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Come on now - the howls of outrage from the Guardian et al would be incessant were the UK to introduce policies that were properly deterrent to illegal immigration. The left is desperate for immigration of all kinds, legal and illegal, because it thinks it can get immigrants hooked on benefits and push politics left for ever. That's the plan, no?

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Asylum seekers are not allowed to work. I don’t like that they’re not allowed to work, but that’s really the fault of the British government for passing laws that say they’re not allowed to work.

They’re also not allowed to vote. That part at least make sense to me.

I don't agree about being allowed to work - that would drive down wages even more for low-skilled jobs, that the poor already suffer from.

Asylum seekers who can even get as far as the UK are necessarily richer and more resourceful than most — because the average monthly salary in e.g. Syria is 149,000 SYP [0] (~= 222 GBP) which means most of those who could even leave Syria in the first place had no real choice and had to flee to much closer places to Syria such as Turkey or Iraq [1], and those who can reach the UK will overwhelmingly be either be high-skilled, rich by dumb luck, or minors sent by their families.

This argument applies to basically all asylum seekers, not just those from the Syrian civil war.

That aside, how many unskilled jobs that don’t require idiomatic grasp of English in local accents (which would include cashiers, baristas, and other customer-facing roles) aren’t being replaced by robots and offshoring?

[0] http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=211&loct...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_W...

The discussion is about doctors who are seeking asylum not being allowed to work.

I don't know how you'd describe doctors as low-skilled.

Hope you’re joking but if not, that’s some amazingly shortsighted bad faith world view.

The left does not want people hooked on benefits. Paying benefits is expensive in a socialist society. The left wants workers who are properly compensated in line with the value they provide, and a social safety net for when they are unable to work.

You could say that the leadership of the right is desperate for immigration and to get people on benefits. Immigration gives nativists someone to look down on, making them easier to exploit. Paying sub-poverty-level benefits is cheap and makes the workforce desperate to accept just-about-poverty-level wages. The working class exists in order to frighten the middle class. The underclass exists to frighten the working class.

Also bear in mind that illegal immigrants do not get "hooked on benefits", they get deported or exploited by "economic libertarians".

Left and right are each many things; I think you have just as much a caricature of the other party as they have of you.

> I think you have just as much a caricature of the other party as they have of you.

That was the point.

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