I keep hearing mental debate on immigration. The left appears to think it’s cool to just allow people to come into the UK and that they should be welcomed with a free house and finance, free healthcare, free schools for their dozens of children, and support given to non-English languages and non-British customs as a priority. The right wants them simply shot before they get here.
Both sides are mainly wrong, of course.
You see, we need a different approach. It’s not complicated. Any country has to think of itself as a kind of lifeboat. It’s easy to think of the UK as a boat, being as we are surrounded by water!
Well, harsh as it may sound, any lifeboat can only take so many people. Overfill it and you drown everybody, not just those who you sadly can’t allow on board due to lack of space.
Now, my way of measuring this ‘fullness’, even though we are actually the second most densely populated country in the EU, would be to look at the number of unemployed.
If you take out of the equation the voluntarily unemployed and lazy bastards who are living off the rest of us, make allowances for population distribution compared to job locations, then all the time there are genuinely registered unemployed, we obviously have more people than we have jobs. So, what is the point of us filling our country with even more people than we have jobs for? Makes no sense, does it? Think lifeboat. You only have on board the number the lifeboat can hold.
When we have as good as zero unemployment, then, fine, let more people in. Simple.
Ok, it’s not exactly as simple as that. Detractors scream and shout that we need to allow more people in with the skills that those already here don’t have. Erm, pardon?
Why the hell are we not teaching skills and giving training to those already here? I mean, for the tasks that tend to be paid at minimum Living Wage or not far off it, and can be undertaken by most people with a little bit of training, why are we bringing people into the country whilst there are registered unemployed who could be doing those jobs? How can that make any logical sense? By flooding the ‘market’ with a massive overabundance of potential workers with identical skillsets we are keeping wages low. By having less people for the jobs available, the wages go up to try to attract people, competing against other employers for the available employees. Fact!
There are also far more specialist skills needed for, let’s say, brain surgery. Even with high unemployment, we need brain surgeons. So, it also makes very good sense to allow foreign brain surgeons into the UK if we have none here already. But, in the longer term we should be designing our schools and universities to provide us with the future brain surgeons. We should never get to a point where we constantly rely on other countries to provide us with all the specialists all the time, year after year. We need to learn to respond to our future needs and to grow our own talent, whether that be brain surgeons or any of the other specialist disciplines.
Using the unemployment figures as a barometer to measure whether or not to allow others into the UK, along with, as far as possible, anticipating future skillset needs, would deliver us a much fairer, happier and prosperous society. We certainly shouldn’t allow ourselves to be attractive to migrants who have nothing special to offer our country, yet seem to be happy to pass through many other countries before they get here, usually illegally.
England's England 