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Comment by bufio | Hacker News Reader

Rapidly increasing the population in this situation is probably not the smartest policy.

If the government makes policy to allow huge immigration, it should make corresponding policy to ensure these people are housed. The housing crisis is not from organic population growth.

The government's goal is to use the population growth to prop up real estate while suppressing real wages. They were never ignorant. They were intentional.

What you are suggesting is the opposite what they are trying to do

Where is this goal documented? I’ve seen some very counter productive immigration policies in the EU, but using migrants as a way to preserve asset prices and suppress real wages is as creative as thinking the earth is flat.

Politically, there are a lot of promised benefits that need to be delivered to old people and fewer and fewer working hands, meaning higher costs to deliver those benefits since labor prices rise.

This would necessitate larger than desired tax increases on the politically influential.

Solution: Reduce the quantity and quality of benefits as much as politically possible, but also import more working hands to reduce labor prices. That it helps support asset price increases is just an added benefit.

That is always the goal with unskilled immigration. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that in the US the Koch brothers and some conservative think tanks opposed closing the border as Trump was clamping down on it. They too like labor to be cheap - their wealth depends on it.

> as creative as thinking the earth is flat.

No, it’s just very basic (completely orthodox) supply/demand economics

Exactly. Immigration has been a massive wealth generator - but only for a subset of people who own businesses, land, and real estate. That wealth hasn’t been fed back into the NHS or public transport, it went into their pockets.

Is it rapidly increasing? First two links in google show it grows about 0.33% per year now, which doesn't look too much and lower than peak in 2010 around 0.84% A bigger issue IMHO is an internal migration from former industrial areas to the London commuter belt and South England more broadly without adequate supply of housing (which is a huge boon for real estate investors and hard to believe they don't lobby for red taping). Houses up north are cheaper but equally unaffordable because wages there are low and declining if adjusted to inflation.

How can you look after an older population that doesn’t work and whose pensions increase every year at least as much as salaries, without either increasing taxes or increasing the working population?

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