Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Sad but true.

I think the most fundamental change of Brexit is the overwhelming "you're not welcome" message. Visas, papers, bureaucrats, people can deal with. But the idea that you're at best tolerated so long as you pay your taxes is really off-putting (even for me, now UK citizen and long-time resident).

Also, all these schemes forget that moving for a job is so much more than that - it is moving a life. Can you move your life with your partner and kids - are they welcome? Can your parents come and visit? Is it obvious you can access healthcare, schools, social safety net on fair terms? Will you have to justify your whole existence to a reluctant bureaucrat every 12 months?

Pre-Brexit, there was always a bit of tension to foreigners in the UK, but then there always is, and London was by far better than most places. But the guarantees of EU membership were so strong that you didn't even think about any of these issues.

My impression is that another upside Silicon Valley has over the UK is that the US is genuinely a country of immigrants. Whatever hoops you have to jump through to get in or stay, I don't get the impression people are looked down on because they are foreign, once actually on the ground. Which is not so much the case in Brexitania.

View on HN

> My impression is that another upside Silicon Valley has over the UK is that the US is genuinely a country of immigrants. Whatever hoops you have to jump through to get in or stay, I don't get the impression people are looked down on because they are foreign, once actually on the ground. Which is not so much the case in Brexitania.

The UK is easily among the most tolerant and least racist of European countries. In international studies, the UK scores very highly on all such measures, usually much better than continental European countries. See e.g. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-rac...

I don't understand this compulsive need of pro-EU voters to construct massive straw men about brexit voters and Brexit Britain. It is possible and reasonable for a country to decide it doesn't want to be a part of the European "project" without being a racist xenophobic hellhole.

On the original article, it is strange it never covers how easy it is for someone in India or the Uk or Africa to immigrate to Germany. The UK has mass immigration still from all over the world - when you have considerably more potential immigrants than you can reasonably accommodate is when countries start getting picky and having rules.

> I don't understand this compulsive need of pro-EU voters to construct massive straw men about brexit voters and Brexit Britain. It is possible and reasonable for a country to decide it doesn't want to be a part of the European "project" without being a racist xenophobic hellhole.

No one is taking that right away. No one is saying UK is a xenophobic hellhole. But the "foreigners" en masse are saying they don't like it, and are more likely to give the UK a miss. Either you don't mind, or if you do, don't pin your hopes of a booming start-up industry on those very same foreigners.

I've not noticed any decline in UK immigration as yet. If there is a decline and it is a problem, then the UK has the ability to address it as needed. If there is not a decline then there's not a problem.

Speaking for my own workplace the effect of brexit has been to replace European migrants with more Indian migrants, not to actually reduce migration. Unless you believe that continental Europeans have some unique ability to found startups, I'm not sure there's much to worry about.

Noticed the empty shelves at the supermarkets? Something to do with no one being around to drive lorries?

But ultimately, if you don't mind, that's good news to you. One thing less to worry about in a stressful world.

I haven't noticed any empty shelves i have to say.

There's is not a labour shortage of lorry drivers. There is increased demand, reduced supply (due to a pandemic on both counts) - but plenty of people who can drive a lorry and are licensed - who don't because salary is not competitive.

If your argument was that wages were kept depressed due to cheap labour from abroad, and how terrible it is that we now have to pay lorry drivers and fruit pickers competitively, I'm not sure that's much of an argument.

I'm a remain-er as much as the next guy (so much so I remain, as a Brit, in another EU country) but:

"...but plenty of people who can drive a lorry and are licensed - who don't because salary is not competitive"

Is really the crux of the issue. Getting a licence, whilst involving some moderate challenge, isn't exactly the most difficult or expensive thing to do. It's been a crappy job for a while and relying on it being filled by immigrants who had no better alternatives isn't a sustainable solution anywhere.

> There's is not a labour shortage of lorry drivers. There is increased demand, reduced supply (due to a pandemic on both counts) - but plenty of people who can drive a lorry and are licensed

Not sure what you mean by that, BBC mentiones a lack of 100.000 drivers just a few days ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/57810729

That's a shortage, no matter how you turn it regardless if people are not available or simply don't want to do it.

Sure, pay can increase but so will the price of goods and components, having a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy and making UK less competitive as a result. Companies want to move stuff and they see no profitable means to do so.

I'm in The Netherlands, there's a driver shortage here too but it's mostly eastern europeans filling the void. With an unemployment rate of 3% why bother with a boring away-from-home job? Unless Trucking is your hobby essentially. I imagine most people in the UK feel the same way; there's better jobs available now with the economy opening up.

> Noticed the empty shelves at the supermarkets? Something to do with no one being around to drive lorries?

Yes there are fewer drivers, however my understanding was that this was due to "pingdemic", a lot of drivers not able to work due to isolation. Additionally there were fewer new drivers trained last year, because of obvious reasons.

Also Brexit means there are fewer EU drivers able to work here, but I think the above as had more of an effect.

The majority of Europeans do not work on lorries or in supermarkets. EU citizens in the UK earn significantly more than locals and are significantly better educated. The real problem here is not lack of undereducated supermarket clerks (we can easily replace them with locals), the real problem is that software developers and lawyers and doctors and accountants and whatnot won’t cross the Channel anymore. Special visas may work for seasonal workers and cleaners, but I wouldn’t move to the UK with a 1-year visa to earn just 70K£ pa (which is more than twice the average salary of a local).

I would stop spreading the fake news of Europeans being the servants of the Britons.

There's both I guess. There are whole industries dominated by immigrants, too. And guess what, they are the ones now experiencing severe staff shortages.

Since labour frictions tend to be absolute, not proportional to e.g. salaries, they are always going to be less acute in better-paid, higher-profile jobs. It doesn't mean they are any less grating to the people who experience them.

The lack of lorry drivers is more likely to be caused by the changes to IR35. Lorry drivers would set up companies to use a tax loophole and not pay NI and income tax. Now they can’t, take home pay went down and drivers are harder to find.

From another EU country I don't feel represented by the EU commission at all. This has nothing to do with immigration and I think any potential immigrant would have to accept and understand that.

I would add that even for immigration procedures and paperwork the UK is actually quite good, straightforward, and helpful compared to some of its neighbours.

> The UK is easily among the most tolerant and least racist of European countries. In international studies, the UK scores very highly on all such measures, usually much better than continental European countries.

The point is not that the British society is more or less tolerant than the Italian society (and it certainly is more tolerant). The problem is that as a European I’ve never experienced xenophobia until 2016, while for some years after that every single Briton I talked to felt entitled to share with me some uneducated opinions about immigration and about my immigration status. These would range from some form of “you are a good migrant (sic) so you can stay”, to “only English people should live in England”. Some friends and colleagues, especially women who mixed with locals from the lower classes, have experienced more extreme forms of xenophobia, such as a doctor friend who stopped working outside of London because half of her patients were telling her to go back to her country (she was already naturalised then) on a daily basis. The locals trying to burn European flags (and failing miserably) weren’t really sending a welcome message.

Edit: poor migrant fix typoz

I'm sorry, I have extreme doubt to what extent these anecdotes are true and have no choice but to reject them when there's no corroborating evidence.

In my experience, I see about 100x as many people trying to shame folk with the "brexit=racist xenophobe" brush than I witness actual incidents of such behaviour.

At the end of the day it is all anecdotes from people who have an ideological axe to grind.

I'd be more interested to see actual data that suggests any permanent effect - like changes in all the many studies into the tolerance of countries towards immigrants, or even a substantial increase of hate crimes - but so far all that is strangely lacking and all we are left with is anecdotes.

There are centainly some racist/xenophobe people and they were pretty loud during and after the Brexit campaign.

However the main issue is that the mainstream leadership took cues from them and the dialog about immigration has changed.

Now it's pretty much native vs immigrants, England vs Europe. It's no longer a family/love story.

"Once Britain is free of the EU’s shackles, there’s nothing it cannot achieve". This kind of slogans extend to simple immigrants as well because "they" are the reason UK is no longer an empire...(so they said).

It is not clear what “ideological axe to grind” I or my friend may have nor why we should make up anecdotes. Convincing you or anybody on this site of anything doesn’t advance any item on my agenda.

Said that, is police data enough evidence?

https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/hate-crime-undermines-t...

> National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Hate Crime, Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said:

“We now have a clear indication of the increases in the reporting of hate crime nationally and can see that there has been a sharp rise in recent weeks. This is unacceptable and it undermines the diversity and tolerance we should instead be celebrating.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/brexit-race-hate...

You don’t have to reply, if you think the police are all crazy leftists who hate brexiters.

Those are all in the few weeks since 2016 referendum. It was not a sustained increase, and further it was in a period of national hysteria following the vote when such issues were common currency.

2021 hate crimes are not above those of eg 2014 so I fail to see how the UK has become some xenophobic country.

I should remind you that this started with you saying I was making up anecdotes because I had an ideological axe to grind. Now you are moving the target. Before we go there, would you admit that the Brexit referendum caused an increase of xenophobic incidents now that we have proof that it did?

I would say that a transient spike 5 years ago is not enough to make the case that the country has had some fundamental and permanent attitude shift post-Brexit.

However, you are right that it does lend credence to complaints around the referendum period that it was a difficult time. But I am still reluctant to draw long term conclusions from that.

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...

There was a peak after the referendum, but there is also a long term trend. The cause of the trend can't all be attributed to brexit though (the causality might be reversed for example).

The UK has great PR, that's a sure thing.

>> without being a racist xenophobic hellhole.

Well if that's the bar UK has set for itself then it's all good but it tries to have its cake and eat it too.

I'm someone who has lived both in UK and now in the US.

UK has a huge issue with racism that people don't even want to acknowledge. The prejudice, micro aggressions, general nastiness from people is extremely off-putting in UK.

In the US nearly every city with over 1 mil in population is open to conversations about racial discrimination, and individuals generally do a good job and admit fault when some behavior is called out.

The opposite of this holds for UK. Pointing out racist behavior becomes denial. Everyone thinks that because they're not the US they're saints and have no racial issues.

This has been the experience of a bunch of my brown European friends as well. US is genuinely better when dealing with other people.

You appear to be redefining racism as "willing to agree with me when I assert everything is racist". You aren't naming any specific problem you saw with actual racism, only that people react badly when you claim it's everywhere. But as you use words like micro-aggressions we can safely assume you're the type of person who led to lists like this:

https://twitter.com/titaniamcgrath/status/128102398724248780...

Don't conflate woke identity politics with racism. They are fundamentally different. British people are right to reject your America-centric obsession with finding racism in everything, given the UK's excellent track record.

> Don't conflate woke identity politics with racism. They are fundamentally different. British people are right to reject your America-centric obsession with finding racism in everything, given the UK's excellent track record.

Again, this is what I mean by British people refusing to engage with my experiences as a brown person living in UK.

Building up a strawman, then assuming I'm part of that strawman, then dismissing it does no one any good.

In Primary school in UK I (and all the non-white) kids were segregated in seating. I was always assigned seating near other brown kids.

When out shopping with my parents, in smaller stores we were "stalked" to make sure we didn't steal anything. This did not happen to our white friends that we asked to keep an eye out for this behavior.

In school plays, the non-white kids were always assigned the side-roles and the "peasant" roles. E.g. I was assigned to be a "chimney cleaner", which involved the makeup people spreading black ink all over myface and essentially making me do blackface.

But sure, this is just woke politics and you know everything about our lives.

"micro-aggressions", lol... i know that argument...

By liberal standards, being asked what your accent is, becomes the equivalent of being beaten to death by the KKK. Stop wanting so hard to be a victim.

Have you considered asking what are the micro-aggressions instead of building up a strawman to fight it?

> the US is genuinely a country of immigrants [...] I don't get the impression people are looked down on because they are foreign, once actually on the ground.

Whilst that may be the personal impression of some, the harsh reality is that many immigrants in the US suffer severe discrimination. For instance, many parts of the country have significant pockets of anti-hispanic sentiment. This often spills over into outright violence - just look at the El Paso shooting in 2019[1].

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_El_Paso_shooting

> and London was by far better than most places

Anecdotal, but London is the only European capital city where I got shouted at on he street, in the middle of day, for being a foreigner. It happened about 10 years ago and actually the shouts of the two English young-ladies were directed at my (now) ex-wife, but I was still surprised by it. If it matters it happened in a posh-ish area of the city, around Kensington, I believe. As such the anti-foreigner mania that took over a great part of the British (and especially English) electorate a few years after that didn't surprise me.

Otherwise I found London a great place, the only real cosmopolitan city left on this continent together with Istanbul (I haven't visited Moscow yet, to be honest), otherwise everything else seems rather stale (Vienna) or too self-absorbed to care about anything else outside of it (definitely Paris, maybe also Rome).

I think Brussels is a real cosmopolitan city, not the size of London, but still. Lively even in winter. And Berlin is as well, but not really the same kind of cosmopolitan (i'd assume most people here wouldn't really like this kind of cosmopolitan). Lille used to be too, though a bit stale, i don't know if it has changed.

> I don't get the impression people are looked down on because they are foreign

In USA? It just depends how rich you are. Does that make things better?

If I'm from the Republic of South Abroadia, and getting a taxi in Silicon Valley, will I hear a rant about immigrants? Will I get funny looks etc?

Maybe yes, I'm only taking about my impressions, I never worked in the US. Certainly doesn't seem to project that image, to me.

well, at least you can change how rich you are. You cannot change what race you are.

As an alternate data point, my partner is a non-EU immigrant living in the UK. The immigration process was relatively straightforward, visa renewal was easy and she's rarely felt any hostility, unwelcoming or anyone looking down on her for being foreign.

We do live in London, however my family are from elsewhere so we've spent plenty of time in other parts.

Surveys generally say the UK and US attitude to immigrants is pretty similar, for example [1].

I'm not a fan of Brexit and wish it hadn't happened, but on the other hand I feel like the idea that there's been a huge anti-immigration shift in the UK to be exaggerated. If anything, our attitudes towards immigration have continued their trend of softening since the vote.

Most other countries around the world get to apply discretion over which immigrants can settle there - why is it wrong if the UK also gets to do that? The upset seems to be mostly from rich western EU citizens, bothered that they are no longer an exception and are now treated exactly as any other country. Many of our ethnically Indian citizens, for example, voted for Brexit.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/03/14/around-the-wor...

I talk to my children in Polish. Almost never before Brexit would random people ask me where I'm from or what language I'm speaking. Now it's all the time, and often with a gentle roll of the eyes afterwards. We don't live in London btw.

I'd never go as far as saying it's terrible, but it's markedly different than it was.

Obviously I won't dispute your experience, and I'm sad that you have to go through that. It's never something we've experienced in any part of the UK so far, and we often speak in non-English (well, me not very well - as a typical British person, English is my only fluent language).

However, I should add that when I was growing up 20+ years ago (also not in London), this kind of thing was much more common. Indeed, it was quite a lot worse. A roll of the eyes was probably the best you could expect. Some of the more unsavoury characters would walk around at night looking for members of particular immigrant groups to beat up, and people would talk about this as if it was perfectly normal and fine.

Thankfully, that is no longer remotely acceptable. The long term trend has been greatly softening attitudes towards immigration. Perhaps the divisive Brexit campaign has knocked it back a bit, but when I compare us now to even 10-15 years ago, it still feels like we're practically a different country to how we were when I grew up.

> The long term trend has been greatly softening attitudes towards immigration.

I strongly dispute this. The UK has anything but a softened attitude towards immigration in recent years. It was bad enough that it made me leave because I felt the longer term trend is not going to be good for me and my family and I'm a white European. You might not see it as much if you're not directly affected, but the discourse on the news and social media in the UK has degraded greatly since Brexit and that even happens on some rural public busses now.

I think the UK both wants to think of itself as world open, but a huge part of the population does not like it. Now it's conflicted of what it wants as a country.

> I think the UK both wants to think of itself as world open, but a huge part of the population does not like it. Now it's conflicted of what it wants as a country.

Yes isn't it great that we live in a democracy, and have the population decide which direction they would like the country to go in.

Unfortunately you only have one country and it hosts a population that’s split right in the middle on that issue.

Sure, but as far as I understand democracy, for it to really work you need well informed citizens. I would say that metric isn't trending up in most countries on Earth at this moment.

Agreed, but hasn't that always been the case? I'm not sure a better solution exists either. Perhaps a series of questions before you're allowed to vote that tests your understanding of the principles of the choices you are voting for?

Also I'm guessing you are suggesting that voters who voted leave where uniformed? (Please correct me if I'm wrong). I still don't believe that to be the case. The run up to the election there was wall-to-wall coverage on the subject across TV, radio and the internet.

Well, again, it's hardly a big burden on me. It's the change I'm remarking on, not some absolute levels of hostility.

But for record, this experience is from benign and safe environments - playgrounds in nice part of the city, National Trust parks etc. I have certainly felt at times it is best not to appear "foreign" in less polished places, and probably wouldn't attract attention to being from Poland.

Funny story (in hindsight), from way back when - ironically before the word "Brexit" even existed. Around 2006 or 2007, I was (almost) mugged at knifepoint in South London. The muggers realised I'm not local, and asked me where I'm from. For whatever reason, I said "Czechoslovakia" - a country that hadn't existed for O(15 years). The muggers saw my old tattered phone and finally let me go, saying they were just messing. I sometimes wonder how that could have gone had I said I'm from Poland.

> My impression is that another upside Silicon Valley has over the UK is that the US is genuinely a country of immigrants.

Have you ever tried applying for a US Visa? The process makes the complaints of the author in this article look like a joke.

I think this is OP's point... Bureaucratic nastiness is only half the game.

Kudos for having managed this: you just added a word to my vocabulary! "Brexitania" sounds perfect, also more precise than the erstwhile "little England"!

I don’t understand the entitlement people from other countries feel to live in my country. I don’t feel the same entitlement to live in their country.

Also, just because they are rich or can start a tech company doesn’t make them any more entitled to live wherever they want any more than anyone else.

Just a very bizarre stance IMO and it seems one-sided.

People from other EU countries were entitled to live in your (UK) country. Suddenly taking that right away did upend people lives.

True, but article 50 has always been part of the Treaty on European Union (TEU).

So EU citizen moving to the UK must have known on the day they decided to migrate that their entitlement to live in the UK was always subject to this caveat.

It may suck, but it was never an right that could never be revoked.

I think most EU citizens thought it was about as likely as California seceding the US.

Article 50 was only added in 2009.

The life of EU citizens in the UK was not upended.

For people who already qualified for permanent residence (i.e. who had been working in the UK for 5 years) nothing changed.

For people who were in the UK for less than 5 years the automatic right to stay disappeared by in reality I believe that they were given so-called "pre-settled status" until they reach the 5 year mark and can stay as long as they want, from what I understand.

Personally I like have proof of things so I had applied for proof of permanent residence (under EU law) before the UK actually left the EU (there was a gap of several years to do so after the referendum), which was quite straightforward, so moving to the new "settled status" only took a few minutes online.

Of course, EU citizens who have been in the UK for 6+ years and have permanent residence can also apply for citizenship and forget about all of this altogether.

A lot of British people living in Spain certainly have expressed a similar entitlement. And many of them voted for Brexit.

That subset of British people similarly have a bizarre position IMO. Entitlement to live in a foreign country is misplaced regardless of your country of origin. The ability to live in another country has always been at the sole discretion of that country’s government.

A dice is rolled and you're born in the world in some country, borders drawn on a map centuries ago by a person from another country. A world sliced and diced by imaginary lines, making groups out of people that in the best case share some common "culture". You are saying that in this world, everyone needs to live in the little territory that they were born?

> You are saying that in this world, everyone needs to live in the little territory that they were born?

Of course not. I'm saying that in this world you are not entitled to live in other people's territory and you must first gain their permission to live in their territory. If you are able to make the prerequisite arrangements you should be free to live wherever you want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com