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Years of ensuring the term 'immigration' meant talking about people that ain't white is what has got us here.
Years of starting any sentence about 'immigration' with the phrase 'I ain't no racialist but' is what has got us here.
Years of 'immigration' being a major part of anything to do with the far right has what has got us here.
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I ran bars in Central London for seven years, English people almost never applied for a job- when I was running the place on Regent Street I had 22 staff and none of them were from the UK- because only foreign nationals had applied for a job there. I used to do create shift allocations based on level of English, which was challenging - but you work with who is willing to work, and "native English" weren't.
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" suggesting that restricting immigration is backwards and racist is part of the reason we're fucked now."
It is when immigration is not the root cause of the problem that exist: Namely people not getting the jobs, eg unemployment.
- In The Netherlands business undercut locals by using a special EU scheme which means welders get paid very little taxable income, and it costs the business less. This pisses off local welders, NL tried to change this scheme but Poland blocked it.
- Some jobs are not suitable when you are the single income person with kids, no flexibility
- People don't want to do some jobs as they're dirty and low paid
So it's part jobs not being suitable, part business exploitation, and part lack of skills and basically part people are unwilling to do the job (which I won't hold against them, I've done my call centre stints) as they're basically dead-end jobs forever.
But it's easy to blame it on themmuns for the government, as business want cheap workers, the government doesn't want to raise tax to pay for education. etc etc...
- In The Netherlands business undercut locals by using a special EU scheme which means welders get paid very little taxable income, and it costs the business less. This pisses off local welders, NL tried to change this scheme but Poland blocked it.
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bazschmaz
Dammit
JWestland
@aggi
Although years of shouting it down as racist is probably part of what ended us up where we are today.
If there'd been a bit more openness and discussion then maybe people wouldn't have reacted the way they did when given a chance to vote on it.
It's OK saying that immigrants make a net contribution to society, but people find it hard to accept that when they are not working and some industries have a disproportionate amount of foreign labour.
This is particularly the case in unskilled labour:
Of those 43%, 19% are migrants who've arrived in the past 5 years. It's easy to see why people have concerns.
There are obviously bigger issues at play, enforcement of the minimum wage for one, but just suggesting that restricting immigration is backwards and racist is part of the reason we're fucked now.