Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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>Did the UK have a legal obligation to allow EU citizens to live and work freely in the UK while in the EU?

Yes but also had the right to deny that to those who couldn't take care for themselves(can't be burden to the society). So can't stop them from coming but doesn't have to keep the freeloaders. UK choose not to pursue that but could have.

> Did the UK have the legal right to alter trading regulations? For example, could the UK decide to import chlorine washed chicken from US while in the EU?

Yes, just different legislative path. UK was full EU member since the beginning and they created those trade deals within EU and they can change them within EU. Obviously they will need to convince others about the benefits of the chlorinated chicken so they can pass that change but they also need to do the same for the electorate in the UK ehen outside of EU.

> Did the UK have a legal right to discriminate against labours from the EU who applied for jobs in the UK?

No. The idea is that meritocracy prevails, arbitrary discrimination is not OK. EU people apply for jobs freely, employers are free to chose the person who would like to work with and they can chose to work with a Brit or EU citizen if the like to. Why do you want the UK government discriminate against people and force employers to hire those they don't want to? What's wrong with meritocracy?

> EU literally does nothing and serves no purpose

EU's primary purpose is the create peace in Europe by making countries inter-depended and give common access to the resources. If you want to operate a car factory in Berlin, you don't have to conquer Berlin - you can just go there and buy or start one.

Beside this primary purpose, EU has many many more functions. It sucks or excels in some and does OK in others.

> Yes but also had the right to deny that to those who couldn't take care for themselves(can't be burden to the society). UK choose not to pursue that but could have.

The vast majority were not economic burdens though? So no we couldn't have pursed that apart from in the very small minority of cases where that was the case. We'd then need to go through a costly and timely legal process of proving it and deporting them.

> Yes, just different legislative path. UK was full EU member since the beginning and they created those trade deals within EU and they can change them within EU. Obviously they will need to convince others about the benefits of the chlorinated chicken so they can pass that change but they also need to do the same for the electorate in the UK ehen outside of EU.

I don't disagree with this, but it's also not wrong to say the the EU removed the ability from UK law makers to make trade deals independently of the EU. This meant everything the UK wanted to do we had to do with the approval of other EU nation states which often had different economies, cultures and economic goals.

The argument that we would have more control to make our own trade deals outside of the EU is true, although a good argument can be made that those trade deals will not be as favourable if we're acting independently of the worlds largest trading block. Neither black or white is helpful in my opinion.

> No. The idea is that meritocracy prevails, arbitrary discrimination is not OK. EU people apply for jobs freely, employers free chose the person who would like to work with and they can chose to work with a Brit or EU citizen if the like to. Why do you want the UK government discriminate against people?

I don't personally, no. But a lot of people in the UK didn't want UK jobs to be on offer to labourers from low-wage Eastern European countries.

I take the highly controversial view that the UK government should suppress working class wages via mass migration and ensure the UK public are educated enough to not need to compete with foreign low-skill labourers. I want agricultural workers and NHS staff to be under paid if it means cheaper food and health care for natives, but obviously if you're a labourer working in those sectors you might not view this arrangement so favourably. People have also taken moral disagreement with me about whether it's right to engineer a migrant labour underclass at the benefit of natives, but if you don't discriminate against people from low-wage economies then this is almost inevitably the result.

Yes, EU migrants were a net positive. What Brexit did was to take their rights to contribute to the British economy - now they need visa for that and the best stay in their countries or go to USA.

I don't know why you fantasise about discriminating against productive law abading EU citizens. I guess you personally are better of out of EU and EU is better of by not having you. It's very creepy that you are annoyed that you can't arbitrarily discriminate against EU citizens.

Also, there's no such thing as a low-wage Eastern Europeans, they still rent in UK and shop in UK and are employed within the UK labour laws. If you are against low wages you should increase the minimum wage, if you can't compete against Eastern Europeans it's because you don't provide enough value to the employer to choose you. If British are outcompeted in the labour market, maybe British should re-evaluate their education system. British employers don't hire Bulgarian butchers when they need JavaScript developers just because it's cheaper to hire Bulgarian butchers. It simply means that Brits don't have the skills for the money they ask, the Eastern European ones have it and that's why they get the job at free market rate.

The problem - or at least one of them, it seems - here is the speed of changes. Britons may be not that much against the lower-paid Eastern European, if their "invasion" doesn't happen overnight and Britons have time to adjust. However it's harder to organize with binary choice "in EU - not in EU", maybe it needs to have a longer period of gradually allowing more and more of the change. Obviously you can't change education system or even re-train the existing workers in the face of sudden coming of a lot of maybe more narrowly specialized but cheaper workforce.

As I said, there's no such thing as lower-paid Eastern Europeans. Whoever works in UK is employed under the same rules as the British. You might complain about expanding the talent pool but that's a good thing. If you think that expanding the talent pool is a bad thing, you can shut down schools and ban having kids to shrink talent pool in order to protect the current jobs.

Also, nothing sudden happened in 2016 about Eastern Europeans, Poland joined 12 years before that and Bulgaria and Romania 9 years.

I think we have different meanings here. When talked about low-paid Eastern Europeans, it means that in Poland or Bulgaria a certain work position offers smaller salaries than the same one in UK for many kinds of positions. This creates the pressure to the workers to migrate from Eastern Europe to UK, among other places.

Expanding the talent pool is better for consumers of that pool, but worse for providers - that is, a UK worker earning some salary may find that his salary stagnates or reduces because of more workers with similar qualifications arrived from lower-paid Eastern Europe. So it a bit depends on definition. Shutting down schools and banning kids will lead to the same - but over a much longer time period which may be enough to more comfortably adapt; of course these two measures have severe unintended consequences.

Yes, Brexit's 2016 isn't a year when a country from Eastern Europe joined EU - but could be a year when the consequences of such joining, accumulating over time, reached the level which allowed Brexiters to prevail.

See, expanding the pool only in one area can be bad for the providers but expanding it on all fronts is good for everyone.

Why? Because you are compensated with money but you can’t consume money - you can benefit by exchanging it for a product or service and the more people are working the cheaper these are.

For example, if a Polish person pushed your salary down by immigrating to UK, another Polish person who is a butcher pushes your cost of eating meat down too. Another one pushes down your health costs or transport costs. When it’s a free market, it automatically balances the economy. When you have too much money but too little people who create the product and services, it causes inflation.

What creates prosperity in a society are working people, not numbers in the bank account going up.

Overall on average, yes. In practice it's hit or miss - if you're in the industry which doesn't have an influx of cheap competition, you net benefit from overall increase of competition, but if you're say a barber and there's a train of barbers from Czechoslovakia, your income suddenly drops and it will take quite a bit of competition in other areas to compensate the drop for you. So in the mean time you could be quite vocal about that price undercutting process.

> the best stay in their countries or go to USA.

It is drastically harder for people from the EU to immigrate to the USA than to the UK, even post Brexit.

US also pays drastically better and has ample opportunities. If you are going to bother with immigration bureaucracy, people want it to be worth it

the UK got itself to a pretty peculiar setup now. The market for devs isn't so high paid or that huge to need much more people that don't already have the right to work there. It's not as attractive as the US

yep. there's nothing more mediocre than being against skilled immigration

> suppress working class wages via mass migration and ensure the UK public are educated enough to not need to compete with foreign low-skill labourers

The nature of migration is such that the foreign migrants become the national public (at least part of). Both groups are inside your borders now, so how would you make sure that the "low-skill" people does not aquire skill?

IOW, you want one arbitrary part of the people present within the state borders to be educated, and another arbitrary part to be low-skill, and this regimen should be upheld by what means?

(only asking because I fail to see how this could be done IRL without resorting to apartheid style rule)

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