Microsoft mulls cutting UK datacentre investment amid Brexit concerns
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/21/australia-t...
NB I really hope these things don't happen as although I am a Remainer I don't want the Brexit voters pushed further to the right and I think that would be an understandable reaction if they found that Brexit resulted in more immigration.
I don't think Brexit voters will particularly care about Australians or Americans having an easier time of immigrating to the UK. Indians and Chinese people, though... that might push them.
Not all Brexiteers are racist. The majority of racists voted Leave.
>> I don't think Brexit voters will...
> Until they realise that Americans can look Mexican and Australians can look Asian.
i.e "they" is "Brexit voters", so it looks like you are talking about brexiters, and not the minority of racist brexiters.
They probably are going to go further to the right, but not for any reasons relating to actual policy.
You can easily tell people's immigration status. I walked into my local Lidl about 7 years ago and didn't hear an english voice for the entire 30 min shop. That was the first time I realised how out of control immigration to the UK had become.
I voted remain, but if you think we can't tell who's english, or you think it's a lie that huge areas have been ghettozied in virtually every major city, you're either blind or unobservant or simply don't have a diverse contact with many areas of our society.
You're an immigrant till the day you die if you move to a foreign country, but you can integrate with your host country.
Immigrant definition: a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.
Someone who lives temporarily is a migrant.
My point was that you have no idea what status a person holds. They could be citizens who prefer to speak a different language. They could be on holiday. They could be students. They could be in the country without permission. They could be anywhere on the spectrum of immigration permission. You don't know their status.
Besides, I went to a shop the other day and not a single person was speaking Irish. They were CLEARLY immigrants.
Yes, there are ghettoes, but (as in European countries which have experienced terrorism problems) that doesn't mean the occupants are immigrants. People can be born here and not have English as a first language.
(Also, non-immigrants have very little idea how large the barriers to immigration are these days..)
Only this is less common than the other.
Besides, for those anti-immigrant, whether "born here" or "newly arrived" doesn't matter much. If they are not of English, Scottish, etc ancestry, they are immigrants.
So saying that the e.g. the terrorists in Germany were German because they were born in the country is a little beside the point when they are clearly from middle-eastern origin for example.
Well, now here we have a problem, because immigration policy can only apply to people who are legally considered immigrants. The word for expelling large numbers of people who were born in the country but not of the dominant ethnicity is "ethnic cleansing".
In London, if population trends are any indication, this sentence applies just as well to English people...
They might not want them expelled, but simply counted along with new immigrants in estimations of the cumulative amount of people of foreign ethnicities that resulted by immigration (and thus in decisions whether immigration has been "too much" or not).
Are they speaking Welsh, or another non-native language?
Which is obviously not the case
> but (as in European countries which have experienced terrorism problems) that doesn't mean the occupants are immigrants.
Correct, but most of them are
> Also, non-immigrants have very little idea how large the barriers to immigration are these days.
That's true, the barriers for legal immigration are high. But it seems a lot of people merely overstay their visas/permissions to stay or ask for asylum on alleged circumstances that are hard to prove. And also there is some welfare abuse, both from EU and non EU-nationals
(local people get upset about migrants moving into their community and refusing to speak the language, only in this case the language is Welsh and the "migrants" are English-speaking. In this case the Welsh people are nearly always bilingual but would prefer to communicate in Welsh.)
The article you referenced is a nice view on what happens when the roles are switched
That "free movement of people" right the papers keep talking about? That we would need to keep if we wanted access to the single market? That means there are no barriers to EU migrants.
Almost 50% of the record 335,000[1] that migrated to the UK last year were from the EU, which has no barriers. Although I admit it clearly shows the UK government has no actual intention of stopping immigration if it's still letting 195,000 odd non-EU migrants in.
As a bit of a side note, I would thoroughly recommend reading Ayesha's Gift, a recent release, to get a glimpse into the world of immigrants in the UK, the racism they face, but also the consequences of not integrating them properly and how their culture can be entirely alien to ours. It's also an excellent true crime book.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Yes, but not just Britain. You hear a lot of Polish around your local Lidl? Well, there's some Spanish bloke also complaining about the amount of English he's hearing in his local Lidl.
Because for example they can see tons of people of foreign origin in their working class neighborhoods?
It's just that the too notions usually coincide (people of different ethnicity would usually either be recent immigrants themselves or children of immigrants).
Precisely, they don't want people that are not historically from Britain to come there from outside the country, and they are not particularly happy with those that already came and have children who've been born in Britain etc either.
(And perhaps even more so about ethnicity it's about culture -- they don't want people carrying a non-traditional British culture in Britain).
> carrying a non-traditional British culture in Britain
Define "traditional British culture".
Not really, since first racism implies considering the other race inferior (except of merely unwanted in your own country), and second because foreign cultures usually don't grow on a domestic population, but come in trough immigration.
Of course some immigrants can perfectly adopt the local culture, but those are not the kind of immigrants the anti-immigrant people worry about or what they believe is happening in any large number.
>Define "traditional British culture".
Like all cultures it's a constellation of things, not all present or shared at all times by all members of it, that has developed historically.It doesn't have a mathematical style, absolute definition, but one knows it when they encounter it, the same way they can tell Basil Fawlty, tea, shepherd's pie and Punch and Judy are in it and bluegrass, wabi-sabi, yodelling and Takeshi Kitano are not.
Visit 'Britain' - then visit 'France' and you'll get an idea of the panacea of cultures and sub-cultures within those two nations, that are quite distinct from one another, most of which could be very readily labeled as either 'French' or 'English'.
And that would only be two of many nations.
Yes - culture and ethnicity actually exist in the world.
That's what actually makes it 'diverse'.
You don't need to know someone's origin to guess at their immigration status.
The UK is not quite America. When you step outside of London, simply one's accent can instantly betrays one's class, and one's regional origin within the UK!
The last time I was in Eastern Europe, people would immediately speak to me in English. They could tell simply by the way I dressed (quite normally) that I was a foreigner. That was pretty weird actually.
Or, local effects of immigration.
"and vote accordingly in places where there are few immigrants, in comparison to places where there are lot of immigrants."
No. The number of migrants to the UK is well publicized, and it's quite high, moreover, EU migrants have considerable privileges within other EU nations (i.e. benefits, voting), which would be truly odd for most citizens of the world. (Imagine Canadians voting in US elections).
The population is well aware.
As far as 'those in areas with fewer migrants' voting more for reduction as evidence of 'lack of knowledge' is not quite right either.
People in non-urban areas simply have very different attitudes towards migration - and this is avoiding the fact that many people in Western urban areas are themselves immigrants - or children of immigrants.
Toronto, for example is 49% immigrants, and 75% first generation Canadian. Imagine how they would feel differently than say, Hamilton, Ontario, which has considerably fewer immigrants?
Clearly, there will be differing attitudes.
I'd urge us not to belittle those with whom we may disagree, or else the pendulum will just swing further: were the EU to have effectuated more sensible immigration reform over the years, consistent with the will of the vast majority of EU citizens, then there'd be a lot less turmoil, no Brexit, and there wouldn't be this massive rise of nationalist parties.
If points based controls reduce the the level of 'poor' immigrants then I'd expect it to eventually become a non-issue as it was when the EU member nations were all roughly similar in GDP per capita.
Daily fucking Mail regularly runs articles about doctors with poor English skills.
The main complaint about migration in the UK is with respect to low skilled migrants. As the UK was totally unable to control EU migration (a lot of which is low skilled migrants from Eastern Europe) it had to try to 'get the numbers down' from non-EU sources.
Now that the UK will be sovereign, in control of it's borders again, it will be able to limit low skilled migration from the EU and allow more high skilled migrants from everywhere.
https://news.microsoft.com/en-gb/2017/01/24/microsoft-re-aff...
It seems incredibly obvious that making lots of long-term investment when the future of the UK is so completely unknown would be a risky move. So you cut investment for a bit, and we see what happens later.
More specifically there are concerns about storing EU-citizen data outside the physical EU and in ways which could not comply with the requirements of EU privacy laws.
This is in addition to the legislative issues about handling EU data, which may or may not be side-stepped by UK keeping all laws on the matter. But considering we'll badly need a free-trade agreement with the US right after we leave, that's likely one of the areas where the Americans will ask us to drop shields...
Not disagreeing, just finding this information interesting
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Of course UK might leave before such ruling.