed to service that demand. Singapores status as an entrepot colony meant that most civil construction works were conducted by Chinese and Indian (by nationality) labourers, with little local populations that were displaced economically. This continued into the modern era, where rapid industrialisation saw most labourers (Chinese and Indians stuck here after the chaos of the Civil War and Partition) in post-independence Singapore prefer to work in sheltered factories instead of outdoor construction. We had Malaysians and Taiwanese imports at first, then now it is Indians, Thais and Burmese, with Filipinos preferring to work in middle office roles. Locals certainly bemoan the presence of foreigners, but even with outsize pay for locals they still leave some jobs unfulfilled, so the companies appeal the Ministry of Manpower for more foreign worker allotments and said allotments are granted.
To extend this scenario to the west, the main example I would use is farmhands. These men were never the locals of the farm area who want to work in backbreaking outdoor work, and instead have historically been displaced itinerants seeking shelter and employment. Farm owners certainly bitch about having to rely on foreigners now, but in olden days a drifter from Oklahoma is as much a foreigner in California as a Mexican was, and doubtless similar disparaging would occur for Buffalo vs White Plains New Yorkers. Hell, even the family the next farm over with one too many hands to work their own plot might as well be barbarians as far as a homeowner is concerned.
My point is that guest workers are a historically tested solution to the problem of 'I need cheap labor but I want to kick them out when I do not want them anymore.' Some domestic populations would lose out, but compared with 'bring them in and they will also bring in their family and we give them citizenship in 20 years time' guest workers are a clear winner.
You could just have 0 immigration as well, and I think we can look to Japan and Chinas eager embrace of gynoids for a model on how that would pan out, but we are still a few years away from that. More research is going into making human form factor robots fuckable instead of workable, and what that says about humanity is for a different thread
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You don’t need actual immigrants to fill specific jobs like that, you can just bring in guest workers who know UK wages will go a long way in Kenya or India and so they’re willing to go home afterwards. The UK chooses not to do this, maybe to prop up the general population of low-skill laborers so they have their delivery drivers and the like.
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