Monday 25 June 2012

Those filthy immigrants, coming over here, stealing our jobs...

It's obvious, isn't it? Allowing cheap, skilled workers from Poland and Latvia into the UK is going to force down wages for the poor, hard-done-by British worker, and, in extremis, force him into a life of penury on the dole.
It's extremely obvious, but sadly, it's also complete fucking bollocks:
From a policy making point of view, the paper reaffirms the general consensus among economic analysts that A8 migration has had no adverse impact on the labour market outcomes of natives. Given the heated public debate about A8 accession – with a number of commentators making assertions that migration has resulted in a significant increase in UK unemployment, or falls in wages, but generally without referring to hard evidence – it is important to establish whether there is in fact any empirical evidence substantiating such assertions. Our conclusion is that as yet there is no empirical evidence of significant adverse effects on native labour market outcomes.
The analysis does, however, have policy implications for the UK labour market. It suggests that the generally poor labour market outcomes of low-skilled natives in the UK do not reflect either a lack of available jobs, structural factors in the labour market, or a lack of formal qualifications – since A8 migrants find it relatively easy to find employment – but rather issues around basic employability skills, incentives and motivation.
In other words, as I've been arguing for years: the problem is not with immigrant crossing continents to live in cramped conditions, affording to live and somehow still being able to send money home, while ostensibly working for less than the mighty British worker and forcing Brits onto the dole - it's that those people who could work but aren't working either don't want to or don't show sufficient appetite to work when they can be arsed to show up at the door.

And I'm disappointed in the normally irreverent Dan Hodges smoking the filthy pipe of anti-immigration, too. Ed Miliband is being a populist, vacuous, bandwagon-jumping cocktard, not brave and astute. The problem is not the majority of people who migrate to the UK to work and create wealth, it's with migrants who come here to sponge. And that's only because we have a welfare culture.

5 comments:

One of your twitter followers... said...

Every immigrant that I have ever worked with has a work ethic that put us all to shame. My current job is 7am till 4:30, but we have a wonderful (London based) Indian chap who works damn near 18 hours a day, 6 days a week. This is not expected, but he does it anyway - I have been called out at 2/3am some times, and have chatted with him online. His work is brilliant as well. Contrast that with a recent grad interviewed, who tutted, sighed and rolled his eyes when we said that we would want him in by 8am.

Instead of stopping immigration, can't we just have an exchange program - the cost of benefits in Britain would give them a decent life in India, while we get the best mind to drag the country out of the mire.

Oh and can we send B£iar to the Hague...

Furor Teutonicus said...

I would have no problem working for the same wages as a scumbag Pole, or some nigger type.

So long as you go and explain to my fucking landlord, gas and electric company, food shop, clothes shop, etc why I will only be paying scummy Polish prices from now on.

Andrew S. Mooney said...

In a situation where 9 out of 10 new jobs reportedly have gone to immigrants, it suggests that something more is going on here than benefits. It strikes me it is more about employers who seem to be of the attitude that looking for work is a weakness, which they then remedy when they deign to offer you a job.

The other way of thinking about it is that you are offering to pay them to do work that you personally don't want to do. That way of looking at it is news to some people: http://www.economist.com/node/21541717

As for me, I don't need to work. I've got a really good income from renting out firetrap properties to gangs of Latvian potato pickers. They pay great and I can't see anything wrong with it as some of them have been here years and if they wanted to, it is a free country, they could leave and go and be analysts in Canary Wharf. I am sure that it is that easy and they just haven't shined their shoes and sucked a recruiter's dick hard enough.

I also have a room full of Indians who are keen to work eighteen hours a day, six days a week. I notice how most of them sleep on the floor under their desks and have no family, wives, children to see or dependents of any sort that I know of. I should know as this was a condition of my helping them get through security at Heathrow airport.

Many of them are also working to pay off the debt that they put themselves in when they went to some ludicrously overpriced university in America, and if this seems hard to you, remember that they really should have thought about all of this when they were fourteen years of age and sat in a slum somewhere. It's not my problem.

Anonymous said...

a local employer near me refuses to employ the british in his factory (doesn't matter what colour). he says they won't work for anything less than £6 odd an hour, so he buses in loads of migrant workers from a neighbouring city...

not sure how this benefits him, as the buses must cost him a far bit in fuel etc, but at least he can avoid employing the british.

he must pay his workers less than the minimum wage then, so how come he hasn't been prosecuted? is it because he is from the far east?

if he'd been british, he'd have been prosecuted. if he'd been white, he'd be in jail.

Furor Teutonicus said...

XX not sure how this benefits him, as the buses must cost him a far bit in fuel etc, but at least he can avoid employing the british. XX

How many wogs can you squeeze on a bus?

If each one is saving it, say, 3 quid, then....

but I refer to my last post. If I can pay woggy prices, then I will work for woggy wages.

It is even more pronounced here, because it is only half an hour to get here from Poland. So they come here, knick all the bloody jobs, knock down the wages to a price where we could not even affiord the matarials, then piss off back to Poland where the tax man can't touch them. (Further South it is the same with Czekoslovakians.)

They are not buying anything here, pay no rents, pay no taxes, but destroy our jobs market. Quids (or Euros) in.