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March 08, 2006

Comments

Luis Enrique

I'd guess that politicians believe that free immigration would be a major vote loser, hence the idea isn't given the time of day. Whether that assumption is right I don't know.

So many questions ....

If all barriers to immigration were removed, would you expect to see immigration levels rise?

If so, by how much? What would cause them to stablise?

Are there any valid reasons to be worried about increased levels of immigration, in your view?

Do you have any views on whether, or how, immigrants should be given access to the welfare state and other state-funded services?

angry_economist

you don't see many jobs over £21k advertised at Jobcentre plus!

my interpretation of the governments actoins is that in the new EU with the new member states, there is oodles of spare labour capacity and the govt is therefore less sympathetic to the claim that labour shortages necessitate the need to look outside the EU

ok completely free markets are nice, but the labour market is highly regulated anyway

Not justifying the points system, but note that it is a long time coming after US, Canada, Australia and NZ have long operated one

And its mostly the lower skilled jobs that have the shortages anyhow - and the skills lacking are soft skills, turning up on time, customer skills etc

Bit of a contradiction going on somewhere...

The govt is still in the miasmoric fantasy that the UK is undergoing a skills revoluation, when the truth is that the economy is gradually upskilling and that's about it

Under the current work permit system, highly skilled specialists can get work permits and get into work

I just don't see what the points system adds, except another period of bedding in a new system and more change for the FO and IND.

Curious

Well, this is precisely why free trade will never come to fruition. I don't understand why lobby group beat this dead horse - perhaps because fair trade would hurt their members.

The movement of labour from our neighbours in eastern Europe to our country (which has reduced wage inflation pressure and helped our economy) is met with too much xenophobia. It is therefore an outright contradiction for the government to be actively promoting free trade and actively implementing policy that nullifies the opportunities for it.

And as a minor point, the points based system, like the current immigration policy, will affect poor country immigrants more that it will US, Canada, Australia and NZ ones. Xenophobia is a terrible thing. For instance, my flatmate expresses outright ignorance about almost all minority groups, spews out propaganda nonsense from the low-grade newspapers and has the backing of her dad who believes in almost supremacist views. Generally speaking, such people are in abundance and at all levels of education. You find the same nonsensical views in the work place.

xenophobia in a "tolerant" society drives policy.

http://culturefusion.blogspot.com/2005/09/immigration-once-again.html

John Hustings

Markets don't work freely as long as you have a welfare state. As long as we retain a welfare state then curbs on immigration are completely defensible.

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