Labour voters believe that higher levels of immigration are driving down their living standards, a poll has shown.
The survey of 3,000 British adults found that fewer than one in four people who backed Sir Keir Starmer’s party last year had felt the economic benefits of migration into Britain.
Could be, eh?
That standard economists’ point is that immigrants bring with them their demand as well as their supply. Thos does not, therefore, drive wages down.
Large scale low end migration, well, possible to argue about how far that’s going to be true really….
I don’t think any sentient person (so maybe not standard economists) has ever denied that immigrants bring their demand with them, quite the contrary.
It’s not exactly a gimme that this includes a demand to work, frequently it’s a case of demanding to receive all the benefits thereof without actually working. (Admittedly this lifestyle expectation is not confined to immigrants nowadays).
In a separate issue the rapidly escalating disagreement between India and Pakistan might lead a rational government to take steps to dissuade and prevent the mother of all immigration surges. Instead TTK activates TT mode and grants Indian workers a three year exemption from paying National Insurance.
John
I wonder if any able bodied men here will join their respective side’s forces.
Anyway if they are not careful, there won’t be anyone left to emigrate .
People whose living standards and employment are not adversely affected by immigration:
Judges
Lawyers
MPs
Senior bureaucrats
Guardian columnists
BBC reporters
‘Charity’ bosses
Re Indian migration, I expect it will get a bit tasty in some British towns and cities.
The article’s surely talking about “standard of living”, which is more than just wages: crime, antisocial behaviour, green spaces, transport, healthcare, etc. etc.
To go back to the absolute bare bones, productivity comes from labour and capital, and immigrants don’t bring capital with them. So without significant new capital you should expect to see the same demand-per-capita, but a lower supply-per-capita, no?
It’s not so much about not working as poorly paid work. We’re bringing in care home workers on minimum wage, which are people who over the years are going to be a cost. They won’t be putting in for their NHS and kids education and so forth.
But because there’s a “right now” problem with care homes, this is what government is doing to keep the costs down.
This problem goes back to a simple thing that Timmy talks about, The Servant Problem. Everyone in the country wants Grandad looking after by someone else. So they can have their leisure, go on holidays, work at their phony government job. But instead of the demand for servants raising the price and some people having to look after Grandad, the government is adding more servants.
The Indian workers will only be coming on working visas, valid for a max of three years, thus we can get rid of them once their time is up.
That’s the official narrative.
How long before activist judges decree after being here three years said workers have a ‘right to a family life’ or some such nonsense and be allowed to remain forever?
But we know these immigrants do not in fact bring their demand with them.
They are prepared to subsist on a low proportion of their already low pay in order to remit the balance back to relatives in their home countries.
BM
“So without significant new capital you should expect to see the same demand-per-capita, but a lower supply-per-capita, no?”
True, but there are all sorts of immigrants: some bring capital, some bring skills. Immigration can also be used to provide the supply for a demand for labour.
This modern immigration does not seem to satisfy any real demand. There are cases where the NHS ( for instance ) imports trained staff from Philippines or Nigeria. The influx of East Europeans around 2000 brought skills with them. But these people from Shitholia or Shitholistan do not provide any usable skills, intelligence or abilities.
fewer than one in four people who backed Sir Keir Starmer’s party last year had felt the economic benefits of migration into Britain.
One-quarter of Labour voters is around 8% of the population. So the combination of recent immigrants from the third world and virtue-signalling twats would more than cover it. And obviously most of the twats would be lying.
Nice graph from the OBR at the bottom of this report. It shows the expected net contribution (to the exchequer) of various immigrant profiles.
https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/FRS-migration-supplementary-forecast-information-release-Mar-2025.pdf
Otto
I’m sure they will but the campaign will be fought in Leicester not the Kashmir.
BiA
The graph is interesting as it is based on the premise that there are no immigrants aged below 24 which rather begs the question about all those “children” sailing merrily towards us.
It also revealed the inconvenient truth that even in their supposedly productive working years many will never make a net positive contribution to the exchequer at any time.
The real elephant in the room is the quantitative breakdown between high-wage, average-wage and low-wage migrants (including no-wage migrants would also be helpful) but I guess the Office for Budget Responsibility just doesn’t have that info.
If immigrants make us richer – they don’t need benefits. If the rule was immigrants can’t get benefits and only get British citizenship when they have been earning say £35k pa for years no one would complain.
This was the Milton Friedman line. Sure, come on in, any and all of you. No welfare though. Nowt, nobbut, nothing.
If immigration didn’t drive wages down, the CBI would have no use for them.
We’re importing African toilet cleaners and their massive numbers of dependents because the CBI wants to save 50p an hour in wages.
The standard economist’s point is also that immigration – legal and illegal – has a *net* benefit.
It’s entirely possible 1 out of 4 people see a massive benefit from immigrants while the other 3 are screwed over.
That standard economists’ point is that immigrants bring with them their demand as well as their supply. This does not, therefore, drive wages down.
Really? So if there is a surplus of something the price doesn’t go down? And pay differentials don’t matter, so big pay gaps at the bottom end of the pay scale isn’t a drag anchor for the whole structure. Union pay negotiators would beg to differ. And what happened to increasing labour productivity which gets wages up, but for which a plentiful supply of low pay labour removes any incentive?
Does the standard economists’ point take into account the welfare state? That demand includes: schools, healthcare, housing, welfare support which is paid for out of taxation out of the pockets of others which must rise to pay for it. And then the immigrants who do not work at all, such as dependents of those that do, or those who cannot get work.
Milton Friedman did say you can either have unrestricted immigration and no welfare, or welfare and restricted immigration – but not welfare and unrestricted immigration.
supply go up, price go down (wages)
demand go up, price go up (housing)
demand go up, no price mechanism, we’re fucked (benefits, NHS)
“This was the Milton Friedman line. Sure, come on in, any and all of you. No welfare though. Nowt, nobbut, nothing.”
What about schools and hospitals?
This isn’t immigration: it’s invasion.
Pakistan and India have established forward bases in UK.
Good news is that if they go at each other, it will be just kukris and kirpans.
‘Labour voters believe that higher levels of immigration are driving down their living standards, a poll has shown.’
Is the Telegraph’s position that uncontrolled entrance of foreign migrants is acceptable . . . if it doesn’t hurt living standards?
Failure to control borders is the catastrophic failure of the government’s prime function. Outcomes have FA to do with it.
Labour is the PDiddy Party:
One of Britain’s youngest councillors has resigned from Labour after claiming she was branded a racist for calling for CCTV to be installed in minicabs.
Daisy Blakemore-Creedon, 19, has left Peterborough city council’s Labour group after allegedly being bullied and subject to anti-Semitic abuse.
She claimed she was falsely accused of racism after she raised her concerns about the safety of both passengers and drivers in the city’s council-licensed minicabs, many of whom are operated by Asian men.
She said some councillors accused her and her wider family of “targeting fellow Asian Labour councillors”.
The abuse allegedly began after she argued within the Labour group in favour of CCTV being installed in council-licensed minicabs, a move she says was voted down by the party’s minority-ruling administration.
Ms Blakemore-Creedon, who was Britain’s youngest councillor when she was elected last year, stated: “These accusations [of racism] are completely unfounded and deeply hurtful.
“Stop raping me.”
“RACEEST!”
Young Daisy’s manifesto:
#1. Establish an Eastern Young Labour branch, with an elected EC.
#2. Coordinate campaign days, ahead of the upcoming GE – and introduce a travel fund.
#3. Fight for policies important to young members – such as Trans Rights, scrapping terminal exams, and more funding for mental health.
#4. Don’t get raped by a vibrant cab driver.introduce a travel fund, sisters, and scrap terminal exams.
Very grown up.
No American Uber driver would operate without in cab video recording.
It’s common f…… sense.
@Bloke in Aberdeen – “Nice graph from the OBR at the bottom of this report.”
Worse than useless – it’s deceptive. Why does it compare three levels of migrant wages with only one “UK resident”? Obviously the “UK resident” must include the same three levels of wages, so why not show them separately? Given that the average wage migrant has a greater fiscal impact at all times of their life than a representative UK resident, it seems highly plausible that the low wage migrant would also have a higher fiscal impact than a low wage representative UK resident. The graph invites comparison between quantites which are quite different and cannot be compared.
Furthermore, unless you are an extreme lefty and consider that the only value someone has is their net contribution in tax, this is a useless graph anyway. It only counts tax paid and costs paid by the state (pensions, healthcare, benefits etc). Someone emplyed in the private sector contributes everything which is supposed to be assessed in that graph in addition to the value of their labour. A proper evaluation would consider all aspects of a person’s contribution, including value to other people not just the state.
The instant net loss from low wage migrants is highly implausible. How can someone move to this country, pay income tax, national insurance, council tax, VAT, fuel duty etc. and still be a net cost to the state?
@Anon – “If immigrants make us richer – they don’t need benefits. If the rule was immigrants can’t get benefits and only get British citizenship when they have been earning say £35k pa for years no one would complain.”
That’s a good first approximation to the actual situation (immigrants usually are classified as “no recourse to public funds” for a period – usually five years, but it’s complicated. And of course, regardless of the conditions plenty of people will complain. There’s no shortage of ignorance and racism and no shortage of those who would exploit that for their advantage.
>No American Uber driver would operate without in cab video recording
Presumably they’d remember to leave it on whilst they’re correcting some kafar slag, and it’s racist to suggest that they wouldn’t?
>The instant net loss from low wage migrants is highly implausible. How can someone move to this country, pay income tax, national insurance, council tax, VAT, fuel duty etc. and still be a net cost to the state?
From the article:
>Figures for migrants includes the fiscal spending required to keep public capital stock per person constant
Now I think you should google “what is public capital stock” rather than just going “well I don’t agree with this independent government auditor so I reckon they must be wrong”, but to save you the trouble it’s roads, hospitals, schools, police, fire brigades, power lines, reservoirs, and so on and so on. This brings us back to the original article: imagine five hundred thousand people show up in Glasgow and work minimum wage and pay NI and council tax and don’t claim benefits, is Glasgow going to be better off or worse off? The same applies with one person, just at a scale that’s far easier to handwave away.
@Charles
“That’s a good first approximation to the actual situation (immigrants usually are classified as “no recourse to public funds” for a period – usually five years, but it’s complicated. And of course, regardless of the conditions plenty of people will complain.”
I know people who did that – and now will get loads in benefits in many cases from day one that they can claim.
@Bathroom Moose – “keep public capital stock per person constant” … – “it’s roads, hospitals, schools, police, fire brigades, power lines, reservoirs, and so on and so on”
So in other words it’s a fictional figure. It assumes money is spent on these things, yet none of that money comes from taxes (which are already accounted for), and it also assumes that there’s no such thing as economy of scale.
Re Indian immigration, I expect it will get a bit tasty in some British towns and cities
Will media report it? So far they haven’t
The Indian workers will only be coming on working visas, valid for a max of three years, thus we can get rid of them once their time is up.
That’s the official narrative.
How long before activist judges decree after being here three years said workers have a ‘right to a family life’ or some such nonsense and be allowed to remain forever?
Plus fake marriages, name alteration for new visa etc
>It assumes money is spent on these things, yet none of that money comes from taxes
No, it can also assume that money *isn’t* spent on these things, and everyone loses out by not having them.
>that were already accounted for
They’re not though, only direct benefits are.
>it also assumes that there’s no such thing as economy of scale.
[citation needed] here mate. This isn’t just some random website, it’s the Office for Budget Responsibility*, you can’t just speculate that they don’t know how much airports cost or that they can’t tell when they’re counting stuff twice. “I reckon I know better” works with some guy’s blog article, but that’s not what this is.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_for_Budget_Responsibility