Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobz1000 | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of anger in the UK because their (our) environment and life conditions are measurably worse than in the past (even 10 years ago). This anger is masterfully directed (by political orgs but not the actual government) against immigrants, drug addicts, and other groups whose ousting is positioned as an "easy fix" to these problems. So there's not much meaningful action taken against the actual perpetrators.

View on HN

Immigration is one of the primary factors in the decrease of life quality in the UK. The only mistake here is that being angry with the immigrants isn't going to change immigration policy.

The UK population and total GDP has gone up, whereas GDP per person has gone down or stayed flat.

The Boris Wave has been the biggest adverse event to the UK since OPEC Oil crisis.

There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.

Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.

>> There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.

It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up. Good luck proving your Brexit counterfactual.

>>Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.

When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true. Also, given that you can get a "skilled worker" visa for working in a kebab shop or a corner store [1], "skilled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjdg4nvz5mro

> When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true

An immigrant cannot bring an extended family - only a spouse and children (younger 18). And they are not eligible for benefits so have no impact on the budget. Skilled visa is abused (to bring relatively low skilled workers) but that's not too common and they still pay taxes, just less than someone working at Google.

I recommend to listed to this podcast (or read transcript) it's not trying to defend immigration at all but di-spells lots of myths about economical impact of immigration: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-does-immigration-affect-publ...

Yeah, but then their children are encouraged/forced to marry cousins.

The major point, though, is that countries are not economic units, and are closer to families than they are companies.

Whose "their" children, and in what sense is cousin marriage connected to your (entirely false) claim about extended families?

LOL. Yes, let's pretend we can't parse English sentences. OK.

No, let's just spell out directly what you're saying (and your incorrect assumptions) instead of dog-whistling.

There's a minimum salary attached to that visa, which the article failed to mention. I very much doubt a kebab shop will hire someone for £45k+.

45 is not far from an average chef salary in London.

That article is largely not about London and not about average chefs though.

> It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up

1. I did check graphs and see low correlation - GDP pp dipped after GFC (2008 crisis) then again around Brexit referendum and started to recover 2021 - around the start of the Boris wave. 2. Even if we had a correlation it doesn't imply causation especially given multiple factors battered the economy around the same time - Brexit, COVID (which had delayed and lasting impact) and Russian-Ukrainian war.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com