Hacker News Reader

> I had assumed that the UK was broadly in consensus with wanting less of it.

UK voters were [1], but their rulers didn't listen.

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/do-brits-think...

Seems to be mostly old people and leave voters when you look at the breakdowns.

The question is did they arrive at these conclusions ("immigrants are bad, Brexit is good") naturally or through decades of propaganda.

And why did one of their votes make their other key concern worse?

> Seems to be mostly old people

In every single age group, more people think immigration is too high than about right or too low. Significantly more. Using latest poll from 24th March, 2025:

18-24 years: Immigration is: too high: 42%, about right + too low: 35%

25-49 years: Immigration is: too high: 59%, about right + too low: 23%

50-64 years: Immigration is: too high: 79%, about right + too low: 14%

65+ years: Immigration is: too high: 85%, about right + too low: 12%

And is the government that is going against the wishes of its populace by implementing ever greater mass immigration, funding propaganda against immigration?

As for why Brexit 'caused' increased immigration - you think it is a simple cause-and-effect? Or could it be that there is a government in the way, that enacts immigration policy independently of EU membership?

The graph is falling gently till about 2021, when free movement with the EU ended, and then rises sharply.

At that low point it's only retired ages and up that are suggesting it is too high. At the previous high point the crossover seems to be in the thirties.

(Also, Conservatives are another high scoring group, the question asks about 10 years before and starts in 2019 so basically covers the last run of conservative government)

Do you have a source for this poll you've referenced? The latest yougov poll i can find (from 2023) has significantly different results -- more under 50s responded don't know about immigration levels versus a skew towards too high in the 50+ population.

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Internal_Imm...

if the numbers have shifted over time, that's fine. but your 'latest poll' could be a daily mail phone in for all i know.

The link is a couple of comments up this chain.

Interestingly your link, which I think is part of the same survey series breaks it down into EU and non-EU immigration, and the latter has about a 10-30 point worse score, which can probably explain the scores for generic immigration getting worse immediately after the EU immigration got curtailed.

And again, it's the Old/Conservative/Brexit voters who are on the "angrier about non-EU immigration" end of that range. They just keep shooting themselves in the foot.

It's a stupid question, the whole point of this article is to point out it's not in our control. Sure it's technically in our control but in reality most of us don't seem interested in filling all the necessary jobs to run our own society. We tried it, everything started falling apart, and we fell back on immigration again.

A better question would be, would you be willing to become a lorry driver or a cleaner etc to reduce immigration. Then vote with a job application, you'd get a totally different result that reflects economic reality. If you don't work by choice you don't get a vote (beggers can't be choosers), if you have a fancy job you have a choice you probably won't take. If pensioners don't like it they should complain to their grandkids to go be lorry drivers.

If you frame the Moon as a villain and ask if we should remove it, of course people will say yes. Doesn't make it any less nonsensical though.

I seem to remember that when asked about immigration to their local area, majorities almost everywhere in the UK thought it was at the right level, but the same people thought it was too high UK-wide. The difference implies that the voters didn't have a coherent opinion about what the right level is/was.

When you misdiagnose a problem (or make one up for political purposes), the solution you come up with invariably doesn't solve the problem and most often makes the situation worse.

> This is definitely the biggest surprise for me about Brexit.

It shouldn’t have. I remember reading articles writing that brexit would just shift the immigration from Eastern Europe (mostly poles) to commonwealth countries like India and Pakistan.

I know that many people from such countries were in favour of Brexit for exactly that reason, and I remember people a the time saying they "just" wanted to change where migrants came from and pick only the best[0] — so if this had been simply a change to the national origins of immigrants, that would not have been a surprise.

The surprise is immigration went up, given so many spoke and wrote so vocally and emotionally during the campaign as if immigration was an existential threat.

Myself, I did the opposite and emigrated: I figured that politicians who thought Brexit was a good thing to campaign for wouldn't be ones I'd like to live under — Johnson demonstrated I was correct.

[0] as if any country can do that. Then as now, and in many countries not just the UK, there's a lot of people who assume their own country is automatically amazing and everyone would move there immediately if allowed.

The Establishment want cheap labour and ”diversity" helps keep the lower classes divided against each other.

Immigration also creates demand for the asset owning classes (housing).

Reactionary politics aren't known for their well-thought-out and considered policy ideas. You're applying logic to what is largely an emotional topic for people, no matter how many times they say shit like "facts don't care about your feelings," their policies are almost in whole, feelings, and the subject of immigration is a great example.

They're furious about illegal immigrants taking jobs from Americans, and they just flatly are not. The jobs don't pay enough for Americans to want them. This is demonstrated every time there's a crackdown on it and farmers in the south west have fields full of rotting crops that won't get harvested because the Americans who could do that job just... won't.

They're also furious about illegal immigrants getting access to government services while not paying taxes, which is, in the vast majority of cases, a double-falsehood. Not only do illegal immigrants regularly pay taxes (the IRS has specific sections of the forms specifically for non-citizens) but they are in fact completely unable to access virtually any government services, including those that one can make a solid case they deserve, like access to worker's rights protections/organizations, and the ability to go to the police when they're victims of crimes, which they are disproportionately to the rest of the population, again, because criminals know they can't go to the cops.

> And conversely, I wonder what will happen if and when we finally do get useful humanoid robots.

I mean, even the cheapest number Elon's thrown out for his AI-powered humanoid robot (which I can't stress enough, does not exist in any meaningful way relative to what he is selling it but nevertheless) puts it at costing years of what an immigrant does to perform the work, and that's not even going into the fact that having them out in fields vs. climate controlled warehouses is likely going to increase the amount of maintenance needed, if they could manage it at all without just falling directly over. And there are energy concerns too, you'd almost need a mobile charging station for agricultural applications of them.

To be honest if you were setting out to automate the picking of crops that thus far have not been mechanized, you'd probably be better off building a large machine that can move over several rows at a time and have a dozen arms underneath it that do the actual picking, versus a bunch of humanoid bots. The human form is exceptional don't get me wrong, but translating it to machinery has been one of the greatest fixations of our species since robotics of any sort came into being, and we still haven't really managed it. It must be pretty fucking hard to pull off.

> You're applying logic to what is largely an emotional topic for people, no matter how many times they say shit like "facts don't care about your feelings," their policies are almost in whole, feelings, and the subject of immigration is a great example.

Kinda the opposite, I'm surprised that the facts (needing immigrants) are overriding the extremely apparent emotion.

> I mean, even the cheapest number Elon's thrown out for his AI-powered humanoid robot (which I can't stress enough, does not exist in any meaningful way relative to what he is selling it but nevertheless) puts it at costing years of what an immigrant does to perform the work, and that's not even going into the fact that having them out in fields vs. climate controlled warehouses is likely going to increase the amount of maintenance needed, if they could manage it at all without just falling directly over. And there are energy concerns too, you'd almost need a mobile charging station for agricultural applications of them.

Aye, but I don't actually mean Tesla's Optimus[0] — I was thinking more like Unitree's G1[1], Agility's Digit[2], or Figure's… whatever they'll be called when they stop using version numbers as product names[3].

The power limits are indeed a huge concern if this were to all happen in the next few years — the global electricity supply is only about 250 watts per capita, and even if we maintain the current aggressively rapid growth of renewables, I suspect that we'll be constrained by electrical capacity until 2032 at the earliest[4], even if absolutely every technical challenge in engineering is met.

("Without falling over" is probably much easier with a human remote controlling them).

[0] Optimus would have been a more impressive demo if it had been sold as remote control rather than AI: the only thing Tesla actually demonstrated that would have been an interesting AI breakthrough would have been correctly parsing speech in an unconstrained environment, everything else was meh and that they even implied it was AI suggests that they're not even sufficiently aware of the state of the art to pull off a smoke-and-mirrors trick.

[1] https://shop.unitree.com/en-de/products/unitree-g1

[2] https://www.agilityrobotics.com/get-started

[3] https://www.figure.ai/about-us

[4] 2032 is when PV and wind roughly equal current global electricity consumption