Britain to Foreign Workers: If You Don't Make $50,000 a Year, Please Leave | Hacker News Reader

Britain to Foreign Workers: If You Don't Make $50,000 a Year, Please Leave

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79 pointswbsun103 comments

As an immigrant myself, this seems like a vastly superior system compared to most others in the world.

Pretty mcuh every country's immigration system falls into one of the following buckets:

1) Market based. Companies "bid" on foreign workers, either directly by paying for the visa, or indirectly using the worker's wage. Some form of quote exists, and the highest bidders win.

2) Lottery. Set a minimum qualifications, which is pretty lenient, and a quota that is significantly lower than the number of qualified applicants. Use a lottery system to decide who gets in and who doesn't.

3) Central planning. Some government agency decides which professions and industries are most important to the country, and need foreign workers the most. Politics, special interests lobbying and/or government incompetence in judging market needs, all figure prominently.

4) Some government bureaucrat, who reads through your life story, and spends 30 minutes meeting with you, gets to arbitrarily decide who stays and who doesn't.

4 scares the hell out of me. 2 is just stupid. I don't have any trust in the government's ability to effectively conduct 3. 1 is the least of all evils unfortunately.

The US does have different enlightenment-era founding principles from countries that are based on ethnicity, religion, or even a shared history according to its founding documents. The priority for individual dignities may conflict with ideas about social safety nets that have become the norm, but it is compatible with sympathy for people who are oppressed and who are undermined.

While immigration is critical to the vitality of the US economy, that is not its only goal. Furthermore, an attempt to optimize immigration for the predicted economic output of immigrants won't necessarily have the most favorable economic outcome. I think Silicon Valley itself serves as a perfect example. There is a significant number of second generation immigrants whose parents escaped abuse somewhere else in the world, then worked hard at a menial job to raise children that went on to do something great.

Whether or not there are problems with the interview processes, making the world a better place by getting people and their families out of terrible situations is a good goal on its own merits. There are a lot of loud anti-immigration people in the US who claim to be proud of selfishness and potentially undermining the economy, but the actual experience for immigrants is better than elsewhere according to friends who have worked around the world.

> immigration is critical to the vitality of the US economy

How is that? I think it was hugely true in the previous century, which was built on manufacturing industries, plentiful labor was directly connected. Unskilled labor has less buying power now than ever, so there will be more burden if they are not employed. This will be more likely after giving away our manufacturing, what's left for them to do?

I think it has more to do with our ability to keep current and polinate the necessary skills that we need to keep our economy vital. Several of my most skilled and intelligent coworkers are immigrants. Having that diversity of background and opinion is an incredible asset for a team.

Despite what both parties are saying, it's not dead. There's still plenty of people who want to come to America the dreams of our forefathers. We need to be willing and capable of accepting them, and flourishing with their help. Hard work should still be an American value, and it won't be if we turn isolationist.

Bear in mind that the existing system is better than what's being proposed. Except for the minor difficulty that it lets people into the country that the UK needs, which is against government policy.

There is a survivor's bias here that concerns me. Currently the world values the tech sector because we're perceived as potentially making people a lot of money. Once it catches on that we spend most of our days cutting through the red tape of entrenched spaghetti code and making pixels blink, this could all change.

It may swing back to valuing farming/construction/industry or shift to even higher speculation (space exploration etc) and we could find ourselves ostracized. I would prefer that we had more open immigration policies and worked towards solving the root cause of mass migration, which is hundreds of years of colonialism and capitalist imperialism that led to global warfare and suffering. The people have a better shot at accomplishing this than either the market or authoritarian governments.

(Side note: I don't think slavs, goths, vandals, huns, greeks, etruscs, arabs, phoenicians, etc. were affected of any imperialism ideas back in the days when they invaded Europe.)

The issue with the current migration is it encourages the migrants to overtake the largest cities and the proposed legislation with the minimum salary encourages this: you can earn such amount only if you live in the top 3 city. Are you a builder, carpenter, electrician, teacher? Good luck to earn such money as an employee outside the metropolitan areas. Yet the need for these professions is higher than ever.

If the migration would be more balanced, restricting the freedom of move, there would be less side-effects, at least no more ghettos.

I am immigrant and I like the idea too. Ted Cruz's call for a very high minimum salary for H-1Bs is also the only thing I will probably ever agree with him.

Instead of setting a high minimum salary, sort the offers by descending order of salary and give the visa to the top N.

The biggest excuse for H-1B visa is that the company can't find qualified workers. Pay enough, and you will find someone qualified sooner or later.

Thus ensuring that Silicon Valley gets to eat up all the H-1Bs.

Not if SV has qualified locals that will work for less than the H1-B bid amount? Why would they pay above market rate?

(Maybe I have absolutely no idea what salaries are like in SV, I'll grant you that... Western/Rochester NY local.)

The government should not be in the business of setting salaries.

I think that this is a special case. In this case a COMPANY is importing a worker to do a job. If they really need to import a worker they should probably be paying that worker at LEAST 150% of the MEDIAN pay for work in that field.

I thought it was a pretty clever way to kill off the H-1B visa program. The downside is that the end result is probably just more companies outsourcing entire departments instead.

I know this won't be popular here at all for a couple reasons, one being that there are many who are like you immigrants or want to become immigrants; but thing is, beyond the individual interests and advantages of immigrating to a better place, there are massive impacts on a macro level that people don't quite consider in their pursuit of those self interests. What immigration really does, among other things, is drain capacity and even capital from countries that not only may have funded the education, but also are then losing intellectual and technical capacity. It is really not only a detriment to source countries, it is also a detriment to destination countries like the USA where immigrants like you are used as tools to ratchet salaries downward and also detracts and defuses pressures to improve the education system to supply the supposed missing supply.

I get that many people don't quite get it, and it's difficult to wrap ones mind around something one has a self-interest in not acknowledging or seeing through the propaganda that the wealthy use to fool the majority to go along with things that are counter to their own interests in favor of the interest of the wealthy and powerful. Reality though is that immigration is really a rather nasty neo-colonialist ruse that is really just a huge wealth concentration mechanism.

The people who are or plan to be migrant were usually fed with your ideas like yours. "The situation is suck here, but your kids will live in a better place." Then the kids and grandkids still live in the same suck country with a suck elite.

History of Europe and US is all about migration. This situation has pros and cons.

Maybe the linked article doesn't make it clear, but the system in the UK is all of these points put together to some extent.

It's mostly pointless in reducing net migration levels, because the quota for Tier 2 visas to non Europeans was capped at 20,000 for the last 5-6 years, and last year was the first time the cap was hit.

Why is 2 stupider than 1?

The justification for allowing immigration is the shortage of skills. If you use a random process then you won't get the skills you need.

Not that I agree with this, right now we need nurses and programmers, in a couple of years the situation will be completely different.

I thought the justification for allowing immigration was that it is a human right.

No. If western countries let in 'everyone' who wants to come, they'd be horribly, horribly over-populated and huge swaths of the world would never develop.

The problem is (if you like game theory), that it's in everyone's personal interest to migrate somewhere richer. However, if everyone does that, wherever they came from experiences such massive drain that it'll be worse off. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, unlimited immigration is a poor 'equilibrium' for all involved. 'Developing' nations will never develop, and developed nations will face massive over-crowding.

The reason the west currently allows immigration in the numbers we do is because it's an easy way to get skilled, motivated labour - at once allowing for economic growth as well as driving down the relative cost of labour.

Freedom to travel/migrate should be a human right, however there are many problems with that, considering the current state of the world.

Which is why all of America lives in Atherton and New Haven and nobody is left in Mississippi or Alabama.

I know you're being sarcastic, but California and NY combined have nearly 20% of the population of the US.

In the US, the most prosperous states are definitely also the most populous.

I think that is the justification for allowing in refugees and asylum seekers (i.e. protecting them from human rights abuses), but not usually used for economic migrants.

If that was the justification, then a lottery doesn't achieve that. Nothing short of completely open borders achieves that.

Because a lottery gives you the people for whom a small chance of getting in is worth going for. If someone's awesome enough to have lots of awesome opportunities in many places, then they wouldn't commit to a lottery-based opportunity. Thus you lose the top in addition to getting people who barely meet the criteria coming in.

The US has an even dumber version:

5) Nepotism. If you are related to or sleeping with a citizen, you have a very good chance at getting in.

Almost every country has that. What, do you want to split up families and loved ones?

Plus, the US actually does something less-dumb, and expands citizenship to people born in the country, regardless of their parents' status or race. ("Jus soli")

Why is promoting birth tourism/anchor babies less dumb? I.e., what makes the child of a wealthy chinese woman who visits CA to give birth more deserving of citizenship than peasant who worked very hard to attend college and jump through our citizenship hoops?

The original motivation for this rule was to prevent disenfranchisement of former slaves. That goal was achieved, and is no longer relevant since all former slaves are dead.

Pregnant women are screened out during the visa interview process to prevent this from occurring. It's not perfect, in the case of individuals receiving multi-year visas, but those are only provided to individuals who have spent significant time in the US, or have family members who are citizens. Also, a baby born in the US to a non-US citizen parent does not automatically confer the parent with citizenship or permanent residency rights. In the case of "anchor babies", the child usually will not have the right to sponsor his parents for residency until they are 18.

What makes the parents of an anchor baby more deserving of citizenship than a person who worked hard, went to school and developed skills useful to the US? Why do we consider this more beneficial to the US than instead importing the highly skilled person who goes through the system rather than subverting it?

(Again, working within the normative framework suggesting immigration should be restricted, which is not my view.)

>What makes the parents of an anchor baby more deserving of citizenship than a person who worked hard, went to school and developed skills useful to the US?

I can't say, as I didn't write the laws. My guess is that US immigration law is designed to limit skilled immigration because educated Americans in white collar jobs can raise a bigger stink politically about H1B competition in high-wage industries than working class Americans can.

As a foreign student who completed his undergrad education in the US, my student visa interview required me to show evidence that I would not try to use the F1 student visa to transition to H1B or a different visa class that can be linked to a green card application down the line. This is standard policy, as my friends who're also US-educated had the same questions during their interview.

It's also difficult to enforce because once you're in the country and have completed your education, you can be recruited by a company who will sponsor your H1B, at which point the ICE will evaluate it as they would any other H1B application. So the whole rigmarole seems pointless to me, but that is bureaucracy for you.

It's not really about the parent so much as the child. The child deserves to have parents that are present in its life.

The parents can raise the child in their home country if that's an important concern. As far as I know, no country will deprive a child of citizenship simply because he was born while the parents were on vacation.

Right, there's no chance of that being impractical or harmful to the child.

Of course it's harmful to the child. But there are millions of children born in various parts of the world who would suffer the same harms. Why should we protect a Mexican child who's parents crept across the border to give birth, but not an Indian child who's parents applied for immigration but were rejected?

I feel like you are implicitly appealing to a very extreme version of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...

The question isn't who we should protect, but who the US government should protect in the course of implementing its immigration policy. The Indian child is not a US citizen.

If you scroll up you'll see that we are discussing whether current policy is good, not what current policy actually is. "Is" != "aught".

Yes, I know. I think that it is legitimate for the US government to prioritize the interests of US citizens in implementing and defining its immigration policy. After all, if it did not, the US would simply have open borders, and there is not much point in discussing that hypothetical.

Pregnancy tourism is rampant. There are businesses in L.A. that advertise it on the web, even.

There are many methods, one common one being to lie about how many weeks pregnant the woman is (note, for example, the woman who gave birth en route on a flight that had to be diverted to Alaska last October).

No, I favor open borders.

But if we are going to have limited immigration, we should do it on the basis of choosing the most valuable immigrants. At the moment, fully 74% of immigration [1] to the US is based solely on nepotism.

Also, it's silly to suggest that I favor splitting up families - I oppose preventing immigrants from going back home to be with their family. We aren't a slave state. (For much the same reason I oppose our various penalties for Americans renouncing their citizenship.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_reunification#Family_re...

>I oppose preventing immigrants from going back home to be with their familU.

You're not making any sense. I'm British and met my husband when working in Canada. One of us has to immigrate somewhere in order for us to be together.

I think he's saying that someone here illegally should be able to return to country of origin and then re-enter illegally at will, protected from repatriation. This puts a premium on entering the country by whatever means and at whatever risk.

He was saying that being married to a US citizen should not enable a person to enter the US legally. (He said "sleeping with", but in fact the US does not generally grant dependant visas to unmarried partners.)

Not quite, I'm saying that from a utilitarian perspective, importing wives for US citizens is not better for the country than importing high skilled workers.

I'm also saying that from a justice perspective, banging an American and getting him pony up for marriage doesn't make a person intrinsically more deserving of citizenship than working hard and creating (potential) value for the US.

Again - I'm generally an open borders proponent. What I say we should do is stop using violence to prevent peaceful people from entering the US and engaging in trade here. (And we should make whatever economic adjustments are necessary to prevent an increase in state-induced violence/threats of violence, e.g. eliminate the welfare state.)

But if I accept the logic behind restricted borders (e.g. "we can't handle too many more" and "immigration should benefit natives"), that logic doesn't really support nepotism based immigration.

You appear to be very cynical about marriage and relationships in general. Visas are granted to the spouses of US citizens because the US recognizes the right of these citizens to have a family life. It is not only the spouse who is harmed if the visa is denied but also the US citizen in question, whose rights the US government is obliged to recognize. Utilitarian considerations are largely irrelevant. As far as justice is concerned, I don't see why you think it would be unjust to grant visas to spouses. Of course spouses of US citizens are not the only people who should be granted visas, but no-one suggested that was the case.

> No, I favor open borders.

I once thought that way too. However I was advised to consider a country as a body, as a cell, tissue, or organ. Then one thing became clearer, the need to police boundaries. Not necessarily in a militant manner, or with belligerence. nature. But that boundaries are a good thing.

My sister works as a primary teacher in the London area. She's Canadian, and can't find a job in Ontario (we pay our teachers very well, so there's rarely a shortage). But the British don't pay their teachers very well, meaning that talented teachers like her who are working hard to contribute to Britain's future for fairly paltry wages would be kicked out of the country under this plan.

If Britain can't meet it's demand for teachers at the wages it wants to offer without immigration, how do they expect to do it when they kick all the immigrants out? In essence, it's going to mean that British taxpayers have to foot the bill for the higher wages needed to get British teachers, or else some schools will simply have not enough teachers at all.

It saddens me that such a fantastic country would be so short-sighted.

Surely it's a good thing for British teachers to have higher wages? It would encourage British people to go into teaching, become educated and pass on that education. Britain has a problem with stagnant wages and concentration of wealth.

And it would seem in literacy and numeracy. 2013 OECD study on England's 16 to 24-year-olds: - 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries.

One more data point: my friend is a doctor and has lived in the UK for about 9 years. She's terribly overworked and makes less than the stated amount.

She must still be in training then as most qualified doctors in the UK NHS earn way more than that:

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/about/careers-medicine/pay-...

Worth noting that there are no limits on what doctors in private practice can earn and some NHS doctors do private work on the side to augment their NHS salaries.

The GP's comment doesn't seem inconceivable. Remember that terms like junior doctor or doctor in training in the UK typically refer to anyone below the level of GP or Consultant. That covers typically 6 years of academic training, followed by at least 5 years of postgraduate clinical practice. Even someone in their fifth postgraduate year, working full time, and making progress as rapidly as the system allows still has a base salary under 35K, and not everyone will progress that quickly.

So, depending on what funny business happens with counting base salaries vs. additional income and what happens with junior doctors' contracts when the current clash with the government has been resolved, a proposal like the one we're talking about really could wind up with someone several years into a career as a junior doctor falling foul of the rules.

Of course it's highly unlikely to come to that, because the NHS is already in serious trouble and would surely collapse completely without the foreign workers it employs not just as doctors but more widely. Any rules about minimum salary are inevitably going to have get-out clauses to protect essential industries from catastrophic consequences.

NHS can't afford to pay it's doctors rockstar wages because it is arguably the most efficient healthcare system on the planet.

I can't see how "NHS can't afford to pay it's (sic) doctors rockstar wages" follows from "it is arguably the most efficient healthcare system on the planet". Why are these mutually exclusive?

Efficient in the sense that you get more bang for your buck healthcare wise in the UK than you would get from the US or any other country that follows the US model. NHS is already barely able to make ends meet right now and would basically flop as a system if it had to match US wages for doctors.

US healthcare in comparison to UK healthcare is bloated, costly and inefficient in the sense that a whole lot of money is spent with nothing to show of it (patients are not getting any better services).

For more information on this read "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care"

Also is the use of 'sic' really necessary? I find it to be pretentious.

Wow... in my countries, doctors are by far the best paid among "standard" professions, and most make about that amout - working 2 or 3 jobs and being terribly overworked as well, but I'm sure their standard of living is much better.

And many are tempted to move to Brazil or other countries. So I guess she should try to move (unless she likes the UK a lot).

Just one other data point: a friend teaches IT and cannot find any permanent employment, it's all temporary gigs of three or six months. So in some respects, it might be like IT workers - they are there, but employers are ruling them out for inscrutable reasons, and demanding access to migrants instead.

Was confused with this for a moment as I thought you were referring to London, Ontario. Anyways it is a pity that your sister may be impacted by this not so well thought out mandate. I also have a friend who graduated from teacher's college (OISE) last year but left for South America.

Ha, no, not that London. She's love to have a job there- they pay teachers well.

It isn't the wage it's self that bothers me, it is this 35K GBP figure without any other context that bothers me.

I think it depends entirely on if someone is trying to become /part/ of a country, or if they are merely there to work in it.

For the former the rules should be more lax, that person should need to make at least the median wage for a given job (until they are fully emigrated).

For the latter that person should need to make at least 150% of the median wage.

Family's complicate the decision; but I would say that the most favored member of the family should be the deciding factor.

£35K is not unreasonable. However if you ask me it should be £35K outside of London and £38.5K within. It far too easy to find a London job that pays £35K, even a lot of entry positions are in the high 20s (27-28K).

That being said, while it is fine for workers, what the UK government have tried to do to people on family visas is very immoral. And has caused a lot of families to be separated.

- To sponsor a spouse you must make: £18,600

- To sponsor a spouse and one child you must make: £22,400 (+£2,400 for each additional child).

For reference the medium salary in the UK is around £22,044, the average is around £26,500 but neither tell the whole story, the UK has a wide salary disparity (in particular London Vs. elsewhere), and some charities project that the above rules preclude over a third of the population from bringing in their family.

Can you imagine being separated from your spouse and child because you don't make enough? Even if that spouse is perfectly able to work? And the worst part is that a lot of people get caught in a poverty trap, where they don't make enough to pay for the skills that they would need to escape it.

The problem is these types of rules come from London where wages are much higher and from very affluent individuals who came from money. They typically impact the poorest parts of the UK, but as they say "out of sight out of mind." Who cares if someone in north England cannot see their family for years... Certainly not Westminister.

To elaborate on the spousal visa issue: this only applies to non-EU spouses. As a British citizen, if you decide to marry a non-EU person, be prepared for hell when you try to get them in. However, Germans living in Britain can get their non-EU spouse in under the German rules. These policies are a result of the governments impossible, damaging pledge to get immigration "in the tens of thousands". What happens is that they look at a categorized list of immigration categories, realize they cannot do anything at all about EU immigration so double down on non-EU migration.

Except the rules only apply to British citizens, because they are the only people they can apply these rules consistently to. Therefore we are left with the bizarre situation where it is easier for a French person in Britain to get their spouse in than a British person in Britain.

There are British people effectively exiled because they went abroad when young, got married and had a kid and cannot return with their family because they don't have a guaranteed job lined up in the UK paying 18k+. The spouses income is deemed irrelevant under the rules, so even if your non-EU spouse can earn well above that, it doesn't matter.

Ridiculous, borderline sick fiddling from the government that has severely damaged the family lives of tens of thousands of Britons.

The work round is to spend 3 months in the EU and then return under EU rules and not UK. The case was Surinder Singh but there are subsequent rulings - https://www.freemovement.org.uk/surinder-singh-immigration-r...

You'll still be rejected out of hand and forced to resort to legal action however. You're right that the UK has targeted non-EU spouses and is intentionally obstructive, arbitrary and perverse in their dealings, all for the political ends you describe.

Why is immoral to make sure people earn enough to support a spouse and a child that they will bring with them or have come over?

Is England obligated to take care of non citizens?

US has same rules.

> Why is immoral to make sure people earn enough to support a spouse and a child that they will bring with them or have come over?

Because separating families is immoral. If you don't think causing a parent and child to be separated is immoral then your list of immoral actions must be slim.

> Is England obligated to take care of non citizens?

You call them non-citizens, I call them dependants of UK citizens. Also the rules entirely ignore the spouse's earning potential which is stupid.

> US has same rules.

No it doesn't.

The US does have a minimum income level but firstly it is much lower, and additionally you can get numerous additional sponsors to combine incomes.

So someone in the US could get their parents as co-sponsors, and thus allowing even someone working at Walmart to bring in a foreign spouse and child.

> Also the rules entirely ignore the spouse's earning potential which is stupid.

Are spouses of people on this type of VISA allowed to work?

> Because separating families is immoral.

You do know the default answer to that is: "Fine, as paragons of morality, we will hereby no longer allow any foreign workers with spouses who make under XX,XXX to enter the UK, because separating them from their family is immoral."

Proviso: I believe in having substantially more open borders than we do today; I just don't think your argument to morality is a very good one.

> Are spouses of people on this type of VISA allowed to work?

Yes.

> You do know the default answer to that is: "Fine, as paragons of morality, we will hereby no longer allow any foreign workers with spouses who make under XX,XXX to enter the UK, because separating them from their family is immoral."

You completely misunderstand what is even being discussed.

We're talking about UK NATIONALS who if they earn below the threshold cannot bring in a foreign spouse or child.

We are NOT talking about foreign nationals on work visas and their ability to bring in other foreign nationals.

To use a specific example: If a UK national moved to the US, got married, and had a kid. If all three of them wanted to move to the UK, they would be separated for years. The UK national would have to move to the UK alone, get a job, earn 23K/year, and only then could they apply to bring the other two over. This ignores how long the visa process takes or how many years of work-history you need to get approval!

"Spouse or child" or "spouse and child"? A foreign child of a British citizen is a British citizen and shouldn't have a problem getting in.

I mean, once the passport office finishes rejecting their paperwork because "it was printed on US letter paper" or "your cosigner's signature is too big" or "their signature was in blue ink". (I had to mail it all in four times.)

Because it discriminates based the nationality of who you marry. If you marry someone from the EU the rules do not apply.

Of course its discrimatory, it discriminates in the favor of british and eu citizens, is that wrong? Are we saying that non citizens have the same rights of entry as citizens?

I live in the far east, in order to qualify for a residency visa, i have to show assets of at least $50,000. In fact i have to bind that in an accredited savings account. So minimum asset determinatiins for residency qualification is common and not a vile abnormality as sugested.

> Of course its discrimatory, it discriminates in the favor of british and eu citizens, is that wrong?

You have that backwards. British citizens are the ones it harms, they're the ones who cannot see their spouse or child.

> Are we saying that non citizens have the same rights of entry as citizens?

Dependants of British nationals should have the same rights, yes.

> So minimum asset determinatiins for residency qualification is common and not a vile abnormality as sugested.

We are talking about visas to bring a spouse or child into the country, you're talking about something else entirely. I don't see the connection. I also have no idea what country or visa type you're even referring to.

US rules aren't at all comparable. They're based on the poverty line and are pretty low. You can be earning below the UK threshold and living a great life, especially outside London.

But how do you reconcile that with those that marry through arranged, sometimes forced marriages, to those in some poor countries? This law is intended to reduce that scenario which is a wide backdoor to normal immigration.

> But how do you reconcile that with those that marry through arranged, sometimes forced marriages, to those in some poor countries?

Forced marriages are already illegal under UK law, and additionally a foreign spouse cannot enter without support by a UK-national sponsor.

You cannot use extremely rare incidents to justify a policy of mass discrimination (against non-EU citizens, and UK nationals that are impacted).

> This law is intended to reduce that scenario which is a wide backdoor to normal immigration.

There's no backdoor. UK nationals are meant to be able to bring in spouses and children. The fact they cannot in some cases because they make the national median in salary is just disturbing.

Essentially poor people have one set of rules and affluent people have another.

Oh there are so many more than two sets of rules, and the predicates that determine which sets apply to any given individual are legion as well.

You state that it is a 'wide backdoor' and while it seems that you could describe this as a backdoor, to assert that it is a wide one seems .. dubious to me. Also, the fact that forced marriage exists is not enough, because it is not necessarily used to foster immigration. Both of the people I have known who had spouses arranged for them had this done because of 'cultural history' and actually went to live abroad with their new husbands (one later managed to leave him and return by herself, I don't know of the other)

I think that the situation you describe (forced marriage) could be illegal already and while it would be good to detect and punish the perpertrators of this kind of offence, to penalise a whole bunch of other people in their name seems somewhat excessive.

My first thought was that's going to have a big impact on the NHS and the care industry:

"Metcalfe says there will be temporary exceptions for people with skills such as nursing, because there is a shortage in the U.K."

Presumably central government has perfect information about the job market and will be able to make all the exceptions required in every industry?

Hmm? If the prevailing wages are low, then claims that there is a shortage are lies; if there were a genuine shortage, then any employer could guarantee they got as many as they wanted by offering a better wage, and would have already done so. The entire point of setting a wage cutoff is that it's an impartial standard, which can't be fooled by false rumors of shortages. Making exceptions would defeat the purpose, and it would be bad for the people in fields covered by those exceptions.

> If the prevailing wages are low, then claims that there is a shortage are lies

That's not necessarily correct. That's only the case in a vacuum, it falls apart in reality.

For example, the US has routine shortages of farm field workers, in places like California, for picking etc. The wages are very low. It's a combination of nobody but illegal immigrants wanting to do the job for $10 / hour because it's a miserable job, and the business owner not being able to afford dramatically higher wages. It's a very persistent problem throughout California. In your theory, the wages could only be so low due to a vast over-supply of labor; there are in fact many other reasons an imbalance like that can occur.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/oct/25/decline...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-u-s-farms-fewer-hands-for-the...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/us/california-farmers-shor...

This is, again, straightforward microeconomics. The reason none of the farm owners is able to afford higher wages is because the price they can sell their crops at is set by competition with other farms, whose prices reflect the fact that they are not themselves paying higher wages. If cheap labor were unavailable, wages and prices would both rise and the business owners would end up about the same.

The situation is somewhat complicated by the seasonal nature of the work, which means yearly cycles of hiring and firing. We normally associate periods of intense hiring with a shortage (ie, a recent shift in the economy means much more demand for some category of worker and not enough people have been trained yet to fill the demand), but in the case of agricultural work, that's part of the economy in steady-state.

It's not purely that simple. Ideally, the farm owners are trying to hit the price point at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. If the demand curve was perfectly inelastic your explanation would be sufficient, but most consumers are going to balk when a carton of strawberries reaches a certain level, and therefore the market is putting downward pressure on the price due to demand.

Maybe if these luxury crops can't be sold economically without resorting to illegal labor, they should be replaced with other products that are more economical.

I can go pick my own strawberries in New England when they are in season for $1-2 a pound. That season might only be about three or four weeks in June/July, but there's other stuff the other eleven months of the year. If I want fresh strawberries in December, they ought to be at a premium.

We used to use a lot of teen-aged labor for this kind of low-skill seasonal work, and I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that. There's still parts of Aroostook county in Maine where they have a weird school year, because traditionally they needed every warm body to get the potato harvest picked in early fall.

The demand for product X is always only sufficient to attract Y workers. That's how the economy works, your confusing a demand shortage for a worker shortage.

Apples and oranges. The average nurse is vastly more skilled than the average software "engineer."

Well, with nursing it's not so hard to know since they created the shortage.

Why can't the central government concern itself with the health of its populace over the dire shortage of iPhone developers?

> non-Europeans on skilled worker visas — known as Tier 2 visas So it only applies to people that were allowed in the country because they are "skilled workers". This kind of visa already has a minimum wage requirement. I read somewhere that they are applying the same rules to stay that they applied to give the visa. Still a change, but not what it looks like in the title.

More generally, the existing system works on a points basis, which takes into account a whole bunch of factors that have been tuned for years. You get a certain number of points for a degree, a certain number if you get paid X amount &c

And then some numpty who clearly hasn't read past Economics 101 gets it into their head that anyone who doesn't earn 35k isn't pulling their weight.

35K GBP is an odd number. To be honest, most numbers in the UK are.

In London, with that salary, you will not be able to buy a studio apartment anywhere within commuting distance of the centre. You'd need to triple it to even think about owning an actual home.

In many cities in the north, 35K will get you a home, in cash, in <5 years.

How does that work, then? Do we deport people who fully pay off homes and retire because they're not earning 35K?

Very odd. Frankly, most of the UK's capital/income thresholds are odd for this exact reason. They end up being piffling amounts in the South East and obscene values in the North.

So I've read multiple places that low-income immigrant labor does NOT reduce the demand for local workers, and results in a general increase in wages overall. (which would mean that most countries immigration policies are based on inaccurate fears)

I'm totally willing to believe this. But I don't understand it. Is it that some portion of low-income local workers are qualified for more skilled work but there isn't the demand? Something else? Can someone give me the simplified version of events that explains this?

The income of low-income workers is spent back into the economy, allowing more people to be employed providing the goods that were purchased. This means it at least breaks even.

Since it stands to reason that the individual immigrant will benefit from immigrating with a higher income, it is also stands to reason that this income being spent would be greater than if they had stayed where they were.

> The income of low-income workers is spent back into the economy

I think this statement vastly underestimates how much money is remitted back home by foreign workers - even low-income workers. In Canada, we lose about 24 billion USD every year this way [1].

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[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/sending-remittances-low-doll...

That's a net effect - more workers == more work getting done, but doesn't address the general fears of "taking OUR jobs" that I've seen debunked but never really understood.

If I'm a minimum wage worker and you increase the pool of minimum wage workers - sure, more jobs will be filled, more money in the economy, but if _I_ can't get a job due to market saturation, my situation is worse regardless.

Again, I'm FOR liberal immigration policies, in general, but I've been told the above fear doesn't play out (overall), and I don't understand why.

In case anyone else wondered in light of the brexit talk, by foreigner they mean people outside the EU.

"Come April, she will very likely have to leave her British life partner"

If I was in that position I would push for a green card marrige. Or perhaps just a normal marrige? not familiar with the dynamics of a life partnership.

Being married to your partner doesn't make much difference with respect to British immigration law. It just makes it somewhat easier to show that you really are in a relationship with someone. If she applies for a new visa on the basis that she has a partner who's a British citizen, then her partner will have to meet the income requirement regardless of whether they're married or not.

The Netherlands already has this, for comparison. Some other EU countries too, I presume - though I'm not sure.

Great idea. But why limit it to just Foreign workers? Just think how Uber they would be if they would just encourage anybody to use their EU passport and move to Elbonia if they don't pull down $50k.

How about the following:

1) All countries drop their borders.

2) All countries begin taxing especially international companies (Amazon, Apple!) fairly and impose sanctions upon countries currently acting as tax heavens. Also, criminally obtained and stashed profits e.g. of (former) dictators or corrupt officials, gets seized and redistributed.

3) Rich(er) countries use this money to actually improve the conditions in the countries where migration originates, no matter if due to poorness, wars, climate change etc.

As a planet we cannot longer extract and privatize profits from poor regions and people. It is simply not sustainable (and never has been, tbh).

> All countries begin taxing especially international companies (Amazon, Apple!) fairly and impose sanctions upon countries currently acting as tax heavens.

And who will start this particular ball rolling.

There are tax havens in the US - Delaware, UK - London and plenty of other places

Apple's primary tax havens are overseas, with Ireland being a key one (Apple pioneered the so-called "Double Irish" dodge, laundering profits through Ireland incentives twice.)

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