UK society – concerns over net immigration

News item of the week in the UK is that net immigration is up – That is essentially that fewer British are migrating and more international students are coming here. Funny really, how the conservative government is paranoid about figures like these and is focused on getting this down in order to ‘improve’ the economy. But first, lets dig a little deeper and see what the root causes are. British love to live abroad. Unfortunately this requires significant savings on the individuals behalf to buy up large tracts of rural ‘sunshine’ destinations as in France and Spain.  So Bung economy = less Brits that can afford to jump ship.

On the immigration side of things, Universities are pitching to international students on an unprecedented scale, much the same as in Australia. Why? Well there is a lot more money to be made by churning out degrees to foreign students who pay more than 3x that of the local students, and generally take less rigorous and less difficult to teach topics.

So is this net immigration a bad thing for the economy? Doesn’t appear so from here – the Brits who would have left the country are still spending their hard earned here, and international students are literally pouring cash into the universities. It surely has something to do with Public sentiment then – given the massive general resentment about foreigners taking British jobs – apparently 75 % of then population would like to see a decrease in net migration as published on the  bbc. This in itself presents an interesting topic - the majority of jobs critical to the British yobs existence are usually taken by Asians. Yep there are not too many white people manning the Taxis at 3 in the morning, or the Kebab shops, or even the local off-licence.

The really interesting bit about the issue of net migration in Britain is that of imposing a cap on numbers does not impose a limit on the number of European migrants. Funny thing is that typically European immigrants far outnumber the others So apparently 57% of the British population is for a restriction on immigration – yep that includes Aussies. But I’m pretty sure if you asked the same people if Britain should limit immigration from Australia they would first question whether or not we needed visas – since we are part of the commonwealth and all. Another debate unto itself….

At he end of the day it would be interesting to see how the average British person who opposes immigration would progress without it – none of their favourite conveniences would be so cheaply and readily available, and perhaps the economy would be in even deeper shit.  Oh and they might turn around to find that a cap is placed on the number of working holiday visas granted to Australia for the - since limtis on these are reciporical.