Mass immigration’s advocates are finally admitting that it cuts pay - "Ministers brief the newspapers that the labour market is too tight, and companies need more workers. And some former ministers are starting to say the quiet part out loud. Philip Hammond, the former chancellor, has said relaxing immigration controls will create more competition for jobs and help to reduce inflation – and therefore interest rates – by reducing the power of workers to seek increases in pay... the inflation crisis – and the solution proffered by Hammond – has revealed a truth long denied by ministers and officials. For years they have insisted that immigration does not cause job displacement or hold down wages. They have done so despite academic studies and evidence from the Government’s own Migration Advisory Committee saying the opposite. But now they admit it themselves. Inflation, according to Chris Patten, is high in part because Brexit has made it “more difficult for us to import … labour”... We have created a higher education model entirely dependent on income from foreign students, whatever their quality, at the expense of British kids who are displaced from our best institutions and courses, and that fails to offer technical and vocational alternatives. Partly as a result we have skills shortages that cause demand for migrant workers to grow. Dependence on their ready supply kills the incentive to invest in labour-saving, productivity-improving tech, and the skills of people already here. MPs grow hysterical when ministers confirm that not every unfortunate individual from every unfortunate country can come here via a “safe and legal route”. This is partly down to the failing economic model upon which Britain has relied for decades. Productivity is poor, growth low, and pay stagnant. But mass immigration grows our GDP, if not GDP per capita, and reduces debt as a percentage of our economy without us having to do much. The lack of imagination, vision and ideas of how we might do things differently is part of the problem. But so too is the ideology of many of our politicians. The Right sees immigration as an economic shortcut, the Left through its obsession with radical diversity and identity politics. Which brings us back to the lies. Last week, responding to the argument that mass immigration was increasing rental prices – a statement of fact – a BBC journalist said, “who you gonna get to build all those homes? British workers don’t seem too keen on learning construction skills.” But he was wrong: non-UK nationals account for 13 per cent of construction workers in the buildings sector, eight per cent in specialised construction, and seven per cent in civil engineering. Shortly afterwards, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, claimed, “this city was built by migrants, by refugees” – a statement which, like the claim that we “have always been a country of immigration” – is verifiably false. Those who believe immigration should be reduced and controlled are often presented by liberals as zealots and extremists who peddle a lie – but on this vital issue, where change is irreversible and comes with real consequences, the opposite is the truth."
A new era of immigration politics has started in Canada - "For decades, the annual announcement of Canada’s expected immigration level for the upcoming year was one of the most boring press releases in Ottawa. Successive governments since the early 1990s gently raised the number each year, allowing a few more immigrants into the country but keeping the rate, as a percentage of Canada’s population, at about 0.8 percent. In that time Canada has enjoyed a remarkable pro-immigration consensus among its major political parties... All of a sudden, though, mainstream voices are arguing that Canada should consider allowing fewer immigrants each year and louder voices are arguing that the country should allow many, many more... It might be a tough sell, especially in the midst of an ongoing housing crisis and health-care backlogs that have blared out from news headlines for years... In an interview with The Hub on Tuesday, Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo who specializes in labour markets and immigration, said advocates for higher immigration focus too much on the total size of the economy, rather than GDP per capita, which he says is a rough way of calculating Canadian living standards. It’s undeniable that bringing in more people will boost Canada’s GDP, but it’s extremely hard to boost GDP per capita through immigration, he said. The United States is the one country that may be able to accomplish it because they genuinely attract the best talent from around the world. But rather than a global “war for young talent,” the policies endorsed by advocate groups like the Century Initiative are more likely to bring low-skilled immigrants to Canada who may be saddled with lower living standards than the people who came here before them, he said. Skuterud believes that the recent Canadian consensus on immigration comes in large part from accepting high-skilled immigrants who keep living standards high. This system also leads to lower levels of inequality. “In this country, it’s a system that you want chugging along in the background, very effectively, with high immigration rates. And when I say high, 0.8 percent is high,” said Skuterud. Skuterud agrees that something has changed in the debate, but he hasn’t experienced any blowback for arguing a position that has historically been taboo in Canada. He said he has been pleasantly surprised about the quality of the debate, even in the more rough and tumble venues like Twitter. And as the immigration debate opens up, it hasn’t attracted any populist or anti-immigrant sentiment so far. The British-based Canadian sociologist Eric Kaufmann argues that Canada has benefited from an elite “taboo” about opposition to high immigration levels, but he has argued for years that it can’t last forever. Kaufmann argues that politicians should learn to talk about immigration in a way that allows these points of view to enter the debate, or risk letting a populist dam burst like it did in the United States when Donald Trump made his unlikely bid for president. Skuterud worries that if inequality increases, at least partly due to immigration policies, it could endanger the Canadian consensus on immigration. “This push towards just filling job vacancies (with immigration) has has two effects. One, it lowers average living standards. And two, and probably what worries me more, it increases inequality. And that’s not good for public support for immigration”"
As record numbers of foreign students come to Canada, experts urge a rethink of the program - "At the Sydney Cineplex Cinemas last fall, alongside movie-goers taking in the latest Marvel movie, university students were piling into the theatre for classes due to a lack of teaching space. Not coincidentally, the university reported a haul of nearly $85 million in tuition fees this spring, a 200 percent increase from just five years ago, driven mainly by an increase in international students. And teaching space isn’t the only thing at a premium in Sydney. Local media have reported on a housing shortage that residents attribute to the influx of international students. Some of the students themselves have asked for a cap on enrolment, as they grapple with housing issues and underwhelming employment opportunities... Because there is no central coordination or limit on how many international students can come to Canada, our post-secondary institutions have basically found a way to monetize permanent resident status, said Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo who specializes in labour markets and immigration. “Canadian PR status has massive economic value around the world. If we auctioned it off that would generate huge amounts of revenue. We’d probably never have to pay income tax again,” said Skuterud. International student fees have continued to rise along with the number of students coming to Canada, meaning even as the fees reach dizzying heights compared to the fees for domestic students, people are still willing to pay them. “So every school for sure is looking at what happens to applications when they increase their tuition fees. And from everything I’ve seen, there is no response,” said Skuterud. And while foreign students increasingly seem to be jaded about life in Canada, finding themselves on the front lines of the country’s housing crisis and in schools that don’t live up to their marketing brochures, they have little recourse. “Those foreign students aren’t voting. (Ontario Premier) Doug Ford knows that. And those foreign students’ parents, more importantly, who paid the tuition, especially aren’t voting,” said Skuterud. While Canada’s largest universities have been juicing their enrolment numbers with international students, there have been new colleges and schools popping up that seem to exist entirely to take advantage of Canada’s loose rules on foreign students."
Damn students pulling up the ladder after them!
Opinion: Closing Roxham Road loophole a benefit to all migrants - "Migrant advocates often argue that borders should be open: Whoever shows up at a border should be allowed to cross and lodge a claim. But who shows up is not random. Rather, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest is fundamentally incompatible with a principled approach to the protection of refugees and asylum seekers. Instead of unequal access for those who can afford to pay, the STCA is an important step toward levelling the playing field for all vulnerable people in genuine need of protection. Neither domestic nor international law offer an internationally accepted definition of “migrant.” To the contrary, the careless and indiscriminate use of the term ignores the democratic socio-political process that defines a non-citizen’s status, which determines conditions of admissibility that distinguish undocumented migrants from economic immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. States have legal and moral obligations to immigrants and refugees, and to consider asylum claims. Under domestic and international law, these obligations differ by such criteria as human vulnerabilities, labour needs and other material and ethical considerations. Public perception of queue jumping at Roxham Road challenges the legitimacy of a well-administered migration policy that is fair for the most vulnerable and grounded in the rule of law. Irregular migration puts at risk the integrity, sustainability and legitimacy of the social contract on which the domestic migratory regime is based. Such a contract preserves the integrity of a state’s borders and the successful political and economic socialization and integration of migrants, as well as social justice and the collective benefit of migration in fostering prosperity... The number of people who strive for asylum or refugee status in the Global North vastly exceeds the fiscal and social capacity of receiving countries. The current refugee system sprung up after the Second World War in an acknowledgement that certain people deserve temporary protection. Evidence in Canada and the U.S. shows that many asylum seekers today are not seeking temporary protection: their intent is to immigrate. In a world where travel is relatively cheap and easy, refugee and asylum provisions have become a back door for economic immigrants who would not otherwise be admissible, and who do not qualify under exemptions that would allow them to lodge a claim at an official port of entry. In 2022, for example, 40,000 people crossed into Canada irregularly from New York at Roxham Road , whose location has made it a semi-unofficial port of irregular entry. Yet, almost half had entered the U.S. legally. At Roxham Road, 40 per cent who cross end up having their claims denied . Although the rate is above average, even failed claimants are unlikely to be removed. For all intents and purposes, many are economic migrants. Claimants originate in countries marred by conflict, corruption and dire economic conditions: Central America, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti. Sophisticated human smuggling networks , which fall under the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime , prey on their misery. Yet, it is not illegal for someone to avail of the services of a smuggler or even to commit identity fraud for the purposes of making an asylum claim. In fact, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates the vast majority of people who try to make it to North America engage the services of human smugglers and what is now a $10-billion-a-year industry."
Of course, to liberals illegal and legal migrants are all the same
Meme - "The most annoying types of people are the ones who immigrate to America but still complain about living there. Like, bruh go back to your country. No one forced you to come here! *Speedy Gonzales*"
The Strange Death of Europe, Revisited - "We are constantly told that immigration is vital to overcome an aging workforce, but ignored is the, once popular and logical, argument that reducing our population is both desirable and beneficial. Murray also pours scorn on the stated need for younger workers... 'there will be a constant need to import larger and larger numbers of immigrants, as in a pyramid scheme, in order to keep more and more people in the style to which they have become accustomed'... new arrivals in Europe (and while he is at pains in the early chapters not to be so explicit, he means Muslims) don’t like their new countrymen much more than Europeans like them. This deluge of immigrants was a strange kind of transplant, in which both the host and the organ have explicitly stated rejection ahead of time. Poll after poll throughout the continent has shown that the public at large were against further immigration, whilst poll after poll of the immigrants shows that they find certain key tenets of European culture to be antithetical to their worldview... while Francis Fukuyama was stupidly declaring The End of History Samuel Huntington was preparing for his The Clash of Civilizations... The Rushdie affair of 1989 should have warned us that absolutism of thought was alive and well in our societies (and the response of those non-muslim Europeans who sided with the Ayatollah should have shown us that moral cowardice had not yet been thrown overboard). The sight of British citizens burning books might also have alerted us to the fact that all was not well. As time went on, and Rushdie receded from the public imagination, the general feeling in British government was that this guy wasn’t really one of us, and was proving a little too much trouble than he was worth. Our sacred European values are far too often only sacred when still tolerable. So much for Voltaire. Within a year the Rushdie Affair was overshadowed by European triumphalism... So drunk were we on Fukuyama that the likes of Huntingdon were decried as scaremongers. We scarcely noticed that age-old prejudice and grudge could still tear apart a sophisticated and modern European country like Yugoslavia. The image of a Europe freed from its past is illusory. These warning signs, and many others, were ignored either willfully or through incompetence. Had you asked anyone on September 10th 2001 if they believed that fascist street thugs or organized rape gangs would soon be roaming European streets; or that the far-right would be able to remodel itself and capture the attention of German, French, Austrian or Italian youth; or that blasphemy laws would be voluntarily adhered to by European newspapers; or indeed that Britain would leave the EU, you might have found yourself being forced to visit a psychiatrist. But here we are... Europeans, particularly western Europeans, whilst happy with some immigration, are opposed to mass immigration across the board... Successive Western-European governments have ignored this data, and instead embarked upon a strategy of simply telling Europeans that they are just wrong to think the things they think. So goes the sacred system of democracy. This willful ignorance of the electorate’s wishes has done much to discredit the establishment, and played its own role in the disastrous lack of faith European publics have in their elected representatives. This lack of faith even extends to the operations of government and security. Witness the British Police’s response to the various gangs of Pakistani Muslims grooming non-Muslim girls and children for sexual slavery, and how could one have faith that your government is fulfilling its end of the social contract? Furthermore, media outlets have entered into a Faustian pact to subvert reality and pretend that the problem of integration and the lived experience of native Europeans were simply imagined. This process, which has been ostensible policy for decades, has come into sharp focus with the growing sense of an European Muslim identity, and has reached fever pitch since the migrant crisis of 2015... outlets such as Huffington Post, The Independent, even Teen Vogue and NME are reporting gleefully on the creation of female only music festivals in Sweden. The suggestion is that these are necessary because of a “rape culture” among Swedish men. Missing from this is of course the point that the vast majority of men who committed en masse sexual assault at last summer’s festivals, like those who did the same at Cologne train station on New Year’s Eve, were reported to have been migrants. This poses several problems... everyone at both of those incidents, and by extension everyone else, knows what really happened... if you were a Swedish man, and you were told you can’t go to music festivals anymore because the migrant men you have welcomed into your country and done much to help, can’t keep their hands to themselves, where would you direct your anger?... The self-loathing far-left would do well to remember that Europe is the place where Marxism was created... I’m especially proud of our shame... Compare our feelings about our colonial past to that of our nearest neighbors in Turkey... too much shame, as well as too much pride, will come before a fall. For the West, with all its deformations and problems, still provides a better hope for humanity that many of its adversaries or friends."
The author says the "solution" to people not wanting low paid work is to have a minimum wage. Of course, if welfare payments are too close to the minimum wage, the left will complain they are inadequate, and the cycle will continue. Even more bafflingly, he claims UBI will solve this problem. Ironic, given that UBI proponents say UBI frees people from work they don't want to do so they can get on with life
Liberals claim democracy in the US has failed because elites ignore the populace when they want liberal goals. Yet...
Condemning the "far right" due to their links to past figures is such a lazy ploy. Yet somehow the same logic doesn't work when you point out that the Democrats in the US were the slaveholders
The writer seizes on an interesting contradiction - the left fetishes an EU identity, despite its whiteness. Of course he accuses Murray of championing whiteness, but most of the comments are criticising him for making that claim despite having no proof
From 2017. With Italy and Sweden in 2022, some change has come
Liberals bring in influx of immigrants without a plan to support them - "Our health-care system ranks poorly against peer countries and seems to be only getting worse... Our housing situation is dismal... It seems like we have shortages of every type of basic infrastructure and service, from transit to schools and childcare spots. International students are frequenting food banks, living in crowded and often unsanitary rooming houses and even driving five hours –– each way –– to attend classes. Many immigrants still can’t work in their trained fields because we haven’t taken the time to sort our credentialing systems. Despite just about everyone agreeing that foreign-trained doctors shouldn’t be driving taxi cabs, it always seems to be a problem for another day. Meanwhile, Liberals argue that we need more newcomers to boost our economy and address labour shortages. Not only does this seem callous and exploitative in light of our inability to provide for needs like housing and health care, there’s little evidence our current immigration system can produce these desired outcomes. At a certain point, we will get diminishing returns. While more immigrants mean more tax dollars, we don’t get to just take from them without giving anything back. They, too, require doctors, affordable homes, schools and passports in a timely manner. They use subways and parks and, eventually, long-term care homes. By failing to invest heavily in infrastructure and government services, the Liberals are exacerbating resource scarcity and intensifying competition for fundamental goods and services. Historically, this never ends well. Eventually, people look for someone to blame for their declining quality of life, and that group tends to be newcomers."
Opinion: No, immigration is not some magic pill for saving the economy - The Globe and Mail - "now the main argument made to ramp up immigration is that it will spur economic growth, and this is a tantalizing promise that turns out not to be true. Study after study after study shows that sudden expansions in immigration increase the size of the economy (the GDP) but don’t change GDP per person or the average wage... The research shows that immigration tends to lower wages for people who compete directly with the new immigrants (often previously arrived immigrants and low-skilled workers) and improves incomes for the higher skilled and business owners who get labour at lower wages. That is, it can be an inequality-increasing policy... Immigration thus keeps wages down in occupations in high demand, and that reduces incentives for firms and workers already here to invest in the skills needed to fill those positions, reducing opportunities, missing an opportunity to increase the skill level of the work force and getting in the way of training and education policies intended to help workers with those opportunities. Using immigration to solve the labour crunch therefore has the potential to weaken productivity and lower wages. Linked to the argument about labour shortages is the aging of our population. The retirement of the baby boom will lead to substantial increases in the ratio of non-workers to workers over the next decade. Surely, bringing in more immigrants is the right solution to this? The answer is that it will help a little bit but immigrants aren’t that much younger than the people already living here, and adding 100,000 more immigrants a year won’t move the age dial enough to seriously alter the dependency ratio. And while it’s not solving these problems, a jump in immigration will put strains on other parts of our economy and society. Adding 100,000 more immigrants a year will mean a big increase in people looking for housing in our cities each year, where the housing markets are already at the breaking point. The government’s response to this most obvious of problems is that immigrant trades workers will fill shortages in construction trades, increasing housing production. But the construction sector isn’t grinding to a halt because of lack of workers – employment in the sector is already above 2019 levels and there is plenty of activity. The problem in housing supply is rooted in municipal regulations around density and offshore buyers treating our housing as an investment. Immigration won’t hit those nails. It will make problems worse. And when it does, it will put a strain on Canadians’ much vaunted immigration-welcoming attitudes. Further strains on the health care system are also concerning... the current system underutilizes foreign-trained immigrants, and the problem lies with rigid professional associations, not with the federal government. Bringing in more health workers without solving this problem is unfair to the people we are bringing in, adding them to the large number of frustrated foreign-trained health workers already here. Again, increasing the numbers is not the solution to the problem."
Welcome no more: Rohingya face backlash in Bangladesh - "Back then, thousands of Bangladeshis, outraged by the anti-Muslim violence across the border, trekked from across the country to distribute food and medicine to the shell-shocked arrivals. But public attitudes have hardened after years of fruitless efforts to negotiate a safe return for the Rohingya, with media outlets and politicians regularly condemning refugees as drug runners and terror threats... Resentment is widespread among Bangladeshis living near the camps, who say the Rohingya have outstayed their welcome. "They are bringing shame to Bangladesh," Ayasur Rahman, the spokesman of a local civil society group campaigning against the Rohingya's presence, told AFP. "They should be sent to Myanmar immediately," he said, accusing refugees of "snatching our jobs (and) stealing our passports"... Negative media portrayals of the Rohingya have become so rampant that they caught the attention of former UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet, who toured the country in August as one of her final acts in office. "I am very worried about increasing anti-Rohingya rhetoric in Bangladesh, stereotyping and scapegoating Rohingya as the source of crime and other problems"... Refugees acknowledge that violence and criminal activity exist within the Kutupalong camp network - though it is the Rohingya themselves who are its chief victims. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an Islamist militant group that has clashed with Myanmar's army in the past, has sought to entrench its control over the camps - even murdering civil society leaders that could challenge its authority. Southern Bangladesh is also a hotspot for the regional methamphetamine trade originating in Myanmar, and Rohingya are often recruited as drug couriers for the influential local kingpins who control distribution networks."
Islamophobia!
'Tons' of food gets tossed by NYC hotel because migrants won't eat it - "Nearly a ton of taxpayer-provided food gets tossed in the trash every day at a massive Manhattan hotel being used to house migrants — because they’d rather secretly cook their own meals on dangerous hot plates, a whistleblowing worker has revealed. Disturbing photos show garbage bags full of sandwiches and bagels awaiting disposal at the four-star Row NYC hotel near Times Square, where the city pays a daily rate as high as $500 per room, hotel employee Felipe Rodriguez told The Post... An NYPD source who was working in Times Square on New Year’s Eve confirmed the chaos at the hotel, saying the lobby was littered with broken bottles and some revelers were dancing while others were sprawled out on the furniture and the floor. “It was a total s–t show,” the cops said. City Hall has refused to say how much it pays to rent out the Row or any of the scores of other hotels being used to house migrants. But Rodriguez said he’s “heard from management it’s between $400 and $500 a night, per room, depending on how big the room is.” Rodriguez, 57, said he began working at the 1,300-room hotel in 2017 and was shocked by what’s happened since Mayor Eric Adams’ administration began using it as a “Humanitarian Response and Relief Center.”... An NYPD source confirmed that cops have responded to a string of domestic incidents at the hotel... Officials initially planned to have migrants undergo processing in the HERRCs for just 72 hours but abandoned that goal after getting overwhelmed by the influx that led Adams to declare a state of emergency in October... “There have been times when we couldn’t take all of the garbage out because the bins were full, and I’m talking about 25, 30 bins of garbage.” “My problem is, why are we throwing away so much food? Someone from the city should have said, ‘Let’s order less food so we throw less food out.’ But nobody cares”... he’s confiscated hot plates, pressure cookers and other forbidden kitchen items from hotel residents at least eight times... In addition to sandwiches and bagels, the migrants are served food including fruit, peanuts, chips, juice, soda and prepared dinners that “you heat in a microwave,” Rodriguez said. “They don’t like the menu. They just don’t. They want rice and beans, plantains, tostones,” he said... “They usually put the hot plate on the rug so that nobody can see it and it stays away from the fire alarm,” he said. “If those polyester curtains by the windows touch that red coil, it’s over. It’s a possibility that scares the s–t out of everybody in the Row... the Row “forgot about the standards we had when we had regular guests.” “If they got caught smoking in the hotel, it was a $500 charge. You could smoke outside, but you couldn’t stand in front so that people wouldn’t get secondhand smoke,” he said. “The protocols went down the toilet because migrants can smoke weed, they can smoke cigarettes. You can’t tell them nothing.” Rodriguez also alleged that he’s seen some residents apparently selling drugs outside the hotel and that he took photos of some scooters that were chained up nearby. "
Of course, it's the government's fault for not providing "culturally appropriate" food, and they need to cater to everyone there
'Many migrants end up working in jobs lower than their skill level': study - "Efforts by skilled migrants to meet employer demands for Australian qualifications result in only marginal returns, at least in the short term, according to new research by workforce experts at Flinders University and Charles Darwin University. While industries are increasingly embracing the skilled migrant program in an attempt to overcome specific skills shortages, migrants' qualifications from their home countries are often not recognised in Australia... Skilled migrants find it confusing that the Australian government accepts certain qualifications for entry into the country as part of its points system, yet employers refuse to accept them as transferrable... acquiring additional Australian qualifications makes comparatively little difference to their employment status when compared to migrants who do not seek new qualifications. According to the study, men were more likely to have a job than women and those aged 40 or older were likely to be underutilised, unemployed or mismatched in jobs... both unrecognised qualifications and the need to show local work experience pose major obstacles."