UK net migration hits record high of 330,000 this year

a reply to: TrueBrit

Something, despite wanting to help to an extent, it does go through my mind that by taking so many needy people and having to provide virtually everything for them there is a huge cost for this. As most are economic immigrants, we will inevitably find that once our good will spending on them has collapsed all our benefit system, crashed our NHS, schools etc etc and those benefits are available for none of us any more, these people who caused the overload and overspend will simply up and off to where the grass is greener for them - they are economic immigrants who have no loyalty, just needs which a decent country tries to supply - but the cost and consequences is something we are not facing up to.

One of the problems I have seen time and again over the years is when the going gets tough here - and even with our depleted benefits etc we are still a wealthy country compared to where some of these immigrants have come from - these people will leave considerably wealthier,healthier and better educated than when they arrived.

This is always born out when we are hit by recessions such as in the 1990s, 1980s and in the 1970's when we had stag inflation and the interest rates rose to 24.2%. A number of immigrants whom I worked with in the 70's simply upped and left, I remember a furious family from Pakistan telling me England was finished and they were off to Australia. They had bought their council house and claimed every benefit available and then he had been forced into work, hence his mortgage etc however, they had come with literally nothing to having a nice little nest egg courtesy of the british tax payer, gained from the man's minimal own efforts. I think immigration is a very mixed blessing especially when our country refuses to retrain people who are flung out of work for no reason of their own making. In Germany after 6 months unemployment you get retrained - not here we import someone we need with the qualifications (hopefully their own, though not always into key employment such as the NHS) and screw our own work force who are left to rot or flip burgers part time, getting further and further into debt often loosing their homes. We need balance and fairness in this situation IMHO.

a reply to: noonebutme

My sentiments entirely.

a reply to: gort51

a reply to: Shiloh7

And another for you.

Many people seem to complain that the British are lazy and result to the jeremy kyle stereotypes. But you have to ask yourself why this is so? Look at the communities where this is most associated and go back 30 years and see what happened. They were once centres of manufacturing, people could go out and get a job never needed to bother the job centre in the least. Look at the mining communities, lace communities and textiles. We were once teaming with jobs and really couldn't get enough people to fill them.
When the industry was closed down or people forced out of work nothing came to replace it immediately. A generation was raised on the shoulders of depression watching there mothers and fathers turn to alcohol to numb the pains of the life they had. Now we have seen some manufacturing return, warehouses and other industrial facilities pob up. It's not so simple as to say "there are jobs but the British won't so them" and then advertise abroad for the positions. Many of the communities are shattered and need assistance to address the problems they inherited. It's great there's now a factory there, but you can't expect it to cure those damaged by 30 years of neglect and abuse.
For many who come from abroad it's also a means to an end. You can come here and work for a few years on minimum wage and then go home and buy a house and live quite comfortably from then on. You've fat chance of doing that if you want to create a good standard of living in this country, about time you've paid the rent on a 2 bedroom house there's little else left unless it's expected that British people house share for the next 50 years in one room. It's the equivalent of a job advertised in some mythical country for £60k a year when you'd only earn £15k here, who wouldn't want to go there for a few years? Even if you had to put up with a 6ft box room and shared kitchen when you can be back home later and in your own 3 bed!
I don't blame anyone coming here but I do see the established communities suffering further, becoming more down trodden and worthless. Nobody in the UK is born a lazy, alcoholic, tattooed scrounger. They are labels which suit for the time being the agenda in situe.
The other argument about nursing staff and how there are not enough in the UK also. It is true. Few want to spend 3-4 years at university for a job which will pay below £20k. On one hand the argument being the course is so long is so it creates the 'best' nurses in the world, yet at the same time we will accept the standard that a nurse can come work for the NHS from a country who's courses are 1/3 or 1/4 the length. It's not saying the courses aren't long enough, it's saying the standards we impose are 'double' standards. We are setting the population up to fail.

originally posted by: ComplexCassandra

originally posted by: MrCrow
a reply to: Rocker2013

/headdesk

Anyone who contributes should be more entitled to those who don't.

Again that logic only follows if, as somebody suggested earlier, you view social security contributions as an extension of your own personal savings account.

In actuality the Welfare State was set up exactly CONTRARY to your statement.

Those who are unable to contribute are EXACTLY the most entitled.

Under your method you would give free prescriptions to the waged and the unwaged would have to pay for them. Does that sound like a sustainable system to you?

Alright then, what if I say that Brits should be more entitled [to whatever] than immigrants?

To be honest, we're going to go back and forth on this and we'll never agree. Shall we agree to disagree and leave it there? I respect your views, they're just not mine.

a reply to: ObsidianEclipse

Good points there. I agree.

a reply to: ObsidianEclipse
I live in an old coal mining community and they have never replaced the futures of the locals. The old miners vacate the early opening public houses for cheap beer and company. Their children and grandchildren have been, and are being dumbed down so have no chance of a productive life, just keeping the production line going.
We invested 5 million in a new school for our local children and what a success that was for the first year. Now we bus middle class children in from 5 miles away to take advantage of the excellent facilities and our kids cant get in. The sports facilities we invested in are too expensive for our children to use so its made up of sports for people that can afford to use it.

a reply to: ObsidianEclipse I do agree quite a bit with what you say, but I was working at a charity for young out work people in my town, we were a homeless charity, but we helped youngsters get some skills and try and find a job. Many of them were a bit lazy, but they were young so I tried not to judge too much, I think none of them had healthy role models in their life. When I was young I saw both parents go out to work, so it was seen as the natural route to go. I was always encouraged from my young teens to get a job by my parents who would take me to jobs and make sure I knew how to do a cv. The youngsters I was working with were never so lucky as I'd been. This is the problem some of our youngsters are just not prepared for working and now they are competing with highly motivated flexible workers from around the country. They have a tough job ahead of them. I don't know what the solution is, but I agree with your sentiment that we are setting Certain members of our society up to fail, especially our youngsters
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a reply to: ObsidianEclipse

That's a very biased and simple view of a very complex period in British history.

If we actually look at what happened honestly, we find that those industries were dying out, coal mining was being subsidized by the government because it was a failing business. When an industry ends because the core of that industry dies out, other things come to replace it. In the case of the industries you list, it can possibly be argued that nothing was done to replace those industries, but the same thing happens around the world to different communities every year, and most of the time that community recovers quickly and replaces the lost business with something else.

My family moved out of London in the 80's, because the career my father was in was collapsing. He saw this coming, and he did what he needed to do for his family. He moved us out of the city and started a new job, the industry he was in shrank dramatically a few years later and has been doing that ever since.

I also don't buy the whole "woe is me" excuse. These young people know little about what happened in the 70's and 80's to the industries that used to employ so many, and I'm not buying the notion that they're lazy for "good reason".

I, too, have had personal experience of employing young Brits and foreign staff, and I know from my own experience that the average 20-something Brit was pretty unreliable when compared to the Polish staff we had. In five years of managing more than 50 staff, I could be guaranteed that if someone didn't show up for work on a Saturday or Sunday morning it would be one of the few British staff in their 20's, and that I could call up one of the few Polish staff in their 20's to come in immediately for the overtime.

I used to work with people in that company who were xenophobic and not at all pleasant about those Polish workers, but even they could not deny that the young British employees were generally hungover, lazy, messy, constantly late if they showed up at all, and all while the Polish workers did everything they could to impress and work hard.

It was the same for the clients they worked with too. There were problems in the beginning with language, but even with that we would have clients requesting those Polish workers back rather than another arrogant, lazy, mouthy young Brit who clearly didn't want to be there and had no interest in actually doing their job.

We used to get the same complaints about the young British staff every day... they were late, they weren't in uniform, they were clearly hung over and looked a mess, they stank of weed, they spend all their time on their phone, they missed various aspects of their jobs completely, they were rude to staff, they ignored staff entirely, they couldn't be found in the building, they left early without telling anyone...

Not everyone was like that of course. We had a lot of great, hard working, professional British staff working for us from all backgrounds and all ages, but we got to a point where most of the young British people coming in for an interview wouldn't even get past the door. It was obvious most of the time that the interview they came to was just for show, to get the Job Center off their back. The job was there if they wanted it, but they would turn up in shorts and a t-shirt and basically do whatever they could to make sure they were not employed.

Of course, most of the people who applied never even got an interview, because they'd send in their application filled with "txt spk".

I'm sorry to say it, but the majority of the employment problems in this country right now have nothing to do with the 70's and 80's, and everything to do with a generation of young people who think every job is beneath them and lack even the most basic skills in language, but it's okay because one day they'll become a reality TV star!

You also have a generation of parents who seem entirely unwilling to light any fires under the butts of their offspring, Jeremy Kyle parents who would rather spend their time getting wasted at the weekends and watching Reality TV than actually being parents. This might also be why those young people can't form a paragraph without confusing "you're" and "your", or even replacing "too" with "2"!

When I started work I was earning £2.50 an hour. I worked 12 hour shifts in a warehouse with holes in the roof slightly bigger than the holes in my shoes. Now I'm running my own business in my 30's. I'm not special, I was a lazy teenager too, but my parents didn't give me the opportunity to sit on my lazy behind and do nothing, they would have physically marched me to work if they'd had to.

For me it seems to be about responsibility for oneself and the complete lack of it many young Brits have, along with bad parenting by people more interested in their own lives than the futures of their own kids. The jobs are there if they want them, clearly. The problem is that they all think it's beneath them.