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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1386 thread views

Transnational Thursday for August 29, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Is this a big increase in the annual flow of immigrants in the last few years, or is it that the accumulated stock has reached the point where people complain? Also, are the numbers driven by points-based immigrants or is there another route that is driving things?

I am asking because there is a fairly widespread theory of immigration politics in the UK (and to a lesser extent Australia) that it's the sovereignty, not the numbers, and that the success of the Canadian and Australian points systems was proof of concept that you could have mass legal immigration without a public revolt as long as you the system appeared to be under control, including low illegal immigration and low "obviously undesirable" immigration (criminals, Islamists, dole-bludgers etc). Dominic Cummings even put out a Substack saying that Brexit had successfully detoxified the immigration issue because mass immigration was no longer being imposed on us by foreigners. (Reader, the type of mass immigration that most bothered people was mass Muslim immigration, which never was).

This is beside the points system, it's linked to a temporary worker program and the foreign student program. They have existed for a while, the former being mostly made for seasonal agricultural workers, but it was expended to fix a "labor shortage" during Covid. The temporary workers, if they get a permanent job offer, can then get on a pathway to permanent residence. Foreign students get a pathway too, but many of them are enrolled to diploma mills that don't really expect them to study, and they just come here and start working immediately.

I'm not sure how gradual it was, a lot of people mention they noticed it coming back to their regular stores and restaurants after Covid. Anecdotically, my wife and I got married and she immigrated here (from Spain) during Covid, and the process had little guardrails, just (a lot of) paperwork. We never had to have any interview or anything.

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