Vive la révolution

Migration is one of the worst subjects to discuss. 

On one side you get people who decry anyone who questions it as racists, xenophobes or just plain evil and on the other you get the ones who claim it is a grand conspiracy to replace the entire population with migrants. Then in the middle there is the silent vast majority who can see the good and bad but get shouted down by both sides. 

This is my take on why the arguments for high levels of migration are pretty weak. 

We have an ageing population 

This is the classic argument made randomly by the liberal left and the free market right and it faceplants when you apply basic logic. All humans age and die thus any migrants will get old as well. That means that they will stop working at some point and we will need to pay their pensions and health care (unless people are suggesting we deny them) so we aren’t solving the problem, we are simply pushing it into the future and making it even bigger. It is basically an argument to continue a Ponzi scheme because we can’t be bothered to fix it now. 

Migration grows the economy  
A classic of the right because who wouldn’t want the economy to grow - well except for the end of the world green nihilists. The problem is that it falls down as soon as you apply a bit of logic to it. Yes, adding more people to any economy will increase the size of it as more people equals more demand for even the basics like energy, food and shelter. But hold on does it increase GDP on a per capita basis i.e. each person gets richer not just the total size increases. The former we all want especially if we measure it as medium per capita but the latter politicians love as it flatters the debt to GDP figures but does zero for the average person. I have yet to see a statistic that shows it moves the per capita statistic much and certainly not medium GDP per capita. 

We don’t have people with the relevant skills 
This is a very weird one as basically it is an indictment of our education system. You have people who were or are in power saying “We did such a terrible job that the system is not turning out enough relevantly trained staff”. It is doubly weird as we are generating enough spoiled brats who think women have penises and want to tear down statues. But beyond that it kicks away any motivation for companies to actually invest in training because they can simply hire someone from abroad. 

We don’t have people who want to work in care and other low paid jobs 
We apparently don’t have enough trained staff to do high end stuff but we don’t have enough to do low end stuff - yes you heard it here first. Well let's start with the basics - a lot of low paid jobs now shouldn’t exist because they can and should have been automated years ago. It is a distinctly British laziness driven by high levels of migration which has meant companies have not bothered to invest in automation (Think of all those car washes staffed by eastern Europeans). I mean why bother spending money on plant when you can pay some guy £8.50 an hour and sack him if you need to - economists who decry low British productivity should look no further than here. On jobs that can’t be automated for example in social care we perhaps need to have a look at our screwed up economic priorities. We celebrate some dumb footballer getting paid millions but decry the idea that those caring for the people we love should be well paid - even better perhaps we should question why we pay others to care for our own loved ones. 

We need migration for the NHS 
This is a classic trope trotted out time and time again by mostly the left and is answered by my earlier point. It is basically the British state saying “We can’t be bothered to pay the money to train staff and would rather import them from abroad”. It is an utterly immoral argument and should shame anyone who uses it as it involves the NHS stealing staff from developing countries who can least afford to lose them whilst failing to provide good, well paid and just as importantly well respected jobs to British citizens. People who celebrate diversity within the NHS should perhaps think of that next time. 

Migration culturally enhances the UK 
This is an absolutely vacuous argument but let’s be clear, one Indian restaurant enhances our culture the next one less and less so the idea you need to continually increase migration to become culturally enhanced is nonsense. Furthermore most culture i.e. language, music, film is now widely available online. If you want to watch the music of the Kalahari Bushman then you can do so on YouTube or Spotify etc. Furthermore migrants are not performing monkeys to entertain us with stories and experiences from the “old country”. My wife doesn’t walk around in a stripey jumper and a beret muttering “sacré bleu” to culturally enhance the UK. The idea that we need migration to experience cultures from around the world is both ridiculous and insulting to our intelligence.

It is racist or xenophobic to not allow migration
The weirdest argument ever put forward and one which actually does more damage to the pro migration argument than anything. 

I get it all the time: 
“You’re a racist for wanting to stop migration from the EU” 
“But I am white and so is 95% of the EU”
“Then you are a xenophobe”
“No I am married to a migrant and most of my friends are from different countries”
“Then you are a racist”
#Facepalm
 
Look, every country / block restricts migration - the only question is where are the lines on the map drawn and who do they allow in. People may not like that fact but a country is like your house and you get to pick who you invite in. It is not xenophobic or racist to want to behave like a normal country. It is very abnormal to think you can have open borders. 

Diversity is a good thing 
This is thrown all the time by left wing politicians like Sadiq Khan but it is actually a noun - it is just a name for a state and so it can be positive or negative. How you find diversity comes down to how comfortable you are with change, difference and also your interactions with what that diversity brings. For example you may love that new Polish shop on your street or you may find it deeply annoying that it has displaced your favourite pub. The problem with diversity is that we all react to it in different ways - it is mostly hard coded into us. Few people learn to love or hate it after their initial mental state is set early in life. What we can say though is studies show that diversity is actually bad for social solidarity as it reduces general trust levels. This is toxic for such things as a welfare state and socialised healthcare as we need to trust that everyone is going to pay in and take out fairly. It is why I am amazed the left has such a hard on for migration - it longer term guarantees the death of the stuff they purport to care about the most. 

As you can see I find none of these arguments convincing. They are mostly designed to support political ideologies and not talk about the genuine implications from migration.... and there are implications which few people want to talk about. 

Lower wages for those who need them the most 
Supply and demand powers market led economies. When it comes to wages it is quite simple if you have less people you will find wages will increase because companies are forced to bid up wages in order to obtain the workers they need. This happened in the 1960’s and 70’s when the economy hit maximum capacity. So if you import more and more labour then supply will be greater than demand which will suppress wages. Guess what happened when Covid and Brexit turned off the migratory taps - wages for those at the bottom of society started moving up after decades of stagnation. Feel free to tell that to some ardent supporter who calls the working class racist. Oh I am sure they will say something like “But the government needs to raise the minimum wage” - so their argument is simply more people on a higher minimum wage - nice one. 

We are already pretty full guys 
The UK is actually pretty full of people - it’s a secret so don’t tell anyone. You will hear some cracking good statistics like only 1.4% of the UK has houses on etc etc. But the truth is about 9% of the UK is built on if you include everything that is human related. That is not a small number though many will try and convince you otherwise. Sure I know that people will say “Yes but there are so many fields with nothing in them” - fair enough. But you do know we need to grow some food as well - as it is we can barely produce 60% of the food we need to feed ourselves - that is down from 81% in 1980 all whilst agricultural yields have rocketed. In a time of growing food insecurity this is actually quite worrying though few want to talk about it. Beyond that we do need a bit of space for wildlife and just nature in general. This leads on to the next point…

How much do you want to build on?
I know this isn't popular to say with many but if you want to import 250k people a year then you will need to build a city the size of Brighton - every two years you will need roughly one the size of Manchester and every four years roughly Birmingham. I don’t think most people want or realise that. To give that more substance Birmingham is 267.8 km² - so every 4 years that is what you will need to cement over either in one place or bits across the country. Furthermore if you have kids this does impact them…. because no government will ever be able to build enough houses if we run migration at this level. So that means your kids will continue to struggle to buy a house, they will be expensive and force a long list of hard choices upon them including when to start their family and give you grandkids but on the plus side you will get to feel better as the value of your house will keep going up.  

And that is before you build the other stuff 
Dirty little secret - in the UK we have not built a reservoir since Carsington in 1991 and we can barely keep the lights on because of the idiotic political decisions made by consecutive governments but we keep bringing in more people. Guess what those people will need water and electricity - anyone building stuff now - no. Even if they wanted to build stuff, where do they want to put it because it all has to go somewhere and no one wants it near them. 

That is before you get to public services 
Those new people will need new schools, hospitals, leisure centres and so much more. You heard about those new hospitals being built (or not). Well there are 1,229 hospitals in the UK now - so roughly one for every 52k people. So if you want to run migration at 250k per year you need to be building five hospitals per year. Same for schools and everything else - anyone heard of that level of building - you won’t because they aren’t. So next time you go to hospital and wonder why it is crowded this is a good part of the reason why and next time a politician tells you how total spending is increasing you should ask what that is on a per capita basis because you will probably be shocked. 

So that is my take on current migration arguments and implications. It is not very pretty for anyone involved to be honest but it is important that things are dragged into the open. At the end of the day I am pro managed migration at volumes that make sense for the UK. We need to have a debate which focuses on the realities of migration rather than buzzwords and feelings. Whatever happens it must be a democratically controlled process where all sides can have their say without insults being thrown around. We are not there yet but I hope we will get there because if not then the extremes will silence that majority who are practical and moderate.