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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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UK Politics
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General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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British people want less immigration because they have been fed a deluge of racist, far right propaganda for years, if not decades. Propaganda that mainstream parties have failed to counter, or even tacitly endorsed.
Immigrants are not just good for the UK, they are essential. Of course immigration grows the economy, and makes us all richer (yes, even the poorest segments of society). But more than that, without immigration, our population will shrink, slowly at first, and eventually catastrophically. We need people to keep everything working, lest there is literally no one left by the time we get to retirement age.
Of course immigrants struggle to integrate when right wing governments have cut the programmes that existed to help them do that! In the 2000s, my wife (an immigrant) trained to teach English as a second language - a programme specifically designed to help immigrants learn English. The Conservatives cancelled that, along with a slew of similar initiatives. And then they feigned surprise when the far right stole their voters, and eventually took over their entire party.
I think you have been fed propaganda from the left.
First British culture has value to it. People like it and people want it. By bringing in a lot of immigrants that don't integrate that value is lost and people are unhappy with that. That is a real concern people have that the left act like it is made up. Sure new culture has value but it doesn't diminish the argument of the first and the great thing about travel is seeing new cultures, no one wants the world to be identical. People do not want to lose British culture and identity and that might surpass any other metric.
There has been far far too much focus on GDP and GDP per capita in my mind. First GDP is largely meaningless to the individual and even GDP per capita is meaningless if you are in a cohort of the population that is doing worse.
You show me that people in the lowest tax bracket are happier, have more home ownership, have more employment, have more dispatchable income, from all this immigration. Then we are talking but other figures aren't the whole picture.
The world is dying. Population decline is good. Japan manage it. They have high homeownership and low crime. Sure not much has changed since 2000. But you ask an average brit if they will probably say 2000 is better than 2024. Also if people had a home, more free time and more excess money they will probably have more kids.
The reason we need immigrants to do stuff is because things like education has been underfunded and wages are kept low by immigration. Fix them and those jobs will be filled with locals, plenty of the country is suffering horrifically and they could be trained to do jobs but instead it's cheaper to bring in immigrants. This is an example of increasing GDP at the expense of the everyday man.