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Comment by easytiger | Hacker News Reader

There are "working poor" in London because benefit systems and uncontrolled immigration allow people with no means to have 3,4 children despite having existed without money to sustain themselves. I can provide a great many examples.

1 in 5 people in England were not born there and in central London boroughs around half (or more) of the populations of various boroughs live in social housing. The poverty you describe is not a result of government indifference to poverty, it's sustained and generated by policies designed to ease poverty.

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Uncontrolled immigration to the UK is a myth. If you've ever tried to get permanent residence for a non-EU citizen, you'd know just how controlled it is.

Granted, yes, we had little control over migration from the EU from 2004 to 2016. But very few of London's working poor are of Eastern European heritage - anyone from there who finds it too difficult here tends to head back.

Asylum seekers / "small boats" migrant numbers are absolutely tiny relative to the London population.

London does have a high % of first-generation immigrants - but most of them are now-elderly Caribbeans, South Asians, Mediterraneans, West Africans who came over in the 60s and 70s. Outside of a few areas, non-Anglo-looking people in their 30s and under were overwhelmingly born here.

"the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022. This was substantially above pre-pandemic estimates of between 300,000 and 400,000 (depending on which measure is used) " [1]

It's clearly not controlled enough. That's a city approximately the size of Leicester every year. Nobody voted for this.

[1] https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo....

For all the flaws of UK democracy, the majority who votes for parties supportive of current immigration levels is vast. So even if you were right nobody explicitly voted for this, opposition to it is weak enough that the vast majority does not see it as a sufficient priority to change their voting patterns.

The English deserve to get what they voted for -- and will get it good and hard.

The problem with this argument is that completely ignores the die-off rate of the population or the demographics. On average, our population is dieing off at about 600k per year - 500k immigrants does not even break even. We have a negative birth rate. We need new blood - ONS projection for population growth between 2020 and 2045 is under 6%. To compare - mid-1995 and mid-2020 it was just over 15%. We are old-age-heavy which is really bad for the economy and taxation. The mindset should align with data.

So your defense has changed from "it's not happening" to "it's happening and it's a good thing"?

It's not a defence. The "new city" per year is a scare mongering tactic that presents only a partial data picture as its basis.

It's a new city every year of only small boat arrivals. As others have pointed out the the wider picture is even more absurd. Largely of people not fleeing war or real conflict or difficulty either. But people who cannot support themselves.

Can you please define how an objective simple piece of data is somehow biased?

And, for avoidance of doubt, I do think immigration is both a good thing and a necessary thing. Of course, being an immigrant, I am somewhat biased.

> Uncontrolled immigration to the UK is a myth

Demonstrably untrue. 1 in 5 people are foreign born. Over six million people received indefinite leave to remain specifically through the brexit process. "Small boat landings" brought a city the size of Canterbury to the UK last year alone fleeing France. Over one million visas were issued last year.

Can you explain what's controlled about small boat landings?

So, I came to the UK when I was 15, studied for over 10 years, got my citizenship. All legal, privately paid for. Incidentally, I worked as a solicitor for over 10 years, large part of my work was immigration law. There is no such thing as "uncontrolled" immigration outside the EU. When we were within the EU, we __chose__ not to enforce the rules. The arguments about it being non-practical (which is what Home Office told MPs select committee) are rubbish - Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands do so successfully from my personal experience. We could have done that too, __if we wanted to__. We just weren't bothered until the rise of UKIP.

Now about being poor. It took me 13 years, 4 of which working in Saudi Arabia, and a career change into software engineering, to make enough money to pay off my debts from school and start earning enough to live on without worrying about the next bill and looking after my wife and kids. Most immigrants I know do work hard. There is also a large swathe of people (immigrants and natives) who for variety of reasons rely on the welfare state. I do agree that welfare state should be downsized significantly. The reality, perhaps surprisingly, is that such a downsizing will hit the natives the most.

> So, I came to the UK when I was 15, studied for over 10 years, got my citizenship. All legal, privately paid for.

Did you pay resident fees or foreign student fees? If you paid resident fees the cost of your education, would have been heavily subsidised by the British tax payer [1] . Given you spent so long in education that will have been a considerable burden. Probably as much as half.

Most people earning less than £40k are a net drain on the Exchequer. An increasingly small percentage of people are propping up the country

[1] https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/01/29/how-much-should-taxpayers-...

International student fees. I did say "all legal, privately paid for"

If you came to the UK when you were 15 how did you end up paying international student fees?

If you were a legal resident of the UK you would not have been liable for international fees.

Jaywick, 97% White, 95% Born in Uk [1]. The most deprived area in England

Search "10 poorest towns in England". There will be no immigrants anywhere. Search "most deprived areas in Europe" and half of them are in Britain. [2] May I remind you that EU also contains Romania and Poland?

Have you looked at GDP per capita of cities? Once you remove London/Oxford/Cambridge, the country is so poor.

Second biggest city in UK is Birmingham, has GDP per capita $30,000. Second biggest city in Germany is Hamburg, has GDP per capita $85,000

You have to compare most of Britain to corrupt, post soviet countries to find comparable standard of living:

Take Prague, Czech republic, GDP PP is $57,000, Double of Birmingham.

So you go to Warsaw, Poland, it was completely destroyed in the war, is really corrupt, still has higher GDP than Birmingham, $32,000.

North & East Ayrshire has GDP €16,200. You might as well live in Siberia! Yakutia has GDP of $18,000 [5]

> The poverty you describe is... sustained and generated by policies designed to ease poverty.

Yes, I guess you could pursue the plan of starving poor to death, do a rerun of Ireland 1850's

London is fucked because housing. Housing in London is fucked because most of UK provides living standards of Poland.

References: 1- https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/eastofengland/essex/E340... 2 - https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/cornwall-sec...

5 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_subjects_of_Ru...

Czech Republic and Poland are neither post-soviet nor particularly corrupt

1 in 5 people in England where born outside the country because the population is below replacement rate especially when you consider people leaving the UK.

You need a large percentage of the population to have 3-4 kids to be a sustainable country.

> because

Explain the causal effect especially apropos small boat arrivals behind this apparently inevitable gravitational force

Remove all immigrants and children of immigrants from the UK and it would have an extremely old population. As in median age of ~60+ in dire economic straits which would push everyone who could to abandon the country. Small boat arrivals are a trivial number of people irrelevant to this discussion.

You can’t have both negative population growth and 300,000+ people leaving the country every year for very long without massive issues. And those massive issues are going to push even more people to leave resulting in even more issues. Which would effectively force the country to promote immigration even if it doesn’t want immigrants the UK needs them.

Alternatively, if the population growth rate was positive then the country wouldn’t have nearly the need for immigrants to be stable.

Maybe, many of those natives leaving every year do so because of the extra competition with the immigrants: bringing people over causes lower salaries and higher costs of housing.

What's worse is that, those leaving presumably are capable of making it in "better" economies. So in pure GDP-per capita-producing terms, you just exchanged some natives for worse performers.

That's what happens when you're not in the top of the totem of the immigration market.

The majority of people leaving the UK were immigrants themselves.

It’s fairly common globally for immigrants to then move to another country. But that’s been especially true in the EU.

  According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in the year ending June 2020, an estimated 673,000 people emigrated from the UK. This includes both UK-born and non-UK-born individuals. Of the total emigrants, approximately 316,000 (47%) were UK-born, and approximately 357,000 (53%) were non-UK-born. The non-UK-born emigrants included both non-British citizens and British citizens who were born outside the UK.

So it's almost 50/50. Looks actually worse than I'd imagined.

Yes, though 2020 was a real outlier for hopefully obvious reasons.

The 2019 breakdown was 397k emigrants of which 131k where British, 151k EU, and 115k non-EU.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

It’s going to be interesting to see how things settle down in a post Brexit and COVID UK.

The idea that any industrialized country has "uncontrolled immigration" is itself not reflective of reality.

There is a labor shortage in the UK and unemployment is the lowest in 40 years, so all those people should be able to find jobs.

At the same time a job at Pret pays £20k / year and you can’t really find a room in London for less than £700 / month.

UK birth rates are far below replacement. The UK would face economic collapse without significant immigration.

Why isn’t the solution raising native English birth rates?

Imported labour is cheaper.

If you know a reliable way of doing so without imposing poverty or massive authoritarianism there are dozens of governments which would pay vast amounts of money for your expertise.

I don’t think that’s true, but if any actually are, I’m happy to help for a moderate fee plus costs.

What I see though are governments which oppress their people to the point of illness, the way abused animals stop procreating — and then rather than confront that behavior in themselves, buy replacements they subsequently abuse the same way.

Not a single country has found a working method, despite attempts at extending welfare, and extensive financial benefits.

But ignoring that, the end result is the same whether people can't or won't figure out how to do it: immigration is an increasing necessity, and as more and more countries tip below replacement it will lead to increasingly desperate measures to compete for it.

With respect to oppression, the two most consistent factors correlating with falling birth rates is higher education and increased wealth.

I'll be cynic, but basically this:

A manual laborer start to get productive at 16, and stop after 50, depending on his form.

So basically, you avoid paying for his education, he is productive right away, and with some luck, he will retire in his country (or the state may deport him) and die there.

Not saying it's good, but that's the way the world work right now.

You would be surprised, but that was the plan in 50s and 70s, when we got a people from Pakistan and South East Asia to come to work in the factories. They did not go back and settled here. The actual result is that they stay here and bring their families and contribute. Which is great, in my opinion.

Even if we can increase the quantity of migration, if we aren't able to compete for the highest skilled migrants or keep our own young people in the country by offering them jobs as highly paid as other english-speaking places (e.g. the US, Australia, etc) with lowish taxes that allow them to build wealth, we're very likely to face serious economic problems supporting the public services we have through the ongoing demographic transition.

That is true. For the time being the UK is still able to sidestep this because there's a supply of well educated English speakers in an increasing number of African countries for whom the UK remains attractive (e.g. the UK is significantly increasing the cost of educating nurses for a lot of third world countries because the UK fails to educate enough of its own), but it will be harder and harder as competition for immigrants heats up.

"The UK would face economic collapse without significant immigration."

Demographics of our country guarantee a demographic collapse. Not as bad as say Japan or Germany, but enough of an impact to maintain wage inflation. The level of immigration that would be required to reverse that is currently not acceptable to our electorate (in the main). Which is unfortunate.

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