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Everyone knows restricting migration damages our economy overall. Quite a lot of people think it might be a good idea in order to maintain some kind of cultural cohesion in their community and some stability in their personal economics. This is what they feel, even though evidence attributing immigrantion as a cause of these problems is often really weak.
This is a political reality entirely ignored by mainstream politics until the EU referendum.
miro_o-
The reality is a bit more complex. According to the studies, EU migrants improve the economy overall, non-EU migrants have a negative impact overall.
Breaking down the EU immigrants, unsurprisingly the higher paid ones have a positive impact on the economy whereas lower paid are approximately neutral.
Obviously the issue is that it's difficult to restrict to just higher paid immigrants and still get people wanting to come.
The curious thing is that those who are most anti-immigration tend to be those who live in areas of low immigration (but without a suggestion that they have intentionally moved there).
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I am always a bit baffled by this "cultural cohesion".
Want want to all know our neighbours and the whole street? Yes, you can... one Belfast street near where I used to live in a rundown part of the city was kept together by 3 grannies who were super happy with having 8 nationalities and everybody watched each other.
With 8 nationalities. In a mostly white area, which is now getting a lot of people from the Carribean. And one that has serious racism problems 10 years ago and turned it around. And it's pretty poor with housing issues. But, the local community group who fights their heart out for GPs/housing decided it had enough and that is now what the area is.
Those feelings also live in the Netherlands, but there are places where people have reached out and it turns out "the others" are just...people.
You are right it is about feelings, but I don't find the whole anti immigration discussion in the UK very productive. It is more about stoking more unhelpful feelings.
And one man a few years ago voted Brexit, but he reached out to the EU citizens in the town. He just didn't want "any more" as "it is now all Polish people". So, to me, it seemed the "local born" go and never come back.
I don't see how locking the door is going to fix that. Though I can understand it must be strange to see a city change that much, so having conversations is fine. But what is the anti freedom of movement bringing to the table? To use an extreme example, maybe the town will just be empty and nobody will come once "the door is shut". Do they take that into account? The discussion seems just stuck on a political level.
aggi
JWestland
It is noise anyway, the lack of control on the global banking system combined with local policies that drive up cost of living VS wages are more at fault than some Romanians. It is bad economic policies like austerity and the fact that betting on house prices can tumble down from the USA to the rest of the world.
But the banks cannot fail, because if they do all the pensions held there will devalue and you can strip a good value of your housing market too. And you -could- go there, but you a shitload of people end up bankrupt/with no pension. So then you could make an exception for that, but then what do you do with your currency? There are no easy answers.
But you can easily control immigrants eh?