UK post-Brexit rules to 'turn off tap' of low-skilled foreign labour

[Conchúr]

The bold answers your query. Your observation that immigration to the UK "still works out as a positive net fiscal contribution" has been contested by Migration Watch and other similar minded organisations and polititians. Sure,  "migrants actually proved useful fiscally and commercially" to many employers — it saved them from needing to modernise, thus exacerbating problems later on.  So Britain kept churning out many labour-intensive and dated products, sweeping up, caring, etc, and in the process recruited too much immigrant labour. It was left to foreign companies to move-in, set-up, take-over industries in the UK and install advanced processes for the markets they choose. If these now scale back and leave the bulk of the UK workforce to find work in financial and service industries, and in unskilled and semi skilled jobs, the UK will struggle.

Don't get me wrong, most immigrants have done what they were required to do (I'm a product of immigration), but too many were required, instead of developing and using modern technology...

Yeah but Migration Watch would say that wouldn't they?  They are an organisation whose very raison d'être is to oppose what they view as mass migration — so I wouldn't expect them to be objective in the appraisal of EEA migration.  



When we talk about migrants being 'fiscally' useful this is in terms of their fiscal contribution — i.e. their contribution to HMRC, not to their employer.  Fiscal contribution is essentially financial contribution to State, so it's not simply a matter of immigrants being commercially useful for employers.  I'm also not quite sure that I follow you completely on the technological innovation point. My main rebuttal would be that there has been a hell of a lot of technological innovation across lots of industries — in fact I think it would be undeniable that since the early 90s the pace of innovation and the growing prevalence of technology across business has been unbelievable. But, despite all that innovation there still remains significant shortcomings in the capability of artificial intelligence and robotics — and even where it has filled gaps, other gaps for human input have emerged.  



I have one of those Google Home speaker thingys that my daughter got me for Christmas — I've been mucking about with it and it's a great piece of kit.  I can turn off the lights with my voice, ask it to set the thermostat, ask it to order me a taxi etc. My wife talks to the bloody thing in French and it calmly does all the same stuff en français .  Unfortunately it hasn't quite reached a point of development where I can get it to take my 90 year old mother to the toilet, and I doubt that it will develop enough in the coming years to be able to collect my grandchild from playschool.  Even if it did, I don't think I would trust it.  



Going back to my brother's company — they are using the type of cutting edge technology that one would expect from a company designing and fitting out luxury ships.  But we aren't at a stage yet where, rather than sending your geographically-flexible Polish joiners to finish off a mahogany staircase on a cruise ship, you can send your robot joiners.   Could technology find a way around the need to send the human joiners?  Yes, it's not beyond the realms of imagination — but such technology at this point would be prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of companies to invest in.

[GerryT]

So patel has set the salary limit for these immigrant's at £25k to keep the low skilled undesirable's out.

Someone needs to explain to patel that the starting salaries are:



Nurse £24.2k

Paramedic £24.2k

Midwife £24.2k

Radiographer £24.2k

Care assistant £17.6k

Physiotherapist £24.2k

Therapist £24.2k



Humm !

[Baron von Lotsov]

I would have thought Priti Patel would have checked the ONS data on the economically inactive before putting both feet in her gob:-

It's a smart move because of the law of supply and demand. As the low-skilled toddle off home, employers will have to raise their rates, so they are a fair bit more than the minimum wage, which often represents the breadline for families.



Employers will have to learn to be polite and welcoming to staff in low-skilled jobs. Eventually word will get back to the dolie and his mate would say, wow, so and and so firm are paying 15 quid an hour and the job is a laugh, and we are treated well. Dolie's paw reaches for phone and a nice lady answers and he has an interview when he would like to have an interview and the critical move is performed where arse departs from seat and legs start to move.



It's not rocket science this, you know!

[Baron von Lotsov]

People say this though as if automation were some new thing.  In truth, automation has been a long ongoing process since the dawn of the Industrial Age.  The subsequent advent of the microchip and robotics has also revolutionised the way economies operate — but this had the effect of creating job opportunities, not lessening it.  



Even at that, there is a fair degree of ambitious interpretation out there as to what robotics can actually achieve both now and over the course of the coming decades.  My brother is an engineer for a British company that designs and fits out ships.  A big part of their operation is having workmen who are flexible to be practically perpetually on the move travelling around dry docks in Europe to do the actual fitting out.  It has borne out over the years that migrant workers, who often come without their families anyway, are the most willing to do that kind of thing given the fact that they are already "detached" from their home.    Free movement also allows for the company to save time, paperwork and therefore money on travel permits for these guys. We are simply nowhere near a point where robotics can replace that kind of workflow, or fix the issue when the availability of this kind of labour is reduced.  

I've been researching this very thing for some considerable time now. It is my interest to see what actually goes on in factories and how a product starts from raw materials to where it is purchased. I've seen many examples, both here and elsewhere, and I keep on seeing the same thing. The last one I looked at was the business of manufacturing buses. There's a bus fanatic on Youtube called flat cap bus driver or something, and this chap is a bus enthusiast and got to film the factory where they make the buses used on British roads. It gives you a rundown of the different processes and then I found a company in China also manufacturing buses, except they call their bus the superbus.



The differences were astounding. I really do not think you appreciate exactly how backward we are. I've also looked at the Jaguar car factory in about 1960 to see how they manufactured cars at that time, and we're at about the same level of automation. The Chinese factory is like space age. Quite frankly I believe many of our firms have no option but to go to the wall. It's not as if there are a few wrong things out of most of it right, but a few right things out of most of it being done wrong. In these cases you might as well free up the resources and human labour to be employed in a firm starting out the right way from the beginning.



Experience does not count so much because of the radical differences. The government have been keeping these firms on life support, which is this cheap foreign labour. That subsidy is actually very harmful to their business. Without it they would have cried oh shit years back, followed by we must do something fast or the receivers will be here, then perhaps the now would see them making good money. Now they are probably just too far behind to recover. We will see much of this going on as the distortions of the market are gradually corrected.

[papasmurf]

I would have thought Priti Patel would have checked the ONS data on the economically inactive before putting both feet in her gob:-



https://news.sky.com/story/priti-patel-attacked-over-clueless-claim-that-inactive-britons-will-fill-job-vacancies-11937918">https://news.sky.com/story/priti-patel- ... s-11937918">https://news.sky.com/story/priti-patel-attacked-over-clueless-claim-that-inactive-britons-will-fill-job-vacancies-11937918

[patman post]

Yes, I'm just trying to tease out though how you think they "fucked up" when it came to EU migration.  Sure, they didn't apply the restrictions on Eastern European migration that they could have done, but even if you actually remove migration from the old member states from the equation — thus accounting only for migration from the post-2004 expansion member states — it still works out as a positive net fiscal contribution.  Ultimately, it seems to me that  because these Eastern European migrants actually proved useful fiscally and commercially. I wouldn't quite call that "f**king up"  but maybe there's more to your point.

The bold answers your query. Your observation that immigration to the UK "still works out as a positive net fiscal contribution" has been contested by Migration Watch and other similar minded organisations and polititians. Sure,  "migrants actually proved useful fiscally and commercially" to many employers — it saved them from needing to modernise, thus exacerbating problems later on.  So Britain kept churning out many labour-intensive and dated products, sweeping up, caring, etc, and in the process recruited too much immigrant labour. It was left to foreign companies to move-in, set-up, take-over industries in the UK and install advanced processes for the markets they choose. If these now scale back and leave the bulk of the UK workforce to find work in financial and service industries, and in unskilled and semi skilled jobs, the UK will struggle.

Don't get me wrong, most immigrants have done what they were required to do (I'm a product of immigration), but too many were required, instead of developing and using modern technology...

[Conchúr]

These rules will be good for our clapped out industry in that they will make it got to the wall or modernise. Like the government says, use robots. If you don't know how to use robots then ask someone, and if you can't do that then get job serving wine to foreigners.



Some of the food processing factories here are like 19th century Manchester, which was literally as shithole because they never has no sewerage.



Low wages just prolongs the time they can stay in business before the inevitable happens. It is a waste of human labour if a machine can do it.

People say this though as if automation were some new thing.  In truth, automation has been a long ongoing process since the dawn of the Industrial Age.  The subsequent advent of the microchip and robotics has also revolutionised the way economies operate — but this had the effect of creating job opportunities, not lessening it.  



Even at that, there is a fair degree of ambitious interpretation out there as to what robotics can actually achieve both now and over the course of the coming decades.  My brother is an engineer for a British company that designs and fits out ships.  A big part of their operation is having workmen who are flexible to be practically perpetually on the move travelling around dry docks in Europe to do the actual fitting out.  It has borne out over the years that migrant workers, who often come without their families anyway, are the most willing to do that kind of thing given the fact that they are already "detached" from their home.    Free movement also allows for the company to save time, paperwork and therefore money on travel permits for these guys. We are simply nowhere near a point where robotics can replace that kind of workflow, or fix the issue when the availability of this kind of labour is reduced.  



Under the government's plans (or rather what we have seen of them so far), 70% of EU migrants who have arrived in the UK since 2004 would be ineligible to enter — and therefore it unavoidably also follows that there is a target to reduce EU immigration by 70%.  This is statistically the hardest working and highest contributing sector of the UK's immigrant population — and I fail to see a compelling argument for the need to take such drastic action.

[Baron von Lotsov]

These rules will be good for our clapped out industry in that they will make it got to the wall or modernise. Like the government says, use robots. If you don't know how to use robots then ask someone, and if you can't do that then get job serving wine to foreigners.



Some of the food processing factories here are like 19th century Manchester, which was literally as shithole because they never has no sewerage.



Low wages just prolongs the time they can stay in business before the inevitable happens. It is a waste of human labour if a machine can do it.

[Conchúr]

The UK already had the power to limit non-EU immigration, and it fucked up on applying allowable restrictions when new members joined the EU. Ireland and France have their own requirements and unrestricted free movement of labour may ultimately suit them — both for recruitment and off-loading — but UK industry used cheap labour to keep going rather than investing in automation and advanced processing.

What the UK should have done after the war was to use Marshall Aid to repair and upgrade its infrastructure and industry, but it chose to put most towards its military and import labour to rebuild its industry and services...

Yes, I'm just trying to tease out though how you think they "fucked up" when it came to EU migration.  Sure, they didn't apply the restrictions on Eastern European migration that they could have done, but even if you actually remove migration from the old member states from the equation — thus accounting only for migration from the post-2004 expansion member states — it still works out as a positive net fiscal contribution.  Ultimately, it seems to me that the UK never sought to employ the full scope of restrictions available because these Eastern European migrants actually proved useful fiscally and commercially. I wouldn't quite call that "fucking up"  but maybe there's more to your point.

[patman post]

Out of interest, why did you see a need for "limiting" EU immigration (and I presume by this you mean "limiting further", as EU immigration did of course have certain restrictions)?



I've subjected myself to reading some horribly boring and long academic and institutional reports on this.  Pretty much all of them conclude that EEA migrants provide a net fiscal contribution, contribute proportionally a lot more than non-EEA migrants, and indeed fiscally contribute more than the average native.  The reports point out that the post-2004 expansion (though of course the UK had the right to suspend immigration from the new member states which it never exercised, while other countries did), did actually have a depressing effect on wages in the low skilled sector — though the effect was not huge.    I've seen no compelling argument yet that EU immigration was causing any major pressing problem in the UK, and therefore have yet to see what is actually being solved by placing more onerous restrictions on a section of the UK's immigrant community that statistically have come here and worked hard — and provided British business with a motivated and flexible workforce.



Interestingly, I was talking to a guy from Poland yesterday who now lives in Dublin.  He pointed out that under the new touted UK restrictions (if they were applied in Ireland) he would not have been able to actually immigrate.  He came here speculatively looking to build a career and is now a Senior Associate in an elite Irish law firm, and I have no doubt he will make partner.  I must take a look to see if I could have migrated to France, where I went over with hardly a bean to my name to look for a job years ago and got one, if the same restrictions were applied.

The UK already had the power to limit non-EU immigration, and it fucked up on applying allowable restrictions when new members joined the EU. Ireland and France have their own requirements and unrestricted free movement of labour may ultimately suit them — both for recruitment and off-loading — but UK industry used cheap labour to keep going rather than investing in automation and advanced processing.

What the UK should have done after the war was to use Marshall Aid to repair and upgrade its infrastructure and industry, but it chose to put most towards its military and import labour to rebuild its industry and services...

[Conchúr]

This has been a long time coming and I've always seen the need for limiting  EU and other immigration — though I still believe acceptable immigration arrangements could have eventually been arrived at while being an EU member.

I hope this new system really does follow the Australian system and adjust those sought and allowed in according to changing requirements, and publish regular understandable updates...

Out of interest, why did you see a need for "limiting" EU immigration (and I presume by this you mean "limiting further", as EU immigration did of course have certain restrictions)?



I've subjected myself to reading some horribly boring and long academic and institutional reports on this.  Pretty much all of them conclude that EEA migrants provide a net fiscal contribution, contribute proportionally a lot more than non-EEA migrants, and indeed fiscally contribute more than the average native.  The reports point out that the post-2004 expansion (though of course the UK had the right to suspend immigration from the new member states which it never exercised, while other countries did), did actually have a depressing effect on wages in the low skilled sector — though the effect was not huge.    I've seen no compelling argument yet that EU immigration was causing any major pressing problem in the UK, and therefore have yet to see what is actually being solved by placing more onerous restrictions on a section of the UK's immigrant community that statistically have come here and worked hard — and provided British business with a motivated and flexible workforce.



Interestingly, I was talking to a guy from Poland yesterday who now lives in Dublin.  He pointed out that under the new touted UK restrictions (if they were applied in Ireland) he would not have been able to actually immigrate.  He came here speculatively looking to build a career and is now a Senior Associate in an elite Irish law firm, and I have no doubt he will make partner.  I must take a look to see if I could have migrated to France, where I went over with hardly a bean to my name to look for a job years ago and got one, if the same restrictions were applied.

[papasmurf]

I disagree.



At least, I now, having read the Gov.uk site, contend that far from killing off the agricultural sector, they will in fact see the scheme allowing agricultural workers to slave away for crop.harvesting expanded, so the local tent dwellers in various cities uk wide will remain undisturbed from their current activities.

I did not know you believed in Unicorns John.  Seasonal workers seems to be a concept the Tory government does not understand.

Under the (scrapped,) Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme seasonal workers were let in as required and went back home after the seasonal work stopped.

Now with a mountain of red tape in the way the crops will have rotted in the field before the Home Office has processed the paperwork.

The concept of tenant farmers is also a concept a few people on this forum seem to be in total ignorance of.

Most of the local farmers where I live are tenant farmers renting land off of land owners who own most of the area. Few of the landowners are farmers.

[patman post]

This has been a long time coming and I've always seen the need for limiting  EU and other immigration — though I still believe acceptable immigration arrangements could have eventually been arrived at while being an EU member.

I hope this new system really does follow the Australian system and adjust those sought and allowed in according to changing requirements, and publish regular understandable updates...

[johnofgwent]

Clear as mud:-



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51550421">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51550421



https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-immigration-system-what-you-need-to-know">https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-immigra ... ed-to-know">https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-immigration-system-what-you-need-to-know

I disagree.



At least, I now, having read the Gov.uk site, contend that far from killing off the agricultural sector, they will in fact see the scheme allowing agricultural workers to slave away for crop.harvesting expanded, so the local tent dwellers in various cities uk wide will remain undisturbed from their current activities.

[papasmurf]

All becoming a lot clearer now ,

Clear as mud:-



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51550421">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51550421



https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-immigration-system-what-you-need-to-know">https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-immigra ... ed-to-know">https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-immigration-system-what-you-need-to-know