Immigration and inequality

Raedwald put up a piece today on the financial costs of inadequately controlled immigration under New Labour. This has been brought into national debate by statistics on unemployment among immigrants and so on. I looked around and here is my reply:

Raedwald, what you say seems intuitively right but the stats say otherwise. With the odd hiccup, both GDP and GDP-per-capita increased up to the 2008 financial collapse, also the Gini index has reduced slightly since (the story seems to be that in a poorer economy there is more equality, as it was here in the 1970s). GDP has gone down because of the b----y banks, and so has fixed capital formation. Seems the financial sector is more to blame than immigration from those points of view.

Also we have to remember that our national enthusiasm for responsibility-free intercourse has led to the butchering of millions of unborn children since 1967 (latterly female-child-focused, it seems), plus declining fertility because of contraception. The foreign workers are, to some extent, filling a demographic gap created by sterile, murderous British selfishness.

Up to the GFC there is a pattern of increasing income inequality, and the higher up the scale the wider the divergence. This is to be expected because those who have more disposable income will invest more and so increase their income and wealth further. However, median wages in the UK have not stalled as in the USA, where middle earners' real wage rates have stood still since the 1970s. This may be because our tax and benefit system redistributes more downwards than in America.

Immigration may create additional strain in (e.g.) the education system, though many immigrants value education highly and push their children to learn and aim high. They will become our doctors and lawyers.

The real national crisis is in the drift from manufacturing to the service sector, and Sir James Goldsmith warned what would happen if GATT went through. We cannot compete in a global economy, and though there are some success stories (e.g. Land Rover here in the Midlands), watch out what happens when the Chinese have learned everything from us that they need to know.

The Asians I know dislike the weirdy-beardies as much as the rest of us. What we have in the Brit Taliban element is what we had to beat off in the 17th century, i.e. Puritans.

Wish I had time to show the graphs etc but I have a job to go to tomorrow.

Fraternally,

Sackerson

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