Can you expand on that? Who is doing the exploiting and how are they doing it?
>This group is now starting to wake up to its plight and voting anti immigrant and against traditional labour parties which have been co opted by the progressive university elite.
That's a bit of a stretch to think universities are progressive or that they're the ones calling the shots politically. The multi millionaire oligarchs pushing this and funding anti immigrant AstroTurf groups and running the usual PR firehose of BS are of course somehow "not elite" as ever.
This isn't a requirement, this is a bad choice that one can make. There's no benefit in favoring highly-skilled workers other than that these are the workers that middle-class professionals associate with. The only reason IMO to favor highly-skilled workers in specific fields is to break professional cartels; you don't even have to favor them, just remove the artificial barriers to their employment that have been institutionalized.
> That's a bit of a stretch to think universities are progressive or that they're the ones calling the shots politically.
It's just sucker right-wing pseudo-populism financed by the same people who employ 99.9% of illegal immigrants.
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edit: those people would love to make the process of legal immigration so onerous that only they themselves could navigate it easily, to make laws against illegal immigration so draconian that every undocumented worker was living in constant fear, and to route all enforcement of those laws through an regulatory agency that they have completely captured.
There, I fixed it for you. In a purely globally democratized and free market, wages would be perfectly aligned to market rates, but this isn't reality. In other words, your labor supply is artificially fixed to birth rates in that sovereignty.
The overall point is anyway moot because you could also make an argument that says "because we're not having enough babies and therefore labor is relatively short from previous decades, wages are artificially high...maybe we should create policies to increase birth rates?".
Point is - trying to correlate wages and immigration dynamics is a fool's errand. IMHO, immigration policies need to be considered from an overall market perspective and not an individual wage one. i.e. does immigration provide a net benefit to the economy and that sovereign society? Given how much illegal immigration is used in our food system in the US to keep consumer prices low, I think Americans equivocally believe some level of immigration is necessary to generate wealth for the middle class.
But, yes, pricing is a useful discovery and market making mechanism. If I want a personal chef but I'm only willing to pay $2/hour in the US for such a service, I should and will have to deal with cooking my own meals or otherwise find some way to obtain food that doesn't have as large a labor component as personal service does.