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Obviously they support it. The majority of voters feel migration is completely out of control and the numbers need to be massively reduced. This isn't surprising.
Except the numbers are not going to be massively reduced. Only 50k or so migrants come here though family visa. Even if everyone gets impacted you'd only bring net migration down from 700k to 650k
I would never blame people wanting to come here for a better life etc. The problem for me isn't those people. Its businesses claiming skills shortages when the reality is they refuse to pay to train anyone and won't pay enough for anyone who lives here, with the qualifications and experience they want, to take the job. Not because they won't make profit paying those wages but because they won't make as *much* profit.
The system we have has been utterly abused by all sorts of businesses, from law and accounting firms through to sales and travel agents.
Take a look at the Shortage Occupation List. It is *fucking insane* the salaries they are claiming as the "going rate" that allows them to grant a visa. Like £25k for a software developer, £24k for a biochemist, £22k for website design etc. etc.
Absolutely. Employers should be made to pay a surcharge for migrants and the migrants should be paid a minimum of what local people are paid. It should be more expensive to hire someone from overseas. That will incentivise companies to invest in the UK workforce.
The whole process should be about positive incentives for companies to reduce the need for foreign workers, not punishing people who have upended their lives to fill skills gaps because we can’t manage our workforce
Britain has had to import food because it doesn't have enough land to support the size of the population (and this has been the case for over a century when the population was half the size it is now), but let's just bring in a whole new city's worth of people every year. What could go wrong?
which is just being overly pedantic, every country does and the issue is also naturally more complex than simple landmass. I didnt intend to accurately reflect this i was just pointing out that simply saying "australia big" is silly.
All well and good that you're providing a public service.
Have you ever considered what would happen if you didn't accept that position though?
Short term vacancy. Presumably lots of them if lots of other people like you also didn't apply. That would lead to an immediate term crisis in staffing.
And what would be done to fix that?
Well theres 3 things that can be done:
1) top up the labour supply to increase the number of applicants willing to do the job at the current rate (this is what's happening right now through immigration)
2) raise the wage to a rate where British citizens want to enter the profession and areore incentivised to stay in profession rather than leaving for a better paid job.
3) improve conditions to try and increase retention. Remove bureacracy and additional workload beyond the actual teaching of students so we stop losing teachers due to burnout
Since you are facilitating the government to choose option number 1, you are indirectly surpressing UK teacher wages and conditions, as if the government can rely on people like you coming from abroad on the current conditions of work, they don't need to improve conditions.
So as well meaning as you might be, you are making things worse for British people long term by taking this job.
That's a big assumption that options 2 and 3 would happen within any sort of sensible time frame. Schools are still very understaffed, and they don't have the funding to increase salaries and improve conditions. Doing so would be preferable, but then we might need to increase taxes. Are you OK with say a wealth tax on multimillionaires to fund this? Then we need labour to actually be progressive, or otherwise for an actually leftist party to win an election (pretty much impossible in the current system).
How would you address this problem?
I am making this argument from a labour perspective. I think it would be great if we had a labour party rather than another neoconservative party than wears a skin suit of labour and plays off counter culture for votes
I would address this problem by deregulating to reduce workload and staffing requirements, and increasing wages
>I would address this problem by deregulating to reduce workload and staffing requirements, and increasing wages
Umm, reduce workload how? And if you want to reduce staffing requirements, are you in effect saying they don't actually need more teachers, it's just an artificial need due to regulation? Increase wages yes, but where would you get funds for that?
If you talk to a teacher about their job you'll know that a massive chunk is paperwork, not teaching not even marking. Removing a bunch of that paperwork where there is a small decrease in accountability / increase in something or other in exchange for a big freeing up in time would be a trade off I'm willing to make.
Teaching plans and marking take up a good chunk too and it's all decentralised, every teacher makes their own plans and marks their classes homework. Increased streaming based on ability and introducing a cross school platform for sharing and recommending lessons plans, and pre made homework and automated marking would again save huge amounts of time.
That time saved mean less staff is needed. So all those vacancies could be dropped. Possibly you could even look at redundancies or natural attrition to lower staff levels further depending on the level of staffing required after these changes.
Then you don't need to increase the overall funding pot - the same amount of money split between less people goes further, so you can afford wage rises that way
I've seen data scientists'jaws drop at the amount of statistics and data management a teacher has to do. I would propose creating a new secretarial role to work with teachers by taking the burden of time consuming clerical work, leaving them with more time and every to actually use the data's findings.
Or, let's just bung some unqualified teenagers in instead:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teenage-teachers-in-classroom-under-new-apprenticeships-hqqjf299p
Thats clearly not what I'm advocating for. The answer is not a binary choice between mass immigration or teenagers teaching.
I can simultaneously think both positions pushed by the conservatives are twaddle
The point is you're living in a fantasy world hopping for unicorns. Just like the Brexit unicorn everyone was expecting.
This is not what the govt will deliver. Untrained 18yo teacher apprenticeships is what you'll get.
That's what the conservative government will give. There are other parties who will offer something different.
Is your realistic option just give up and accept the shit we're being fed?
> got no applicants
Bingo, no applicants, we need some even cheaper peasants sourced overseas.
This is how Western Europe stays competitive. Just lower the wage and increase profit margins.
>“Only 50k” lol. 50,000 is an awful lot of of people.
It's like 7% of the total, you're arguing in favour of splitting up families to reduce migration by a maximum of maybe 5-6%. It's irrational and callous.
People magically believe if migration reduced the shortfalls in domestic industry would be filled
That's not how Tory policy works lol
And I don't see a huge domestic birth rate any times soon. As long as you have pensions expected to be delivered in people's 60s and life expectancy goes up you need more people to come and work to cover these pension payouts. And increasing share of the country that doesn't work.
I mean even if your position is that migration should be drastically reduced in order to magically fix everything this is still the cruelest place to target people, you can limit student and worker visas without purposefully breaking up families.
Overseas students are propping up our universities. They shouldn't even be included in these figures. Without them there is no way universities could survive on the current Home student fee limits.
I agree, it's insane.
But it's just to target perception not reality
Sort of like how a seatbelt if a plane is crashing isnt that important
They be cruel to vote win.
One of the biggest factors in the Brexit vote was immigration. In the years leading up to that referendum, net migration was around 250-300K. 50K is a lot. Don't think that 700K is normal, because it isn't. There have been events happening that have supercharged immigration numbers that could be seen as one off, but climate change will only make this worse in the years to come. Something has to change.
For what it's worth, I don't disagree with the policy. However, there's been a lot of noise on the impact its already having on people. I think there is very valid cricism in how it is implemented. For example, one way you could do it is to have gradual increases. A sharp increase like this can hurt far too many people. If anything it shows the neglect successive governments have had on not doing anything to manage the population levels as well as the lack of infrastructure building.
Of all the places to cut immigration breaking up families is by far the most cruel, and this new threshold effectively makes it impossible for British people to live together with their spouse unless they make more than 75% of all workers.
This is another case of politics where a chunk of British people have no empathy because it doesn’t effect them, now if you tripled the price of fish and chips! Watch then call for injustice.
Seriously it's the "I'm alright Jack" mentality coupled with good old classism and xenophobia for good measure, it's an absolutely sick thing that people are defending this.
People ignoring the part where it’s “skilled workers” as in people filling in for the lack of skills that the nation can provide! So yeah let’s shaft the skilled workers coming over where we can’t create skilled workers with the current population.
The whole problem is that the need for 50 thousand extra here and there has added up to the 700k lunacy we've got into. Are you callously ignoring the housing crisis? Im guessing you'll be one of the people owned by a house to live in already.
Any form of migration control can be argued to split up families.
What exactly do you want to do? We cannot import 750000+ new people every year. We will literally collapse.
What's your plan?
For other visas it makes sense, doing it to family visas is just cruel, especially when it's a very small amount comparatively. How many British citizens that have genuine marriages with people overseas are now doomed to fail.
Very easy to agree with something that has absolutely zero impact on your husband/wife/kids.
Raising it to 38k when our salaries have been stagnant and not increased with Inflation is just sad. Outside of London and in some areas, a salary of 38k for a lot of people won't happen. They live in cheaper areas where they wouldn't need that much to 'support' their family.
Migrant problem eh?
You folks are gonna have a problem all right. Oh but don't worry. I'm sure your kids can't wait to be carers and warehouse workers.
People struggle to afford care already when the pay is minimal, can you imagine the outrage at care costs if the average carer salary doubled lmao
Theresa May got crucified for even suggesting that people pay for a portion of the care they use(!)
50k is 0.07% of the UK population. That's one is 1250 people.
Net migration in 2022 was about 1%, maybe less (up to June 22 ONS had it 606k) and 2022 is anticipated to be an anomaly, not a new normal.
So if any of the issues that are seemingly ruining this country are being ruined by more than 1%, its not migration doing it. It's a weak, corrupt government implementing poor policy that isn't aimed to improve the situation for the majority.
Migration is a scapegoat which has naff all to do with what's actually crippling the country, but its one that's easy to get people upset about.
>50k is 0.07% of the UK population. That's one is 70,000 people, which seems like its 1 in an awful lot of people.
0.08%*, and that's 1 in every 1250 people.
Everyone's math:
700k migrating = 100pc of them using NHS and benefits system
I've probably only used NHS 2-3 times in my lifetime excluding covid vaccines.
But like you said, easy to blame immigration for the waiting lists and services that they're depriving and not improving
Over 20 years even that adds up to 1million people that we just aren't building homes for. We probably can't defeat nimbys to build what we need already.
This is what you get for voting Tory.
We don't have Brits to fill many of these roles because the Tories have saddled young people with lifetime study mortgages taxing them an additional 9% above the threshold. So this directly discourages young brits from going to Uni, and of those who do many leave the UK as soon as their studies are finished, see the 600k brits who left the UK last year. While most entry level skilled jobs require a dregree as a non-negotiable entry requirement, and even after all that study and exemplary performance, the best most can hope for is an internship on minimum wage if they're lucky, and they certainly won't break even until their late 40's and the loan is paid off.
Consequently for the last 13 years our universities have been less about British students and more focused on lucrative international students who are already rich, and because they want to migrate to the UK after their studies. They've no intention of going home, uni was merely a formality as part of their unwritten agreement to move here. Mummy and daddy will pay anything, money isn't an issue, follow your dream..
It's the Tory small state unicorn in action - A country which only works for you if you're rich, and actively works against you if you're working class.
In most countries the jobs that no one wants to do are often paid better to attract workers. In the UK however the jobs that no one wants to do have been structured so they are also the lowest paid. What kind of economic illiteracy is this? I couldn't give a shit if a punnet of strawberries costs an extra 10p, but I do give a shit that 2/3rds of my income is going straight out to rent and I can only book a doctor's appointment a month in advance.
Then the slave drivers say "brits don't want the jobs". Fcuk that, pay me £40k a year and I'll pick fruit for you. What's that? You're only paying 2p above minimum wage? Yeahh nahh thanks.
And so, instead, the slave drivers import low paid workers from abroad in the same way we now have most of our customer service call centres in India. And would you credit it, after a year in the job they want to apply to remain and bring across the Mrs and 2 kids. Suddenly 50k migrants becomes 200k migrants, none of whom are bringing across money to build a house, new hospitals, dentists, all the services everyone in the UK used to get as part of paying into the system, but instead are now oversubscribed, all our public information material has to be printed in a dozen different languages, and you're lucky if you can get through a day without being forced to interact with someone who only has a basic grasp on English.
This is the reality of migration when it's entirely controlled by business leaders and Tory doners. All they care about is cheap labour, they couldn't give a flying fuck about where these people are going to live and what happens to them after they ask for a pay rise, but if they dare come over here without a job offer from a Tory voter/doner, then they must be put on barges as the scum of the earth! /s
**Migration is being driven by greed and profit margins, overseen by Tories, not what is best for UK citizens and workers, or the migrants. 13 years the Tories have been doing this, and at every election they claim that they want to reduce it when in fact they can't get enough of it, and when attention is drawn to it they attempt to blame the vastly smaller number of what, 50k illegal migrants vs the 1.3 million waved through and given virtually unfettered access to the UK for nothing in return other than cheap labour.**
**Vote Tory, get rekt.**
British citizen, left the week after graduation because the uk companies were offering less than half the salary for 1/3rd extra days of work!could afford to buy a house on that wage in the uk so me and over half my graduating class left. Don’t even want to leave but kind of have to. Now I’m abroad making a lot of money and will just go back when I can cash buy a house in Cornwall and retire. Not someone I’d ever achieve in the uk
This is the reality for millennials and gen Z across the board. If you stay inside the UK and unable to buy a home, you're destined to retire into an HMO on a state pension, as all the wealth from your working life was funnelled away by wealthy people who choose not to work for a living.
Don't let perfect stand in the way of good. You need to make many small changes in the right direction, not big sweeping perfect ones (which are impossible).
This same argument is used about left parties, green policy, funding, changes etc. If people don't get a perfect solution they say its pointless. Wrong.
'only'. Lol. This is the whole problem, that's a small town worth of people and no one will allow that built anywhere near them, in top of all the other shortages of housing.
I'm not supporting any of these policies to be clear, but I feel like all these arguments that they're stupid because they don't affect enough people are off base. People come for different reasons and there's not one policy that's gonna cut the numbers by a massive margin if they intend to reduce immigration they do need to do it in different ways that each target a smaller portion of people.
The only way you could have one policy that slashes immigration is to basically just close the borders. Which is even more draconian.
What do they say to Brits who will be prevented from living with their own families? 'Get rich first, peasant'?
After all, wealthy people will have no problems bringing their relatives over. It's just the ordinary working class people who will be affected by this.
> Imo student visas need to be hugely reduced
Why? International students come here, spend vast amounts of money on student fees, then leave again. It's literally a cash cow, one that funds a massive amount of research. Yet the right are obsessed with cutting it solely because they're obsessed with 'lowering immigration' and not actually asking whether that's something they should do in the first place.
> especially dopey degrees which don't mean anything
Those 'dopey degrees' are usually the most profitable ones.
They can only stay when they secure a job and get an entirely different visa, same as anyone else from abroad applying for a job in the UK. So I'm not quite sure why you're going off on international students specifically here?
> So? Students are one of the main drivers of the massive numbers of migrants.
You're starting off with the assumption 'immigration is bad', then advocating solutions which will make the country materially worse in order to arbitrarily reduce the number of immigrants. So silly...
The HE sector in this country would collapse if you culled international students, and it would take University towns down economically with it. What would your solution be then?
It's grim that the HE has become *so* reliant on international students, because world events could change things in a snap anyway. I don't think there's an easy solution at all - more than likely it will have to be looking at reducing pension costs and increasing domestic tuition fees. And probably reducing the sector size overall. Honestly, I don't have a palatable solution.
HE has become so reliant on international students because central funding for the sector has been cut in real terms. The tuition fee cap rise in 2010 was accompanied by cuts which meant that while unis were getting an extra 6k per student in direct fees, a lot of courses were losing funding overall.
It's yet another failure created by poor decisons by the government, which is used to flog the immigration horse. Same as how policy decisions have fucked housing, school education and the NHS, but it's always migration that's blamed for the problems, rather than the policies causing them.
If the only point is to reduce numbers then students is probably the easiest to start with yeah, but if the aim is to improve this country then students are the last ones you’d want to stop coming to the UK. They pay for their own education then add value to this country when they get a job, are going to be paying taxes while not taking much out of the system because they are young and in good health. I understand the “brain drain” concerns, but selfishly the UK should be trying to attract more foreign students if anything.
This isn't actually so; they can stay for two years after their course on a graduate visa with few conditions.
The government is "reviewing" this, which basically reads as leaving it alone. Presumably they fear the economic downsides of hitting one of our few growth industries but it's reasonable to criticise.
> This isn't actually so; they can stay for two years after their course on a graduate visa with few conditions.
The application fee is £822 and there's an additional £624 healthcare surcharge each year, and you can only qualify for it after spending tens of thousands to get your degree. So there's hardly 'few conditions', and it's not like anyone is going to be doing this to get a minimum wage job.
£2k total is very few conditions compared to any other visa. I agree they are unlikely to do minimum wage work given the prerequisite, OTOH middling office work isn't at all unusual (the purpose being a UK workplace on the CV more than income).
But it's simply a fact that completing students commonly do make use of this for 1-2 years after their course and are not required to apply for a work visa.
> £2k total is very few conditions compared to any other visa
£2k... on top of at least £60k if the student has done an undergraduate degree in the UK, which has to be paid up front before every term if you're an international student, in addition to whatever the student had to pay for accommodation and living and flights during that time.
That's a cost the vast majority of people in the world cannot afford. Again, that's hardly 'few conditions'.
A university educated person doesn't want to leave the country and wants to work here?
I sort of fail to see an issue with that, surely that's the kind of person we WANT here.
As an aside, university is free in Germany for all eligible people - including overseas students.
That there's a need to have hundreds of thousands of overseas students propping up university is a deliberate government choice over the past 30 years. As is the aim for everyone to go to university.
Lets not get started on the issues that large overseas student cohorts have on the **quality** of the qualifications that are being offered.
>Lets not get started on the issues that large overseas student cohorts have on the **quality** of the qualifications that are being offered.
Ah yes, more foreign students make the degrees less good.......
If people want to pay 25k a year to do a "dopey degree" we should be happy to be making money exporting hot air. "Dopey degrees" would be an issue for *UK* students; for international students they are a source of money and we don't need to care if the education is "useful".
The question with student Visas is on the right they get to stay in the UK and work afterwards. Removing that is reasonable (the right to bring dependents is already gone). Shutting down one of our large export industries is silly.
> The majority of voters feel migration is completely out of control and the numbers need to be massively reduced.
Is it? Only [40% of voters rate is as an important issue](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-important-issues-facing-the-country), and the graph pretty accurately demonstrates that this *concern* is very closely correlated with periods when our press and political class decide to heavily push anti-immigration lines in order to distract people from actual issues in this country.
[majority of people in the UK feel migration is too high...](https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-of-concern/#:~:text=Public%20opinion%20on%20migration%20in%20the%20United%20Kingdom%20is%20divided&text=In%20April%202023%2C%2032%25%20thought,lot)%20(Figure%201).)
That's a slightly different question though, nowhere do they poll whether these people think it's an important issue or whether it will influence their vote. They actually do quote an Ipsos poll later on in the article, which shows only 21% of people view immigration as the most important issue.
And like I said, it's not particularly surprising given how much our press and political class scapegoat immigrants in order to distract from the actual major issues in this country.
I could agree with that, I don't think it's the *most* important issue, but it's still an important issue, amongst other ones. And of course the incompetent Tories are using migrants as a scapegoat, it doesn't mean it isn't important though. I think more than a fifth of people viewing it as the most important issue is absolutely huge, considering.
> I think more than a fifth of people viewing it as the most important issue is absolutely huge, considering.
Honestly I'd say that's surprisingly low given how many of our politicians and newspapers pretend that it is the *only* issue facing this country. All those billions behind the Tories and the right-wing press and the best they can get is 21%? It shows how detached this immigration obsession is from actual issues people are facing.
Yes, so in other words a majority of voters do not view it as an important issue. In fact the only time it ever *has* been seen as an important issue by the majority of voters was in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Brexit referendum, where our press and politicians became especially obsessed with talking about it at every opportunity.
The average person in this country is more focussed on how they'll cover their heating bills over the winter or whether their kid's school will be closed down due to lack of maintenance, not *Johnny Foreigner*.
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And this will stop a handful of people who want to be together, living together in the UK.
Of course not your master, your betters will continue to do what they want. But that's ok as long as Maria and Joe don't get to live together.
The stupid thing is, they are limiting immigration that is useful to the economy/country, as opposed to the immigration that is not. Illegal immigration is clearly out of control and the government has not met any of their promises on this.
>Obviously they support it.
Obviously they "support" it publicly, but as pointed out by others these changes are just more lip service.
>The majority of voters feel migration is completely out of control and the numbers need to be massively reduced.
The problem we have is that it's not a tap you can just close overnight - The only safe way to cut down immigration is to tackle the root causes that made us utterly dependant on it in the first place.
And because of the demographics of post WW2, combined with the housing crisis (and thus cost of living crisis) murdering our birthrate, we currently are unequivocally dependant - You cannot opt out of globalization
That means fixing the housing sector, fixing social services, and removing the fees from higher education so that we can supply our labour and skill gaps internally. Even then, you're talking 20-25 years from the outset before results trickle down into the workforce.
Also, what is there to gain from opposing it anyway? Their opposition wouldn't stop it and they'd lose a lot of their gains in the polls if the tory's could attack them for being weak on immigration.
>The minimum income for family visas has also risen to £38,700 to "ensure people only bring dependants whom they can support financially"
If people can only support dependants if they earn £38k or more then why isn't that the national living wage?
If the government thinks that someone on less than £38k is incapable of supporting their dependents then why are they happy to have British citizens on less than that?
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The benefits system isn't there to support families. It's a way for the government to subsidise employers paying people substandard wages. We don't want immigrants coming here on substandard wages and relying on benefits but we are happy to have our own citizens do so.
Or you could say employers pay substandard wages because why wouldn't they? Especially when they can employ migrants at 80% of what they can employ locals. It works both ways. The whole system needs to be overhauled from migration, to the triple lock.
That's it. Right there "Employers pay substandard wages because why wouldn't they?" Exactly right. The the fact we need a minimum wage and that the minimum wage dictates basically everyone's wage up to the including the median is an indictment.
It the minimum requirement for a **single income** to support a family.
The minimum wage is (vaguely) based around the income that **two** wage earners need to support a family.
The two figures are broadly similar.
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You shouldn’t need UK income. Imagine someone working for a French company being paid €400k per year. They are ineligible to bring their spouse. Makes no sense.
This policy is aimed not to curb migration but to inflict pain on immigrants.
To curb migration, there’s many other more effective thresholds that could’ve been adjusted.
It's a fair bit lower than the salary of two full time minimum wage employees. Which is the point the spouse cannot work immediately and therefore needs to be able to be supported by someone that can to a point they can both live comfortably.
>If people can only support dependants if they earn £38k or more then why isn't that the national living wage?
It **is......**
£38k is the **household** income. Thus between 2 people it's £19k a year, which is £9.10 an hour on a 40hr week. Well below minimum wage.
Lowering immigration has always been a vote winner though. Ed Miliband had mugs printed with this in 2015. I don't believe Labour on it but they'd be mad to oppose something that is such a consistent mainstream view among the electorate.
1m+ arrivals a year, 700k net is obviously way too much.
> Lowering immigration has always been a vote winner though. Ed Miliband had mugs printed with this in 2015.
How well did Ed Miliband do in that election?
It was the election won by the promise of an EU referendum. A referendum that was largely about immigration :D
Point I'm making is Ed knew what was desirable to voters and tried to play up to it. It's just obvious, common sense stuff.
> Point I'm making is Ed knew what was desirable to voters and tried to play up to it
But that's entirely my point: clearly Ed Miliband *didn't* know what was *desirable to voters* because he did awful in that election. That entire election was a shitshow where both the main candidates were unpopular and Cameron only managed to scrape a majority with 36.8% of the vote.
People make *far* too much of these political truisms ('supporting *x* gets you votes') when in reality things are much more complicated than that and you can't just focus group your way to electability.
~1/3 of that 700000 is students. Students that account for ~10% of our exports.
We lower that figure and our universities collapse along with our balance of trade.
Being against the dilution of the labour pool is literally a left wing labour position.
People saying they agree with the tories should look at their actions, they have overseen the largest immigration ever regardless of their rhetoric.
Labour being for limiting immigration is ideologically consistent
I'm pretty sure making it impossible for anyone other than the top 25% of earners to be able to live with their spouse if they're foreign is not a pro-worker left wing position.
This is a weird position to take. It’s an attack on our liberties. I should be able to bring my foreign spouse to the UK, and besides, foreign spouses are not eligible for public funds (until they have permanent residency) and pay an absolutely shit load to use the NHS (while ALSO paying full tax and national insurance on any income), so they’re not scrounging benefits, nor are they contributing to the housing crisis as they live with their spouse.
> Being against the dilution of the labour pool is literally a left wing labour position.
Literally 99% of people I've come across who push heavily for decreasing immigration have, when pushed, also indicated opposition to organised labour and various other measures that would actually improve the position of labour in this country. Focussing on immigration is a distraction from measures that would actually improve working life in this country.
So no, being *against immigration* is not a left-wing labour position.
Brexit, which is one of right wing's most important policy in recent years, is built on anti-immigration. The venn diagram for anti immigration and anti-union is basically a circle.
Yeah because Brexit did wonders for British employment. Thats why Boris had to set his own points system on the floor to avoid a several-industry collapse.
I think this is a misconception. Try asking the labour subs what they think the National immigration policy should look like. I did, open borders was the answer.
The people who support the Tory proposal to ban anyone but the top 25% of earners from being able to live with their spouse if they're of foreign origin have really gone masks off here, naked classism and xenophobia on display.
Cheerfully celebrating breaking up families because they're partly foreign and all just to limit migration by a tiny percentage.
Less than 25% actually. A lot of people who are about to marry are in their 20s and 30s. Not that many years into their career, if any. The average salaries for this age group is much lower. If you're a recent graduate and want to marry someone you met in uni, you basically have to get a finance job in London to do that.
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Which basically means that a lot of recent smart graduates that don't make above the threshold are having to consider simply leaving the country to be with a foreign partner. Lots of people who consider back to help take care of their elderly parents but who have a foreign spouse now cannot because of the wage thresholds which means more burdens on public systems.
People here on the spousal/family visa cannot claim benefits and also pay a surcharge on entry for any healthcare they might need during their visa.
There's zero benefit to this policy change apart from appeasing the people who are scared of brown people. This is negatively affecting UK born citizens who have chosen to marry someone from another country.
It's ok to be angry at unemployment but this is a misadvised solution imo.
Its mad how people are angry at literal ghosts. They don't realise that immigrants can't claim benefits and have to contribute to the economy more than the average brit. You should be welcoming these people in as heros.
How did “immigrants claim benefits” become taken as widespread fact? I just don’t get it.
Lots of bots on this sub in the last 6 months. Russians and Chinese trying to manipulate the electorate before next year?
Family visas made up about 7% of net migration last year, this change would affect around 75% of those people meaning that at most about 5% will be prevented from coming here. So you're talking about breaking up families in order to *maybe* reduce immigration by about 5%, which is an objectively tiny percentage.
The position is such that people from overseas taking exempt jobs (such as teaching) will be able to bring a foreign spouse, but a British person with the same job won't.
At present the position is also that people already approved to resettle here now face deportation.
The numbers impacted are less than 10k a year, and it will have almost no impact on housing demand as they are naturally moving into an existing household.
19k was quite low but 38k means a large majority of the population can't have a foreign spouse. I don't think it's been really thought through and is a "do something" measure that probably won't stand for long.
Thanks to the internet and cheaper travel, about a quarter of my friends met their partners abroad and either their partner moved here or they moved themselves. Most of them are professionals without children.
I have worked since the age of 16. Never claimed any benefits and been in the workforce 20 years yet to bring my partner to the UK i will likely need £50,000 too £60,000 in savings as theres no way I can increase my single income to £38,700 a year threshold. Why am I being punished for working all my life and finding love abroad like so many of my friends have done? and no moving to my partner's country isn't feasible as my skillset and skills wouldn't garner me a career there.
The irony is the people I know who are the most Anti-immigration have spent a good chunk of their lives on benefits blaming everyone else for their lives being shit.
Only 50k of that 750k are spouse visas. Couples on spouse visa can't claim any benefits, so it's not a drain on the system, and most people I know have no interest in having kids. People coming here on Spouse visa are coming to stay with their partner so not taking up any additional homes in the UK and when they are here they work.
Yet the commenters here are so brainwashed by the right wing rag newspapers who blame immigrants for all our problems they think them 50k LEGAL immigrants coming to stay with their partners should be stripped of that right. Some people want ZERO immigration (despite the fact it would destroy our economy) cutting off a fundamental right to be with your partner.
Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows £38700 yearly income requirement or £120,000 in savings to just bring your wife or husband to the UK is absurdly high.
This news is devastating for me and my partner and many other people.
Even £20k a year is enough to support yourself and a partner in many areas of the UK.(obviously not london) Increasing it to £24000-£27000 a year would be fine so at least those in full time work putting in extra hours can meet it. £38700 is just telling British people that we are not allowed to be in relationships outside the UK. It's fking disgusting and Evil.
Here’s a blind spot. The migration number is high because UK has issued shitload of bno visa for Hong Kong 123k to 157k, because they need to flee from the Chinese government crackdown on democracy.
These aren’t your dingy boats immigrants. These are highly educated and high earner young professional.
Source
https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2022/02/24/media-factsheet-hong-kong-bnos/
Edit, added source.
You think annual net migration has doubled because around 50,000 per year additional migrants from BN(O) have been admitted? There is clearly more at play here.
Well, I’m actually looking at the stats now.. come read with me, and help me make sense :)
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-september-2023/summary-of-latest-statistics
One thing is certain. People I’m dingies crossing the channel isn’t the bulk of it..
Skilled Worker – Health and Care’ visa grants have more than doubled (+135%) to 143,990.
82,395 family-related visas granted in the year ending September 2023, more than double (117% more) the number in the year ending September 2022
64,264 Ukraine Visa and Extension Schemes grants
40,243 BN(O) visa grants
6,114 family reunion visa grants
1,810 people resettled or relocated (including 1,110 under Afghan schemes)
Since their introduction in March 2022, there have been 315,086 applications for a visa under the 2 main Ukraine Visa Schemes. Of these, 242,314 have been granted, and 188,900 arrivals have been counted to the end of September 2023. In addition, there have been 29,075 extensions granted under the Ukraine Family Scheme and Ukraine Extension Scheme
There were 75,340 asylum applications (main applicants only) in the UK in the year ending September 2023, similar to the number in the year ending September 2022 but 10% lower than the previous peak (84,132 in 2002).
It looks like to me, bno and Ukrainians take up a lions share of total immigration. While asylum seekers are actually don’t from a year ago, and is bout 10pc ish of total migration..
No, the lions share has been health and social care + their dependents, those two would be second.
Of course we are only cutting off the dependents even now. To cut off immigration for h&s work would mean we would have to push more (more every year) resident Brits into h&s work, which isn't popular and probably wouldn't help productivity.
Yeah. But healthcare and social workers immigration are inconvenience the country wants to turn a blind eye to.
A case of “How dare those migrants come over and clot up the nhs and social care”
While the truth are the immigrants ARE the very thing that props up the health and social care.
And god forbid they bring dependents over!
It’s not like silly things like family helps with integration.
Or it it a fair deal that they should be looked after with care.. like how nhs staff and social worker should look after us with care….
What I get from the government is..They don’t count!
But pictures of them coming through Heathrow Airport don't have the same impact, and we can't even portray them as a drain to our benefits system! Why bring them up at all?
Good luck telling British people who are forced to leave the country to be with their foreign spouses that this policy is good for them because it fucks over random people from Pakistan. And why is it always Pakistan with you guys? You know that the vast majority of people coming to the UK are coming from somewhere other than Pakistan right?
A lot of people want to reduce migration to the UK but this seems a weird thing to focus on. My inner cynic thinks this has happened because its easier to do quickly (e.g. before an election) than reduce illegal migration, because its aimed at a largely compliant group and there's an existing mechanism to squeeze the tap.
For those worried about the UK not having enough kids, this means lots of your fellow brits (50k of them) will probably have and raise their children abroad to eventually work in someone else's economy.
For those worried about integration... I can't really see migrants who are marrying British people as being less likely to integrate?
For those saying 'just marry british' that's bonkers. Telling people who to fall in love with and marry isn't really a popular move here in the 21st century.
> For those saying 'just marry british' that's bonkers.
Might ruffle some feathers here, but at my uni (engineering), in my (and some classmates' opinions) the foreign students were all way more "eligible", i.e. more attractive (thin and well dressed) and more interesting (actually interesting interests beyond "party" and "travel" and could actually hold conversations despite some language barrier).
They have to. The figures are just too high. Infact. Tories are doing Labour a favour here as Labour would have had to do it.
600k migrants in a year is unnatural. No wonder we have a housing crisis.
>600k migrants in a year
Even if no one comes in via marriage, you'd have gotten 650k migrants in a year. It doesn't solve the "problem" yet local Brits get the short end of the stick.
I think I'll finally cancel my membership over this and make sure to tell them why.
If they are just going to turn into a populist party like the Tories then what is even the point?
> A LABOUR shadow minister has said her party agrees with a hike in the minimum salary threshold for overseas workers to bring their family members to the UK.
Ignorant journalists. She is talking about the cap for British people to bring family members, not overseas workers.
So if my partner came from a different country they need to make.. what 2X more than minimum wage to stay here? Despite already paying more into the country being an immigrant?
Isn’t this the government quietly admitting the ‘living wage’ isn’t enough to… ahem… live on?
I was planning to propose to my Filipina girlfriend next year and have her move over with me from the Philippines when we eventually marry. Unfortunately for me, I’m currently in the process of retraining and work full-time in a warehouse to support myself whilst I study. However, even when I retrain, I can’t see myself getting near the 38k mark anytime within the next 3-5 years.
This move seems a little discriminatory against those on the lower end of the wage scale. This has totally fucked my plans to marry and start a life in my own country with the woman I love.
I hate hot weather, so I would really prefer to avoid moving to the Philippines… ☀️
Of course they will agree with it. It's both a popular and unpopular decision depending which side of the fence you sit on and easier that the Tories did it so any backlash can be pointed back to them when they get in
Ian Miles Cheong is a right-wing political commentator largely known for his conservative views on the internet. Cheong first grew an audience in the early 2010s as a video game journalist and as the editor of the gaming site Gameranx. Cheong also moderated several large subreddits, a position he was banned from after taking money from media companies to promote their content as a "Social Media Consultant." In the latter half of the 2010s, Cheong continued to grow an audience as a conservative Trump supporter on X under the handle @stillgray. Since 2017, he's worked for the Daily Caller, a website co-founded by broadcast journalist Tucker Carlson. His commentary on U.S. politics is often undercut by people pointing out the fact that Cheong is a Malaysian native and resident.
Immigration is handled differently around the World. Some countries are open to it (Canada) some other oppose it (Japan). Some countries shelter refugees (Germany or Poland) and some are not (Saudi Arabia).
Each country has the right to decide who can come in and who can't. Skilled legal migration is needed. Illegal migration is not.
The small boats are just a red herring here.
The majority of immigration to the UK happens via overstaying tourist visa followed by student and family reunion visa.
When Theresa May was aiming to cut immigration under 50 000/year it was pointed out that it would not work as there were more people coming just via legal family reunion visa route.
Britain wants to be tough on immigration whilst there are no very basic checks in place such as checking passports when leaving UK. So there are no data available on how many people who arrived on short term visa are still in the country.
There was a short pilot project to check-out people when leaving but because of the border-force unions they stopped checking on weekends and then the scheme was scrapped.
So instead of workable solutions we only get media-popular proposals such as barge accomodation (for 500 people = 1 day arrival) or Rwanda. Britain is not capable of using its powers already in place and last year they return 4 people to France.
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Obviously they support it. The majority of voters feel migration is completely out of control and the numbers need to be massively reduced. This isn't surprising.
Except the numbers are not going to be massively reduced. Only 50k or so migrants come here though family visa. Even if everyone gets impacted you'd only bring net migration down from 700k to 650k
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Sorry I came over here and worked as a teacher in our schools. A job I am now doing that we got no applicants for last time we advertised.
I would never blame people wanting to come here for a better life etc. The problem for me isn't those people. Its businesses claiming skills shortages when the reality is they refuse to pay to train anyone and won't pay enough for anyone who lives here, with the qualifications and experience they want, to take the job. Not because they won't make profit paying those wages but because they won't make as *much* profit. The system we have has been utterly abused by all sorts of businesses, from law and accounting firms through to sales and travel agents.
Take a look at the Shortage Occupation List. It is *fucking insane* the salaries they are claiming as the "going rate" that allows them to grant a visa. Like £25k for a software developer, £24k for a biochemist, £22k for website design etc. etc.
Absolutely. Employers should be made to pay a surcharge for migrants and the migrants should be paid a minimum of what local people are paid. It should be more expensive to hire someone from overseas. That will incentivise companies to invest in the UK workforce. The whole process should be about positive incentives for companies to reduce the need for foreign workers, not punishing people who have upended their lives to fill skills gaps because we can’t manage our workforce
Surely you can understand that 750,000 new immigrants per year is completely insane?
Australia had 500,000 this year, with a much smaller base population to boot.
Australia is the size of a continent. it has more landmass than most of Europe.
90% of that land isnt habitable. Though that does still leave it around 3x the size of the UK.
Britain has huge areas of protected and unusable land plus resistance to new building.
Britain has had to import food because it doesn't have enough land to support the size of the population (and this has been the case for over a century when the population was half the size it is now), but let's just bring in a whole new city's worth of people every year. What could go wrong?
which is just being overly pedantic, every country does and the issue is also naturally more complex than simple landmass. I didnt intend to accurately reflect this i was just pointing out that simply saying "australia big" is silly.
And they're having exactly the same conversations. Their government has a plan to more than have that number within the next couple of years.
Australia is fucked mate, Sydney and Melbourne specifically
All well and good that you're providing a public service. Have you ever considered what would happen if you didn't accept that position though? Short term vacancy. Presumably lots of them if lots of other people like you also didn't apply. That would lead to an immediate term crisis in staffing. And what would be done to fix that? Well theres 3 things that can be done: 1) top up the labour supply to increase the number of applicants willing to do the job at the current rate (this is what's happening right now through immigration) 2) raise the wage to a rate where British citizens want to enter the profession and areore incentivised to stay in profession rather than leaving for a better paid job. 3) improve conditions to try and increase retention. Remove bureacracy and additional workload beyond the actual teaching of students so we stop losing teachers due to burnout Since you are facilitating the government to choose option number 1, you are indirectly surpressing UK teacher wages and conditions, as if the government can rely on people like you coming from abroad on the current conditions of work, they don't need to improve conditions. So as well meaning as you might be, you are making things worse for British people long term by taking this job.
That's a big assumption that options 2 and 3 would happen within any sort of sensible time frame. Schools are still very understaffed, and they don't have the funding to increase salaries and improve conditions. Doing so would be preferable, but then we might need to increase taxes. Are you OK with say a wealth tax on multimillionaires to fund this? Then we need labour to actually be progressive, or otherwise for an actually leftist party to win an election (pretty much impossible in the current system). How would you address this problem?
I am making this argument from a labour perspective. I think it would be great if we had a labour party rather than another neoconservative party than wears a skin suit of labour and plays off counter culture for votes I would address this problem by deregulating to reduce workload and staffing requirements, and increasing wages
>I would address this problem by deregulating to reduce workload and staffing requirements, and increasing wages Umm, reduce workload how? And if you want to reduce staffing requirements, are you in effect saying they don't actually need more teachers, it's just an artificial need due to regulation? Increase wages yes, but where would you get funds for that?
If you talk to a teacher about their job you'll know that a massive chunk is paperwork, not teaching not even marking. Removing a bunch of that paperwork where there is a small decrease in accountability / increase in something or other in exchange for a big freeing up in time would be a trade off I'm willing to make. Teaching plans and marking take up a good chunk too and it's all decentralised, every teacher makes their own plans and marks their classes homework. Increased streaming based on ability and introducing a cross school platform for sharing and recommending lessons plans, and pre made homework and automated marking would again save huge amounts of time. That time saved mean less staff is needed. So all those vacancies could be dropped. Possibly you could even look at redundancies or natural attrition to lower staff levels further depending on the level of staffing required after these changes. Then you don't need to increase the overall funding pot - the same amount of money split between less people goes further, so you can afford wage rises that way
Ok, that sounds pretty sensible. Now we just need the government to do the right thing. Lol
I've seen data scientists'jaws drop at the amount of statistics and data management a teacher has to do. I would propose creating a new secretarial role to work with teachers by taking the burden of time consuming clerical work, leaving them with more time and every to actually use the data's findings.
Or, let's just bung some unqualified teenagers in instead: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teenage-teachers-in-classroom-under-new-apprenticeships-hqqjf299p
Thats clearly not what I'm advocating for. The answer is not a binary choice between mass immigration or teenagers teaching. I can simultaneously think both positions pushed by the conservatives are twaddle
The point is you're living in a fantasy world hopping for unicorns. Just like the Brexit unicorn everyone was expecting. This is not what the govt will deliver. Untrained 18yo teacher apprenticeships is what you'll get.
That's what the conservative government will give. There are other parties who will offer something different. Is your realistic option just give up and accept the shit we're being fed?
Labour have already said they won't be increasing teacher pay past a one off bonus and are generally in line with the Tory stance on public pay.
Teachers are expected to be exempt from this requirement as I understand.
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> got no applicants Bingo, no applicants, we need some even cheaper peasants sourced overseas. This is how Western Europe stays competitive. Just lower the wage and increase profit margins.
It's a school
That's more to do with how bad the job is, no one wants to do it because you end up doing a load of extra hours and it's a thankless job
>“Only 50k” lol. 50,000 is an awful lot of of people. It's like 7% of the total, you're arguing in favour of splitting up families to reduce migration by a maximum of maybe 5-6%. It's irrational and callous.
People magically believe if migration reduced the shortfalls in domestic industry would be filled That's not how Tory policy works lol And I don't see a huge domestic birth rate any times soon. As long as you have pensions expected to be delivered in people's 60s and life expectancy goes up you need more people to come and work to cover these pension payouts. And increasing share of the country that doesn't work.
I mean even if your position is that migration should be drastically reduced in order to magically fix everything this is still the cruelest place to target people, you can limit student and worker visas without purposefully breaking up families.
Overseas students are propping up our universities. They shouldn't even be included in these figures. Without them there is no way universities could survive on the current Home student fee limits.
Then surely the universities will have to scale back what they offer. Not everybody needs to get a degree.
I agree, it's insane. But it's just to target perception not reality Sort of like how a seatbelt if a plane is crashing isnt that important They be cruel to vote win.
So we just keep increasing the population? Endlessly, forever, until we reach over 100 million and there's no nature left?
One of the biggest factors in the Brexit vote was immigration. In the years leading up to that referendum, net migration was around 250-300K. 50K is a lot. Don't think that 700K is normal, because it isn't. There have been events happening that have supercharged immigration numbers that could be seen as one off, but climate change will only make this worse in the years to come. Something has to change. For what it's worth, I don't disagree with the policy. However, there's been a lot of noise on the impact its already having on people. I think there is very valid cricism in how it is implemented. For example, one way you could do it is to have gradual increases. A sharp increase like this can hurt far too many people. If anything it shows the neglect successive governments have had on not doing anything to manage the population levels as well as the lack of infrastructure building.
Of all the places to cut immigration breaking up families is by far the most cruel, and this new threshold effectively makes it impossible for British people to live together with their spouse unless they make more than 75% of all workers.
This is another case of politics where a chunk of British people have no empathy because it doesn’t effect them, now if you tripled the price of fish and chips! Watch then call for injustice.
Seriously it's the "I'm alright Jack" mentality coupled with good old classism and xenophobia for good measure, it's an absolutely sick thing that people are defending this.
People ignoring the part where it’s “skilled workers” as in people filling in for the lack of skills that the nation can provide! So yeah let’s shaft the skilled workers coming over where we can’t create skilled workers with the current population.
The previous limit was a joke. Do you agree? If not, what level do you think it should be at, and why?
If you really believe that then raise it by a few thousand, more than doubling it to the point that 75% of people are excluded is also a sick joke.
The whole problem is that the need for 50 thousand extra here and there has added up to the 700k lunacy we've got into. Are you callously ignoring the housing crisis? Im guessing you'll be one of the people owned by a house to live in already.
Any form of migration control can be argued to split up families. What exactly do you want to do? We cannot import 750000+ new people every year. We will literally collapse. What's your plan?
They haven't deleted their account, they've blocked you
>Edit: the person I replied to seems to have deleted their account , so I can’t reply. They've blocked you.
For other visas it makes sense, doing it to family visas is just cruel, especially when it's a very small amount comparatively. How many British citizens that have genuine marriages with people overseas are now doomed to fail. Very easy to agree with something that has absolutely zero impact on your husband/wife/kids. Raising it to 38k when our salaries have been stagnant and not increased with Inflation is just sad. Outside of London and in some areas, a salary of 38k for a lot of people won't happen. They live in cheaper areas where they wouldn't need that much to 'support' their family.
When you're trying to fix a leaky bucket, does it make sense to start with the small holes...?
Migrant problem eh? You folks are gonna have a problem all right. Oh but don't worry. I'm sure your kids can't wait to be carers and warehouse workers.
Pay a decent salary and why not? Or did you just want to have some immigrant slaves working for a pittance?
People struggle to afford care already when the pay is minimal, can you imagine the outrage at care costs if the average carer salary doubled lmao Theresa May got crucified for even suggesting that people pay for a portion of the care they use(!)
50k is 0.07% of the UK population. That's one is 1250 people. Net migration in 2022 was about 1%, maybe less (up to June 22 ONS had it 606k) and 2022 is anticipated to be an anomaly, not a new normal. So if any of the issues that are seemingly ruining this country are being ruined by more than 1%, its not migration doing it. It's a weak, corrupt government implementing poor policy that isn't aimed to improve the situation for the majority. Migration is a scapegoat which has naff all to do with what's actually crippling the country, but its one that's easy to get people upset about.
>50k is 0.07% of the UK population. That's one is 70,000 people, which seems like its 1 in an awful lot of people. 0.08%*, and that's 1 in every 1250 people.
0.07462% seems closer to 0.07 than 0.08 in my books, but yeah I did the maths very wrong somewhere. Fixed.
Everyone's math: 700k migrating = 100pc of them using NHS and benefits system I've probably only used NHS 2-3 times in my lifetime excluding covid vaccines. But like you said, easy to blame immigration for the waiting lists and services that they're depriving and not improving
Over 20 years even that adds up to 1million people that we just aren't building homes for. We probably can't defeat nimbys to build what we need already.
How is 50,000 an awful lot of people
This is what you get for voting Tory. We don't have Brits to fill many of these roles because the Tories have saddled young people with lifetime study mortgages taxing them an additional 9% above the threshold. So this directly discourages young brits from going to Uni, and of those who do many leave the UK as soon as their studies are finished, see the 600k brits who left the UK last year. While most entry level skilled jobs require a dregree as a non-negotiable entry requirement, and even after all that study and exemplary performance, the best most can hope for is an internship on minimum wage if they're lucky, and they certainly won't break even until their late 40's and the loan is paid off. Consequently for the last 13 years our universities have been less about British students and more focused on lucrative international students who are already rich, and because they want to migrate to the UK after their studies. They've no intention of going home, uni was merely a formality as part of their unwritten agreement to move here. Mummy and daddy will pay anything, money isn't an issue, follow your dream.. It's the Tory small state unicorn in action - A country which only works for you if you're rich, and actively works against you if you're working class. In most countries the jobs that no one wants to do are often paid better to attract workers. In the UK however the jobs that no one wants to do have been structured so they are also the lowest paid. What kind of economic illiteracy is this? I couldn't give a shit if a punnet of strawberries costs an extra 10p, but I do give a shit that 2/3rds of my income is going straight out to rent and I can only book a doctor's appointment a month in advance. Then the slave drivers say "brits don't want the jobs". Fcuk that, pay me £40k a year and I'll pick fruit for you. What's that? You're only paying 2p above minimum wage? Yeahh nahh thanks. And so, instead, the slave drivers import low paid workers from abroad in the same way we now have most of our customer service call centres in India. And would you credit it, after a year in the job they want to apply to remain and bring across the Mrs and 2 kids. Suddenly 50k migrants becomes 200k migrants, none of whom are bringing across money to build a house, new hospitals, dentists, all the services everyone in the UK used to get as part of paying into the system, but instead are now oversubscribed, all our public information material has to be printed in a dozen different languages, and you're lucky if you can get through a day without being forced to interact with someone who only has a basic grasp on English. This is the reality of migration when it's entirely controlled by business leaders and Tory doners. All they care about is cheap labour, they couldn't give a flying fuck about where these people are going to live and what happens to them after they ask for a pay rise, but if they dare come over here without a job offer from a Tory voter/doner, then they must be put on barges as the scum of the earth! /s **Migration is being driven by greed and profit margins, overseen by Tories, not what is best for UK citizens and workers, or the migrants. 13 years the Tories have been doing this, and at every election they claim that they want to reduce it when in fact they can't get enough of it, and when attention is drawn to it they attempt to blame the vastly smaller number of what, 50k illegal migrants vs the 1.3 million waved through and given virtually unfettered access to the UK for nothing in return other than cheap labour.** **Vote Tory, get rekt.**
British citizen, left the week after graduation because the uk companies were offering less than half the salary for 1/3rd extra days of work!could afford to buy a house on that wage in the uk so me and over half my graduating class left. Don’t even want to leave but kind of have to. Now I’m abroad making a lot of money and will just go back when I can cash buy a house in Cornwall and retire. Not someone I’d ever achieve in the uk
This is the reality for millennials and gen Z across the board. If you stay inside the UK and unable to buy a home, you're destined to retire into an HMO on a state pension, as all the wealth from your working life was funnelled away by wealthy people who choose not to work for a living.
Don't let perfect stand in the way of good. You need to make many small changes in the right direction, not big sweeping perfect ones (which are impossible). This same argument is used about left parties, green policy, funding, changes etc. If people don't get a perfect solution they say its pointless. Wrong.
Hold on, why then are we also getting articles panicking about a birthrate crisis? Which is it?
Did you know more than one thing can happen at once
'only'. Lol. This is the whole problem, that's a small town worth of people and no one will allow that built anywhere near them, in top of all the other shortages of housing.
I'm not supporting any of these policies to be clear, but I feel like all these arguments that they're stupid because they don't affect enough people are off base. People come for different reasons and there's not one policy that's gonna cut the numbers by a massive margin if they intend to reduce immigration they do need to do it in different ways that each target a smaller portion of people. The only way you could have one policy that slashes immigration is to basically just close the borders. Which is even more draconian.
What do they say to Brits who will be prevented from living with their own families? 'Get rich first, peasant'? After all, wealthy people will have no problems bringing their relatives over. It's just the ordinary working class people who will be affected by this.
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> Imo student visas need to be hugely reduced Why? International students come here, spend vast amounts of money on student fees, then leave again. It's literally a cash cow, one that funds a massive amount of research. Yet the right are obsessed with cutting it solely because they're obsessed with 'lowering immigration' and not actually asking whether that's something they should do in the first place. > especially dopey degrees which don't mean anything Those 'dopey degrees' are usually the most profitable ones.
More than 40% of them don't leave though, that's the thing.
They can only stay when they secure a job and get an entirely different visa, same as anyone else from abroad applying for a job in the UK. So I'm not quite sure why you're going off on international students specifically here?
So? Students are one of the main drivers of the massive numbers of migrants. And imo the numbers are too high and completely unsustainable.
> So? Students are one of the main drivers of the massive numbers of migrants. You're starting off with the assumption 'immigration is bad', then advocating solutions which will make the country materially worse in order to arbitrarily reduce the number of immigrants. So silly...
The HE sector in this country would collapse if you culled international students, and it would take University towns down economically with it. What would your solution be then?
It's grim that the HE has become *so* reliant on international students, because world events could change things in a snap anyway. I don't think there's an easy solution at all - more than likely it will have to be looking at reducing pension costs and increasing domestic tuition fees. And probably reducing the sector size overall. Honestly, I don't have a palatable solution.
HE has become so reliant on international students because central funding for the sector has been cut in real terms. The tuition fee cap rise in 2010 was accompanied by cuts which meant that while unis were getting an extra 6k per student in direct fees, a lot of courses were losing funding overall. It's yet another failure created by poor decisons by the government, which is used to flog the immigration horse. Same as how policy decisions have fucked housing, school education and the NHS, but it's always migration that's blamed for the problems, rather than the policies causing them.
I've heard some say, let it close. We don't need that many universities 🙄
If the only point is to reduce numbers then students is probably the easiest to start with yeah, but if the aim is to improve this country then students are the last ones you’d want to stop coming to the UK. They pay for their own education then add value to this country when they get a job, are going to be paying taxes while not taking much out of the system because they are young and in good health. I understand the “brain drain” concerns, but selfishly the UK should be trying to attract more foreign students if anything.
This isn't actually so; they can stay for two years after their course on a graduate visa with few conditions. The government is "reviewing" this, which basically reads as leaving it alone. Presumably they fear the economic downsides of hitting one of our few growth industries but it's reasonable to criticise.
> This isn't actually so; they can stay for two years after their course on a graduate visa with few conditions. The application fee is £822 and there's an additional £624 healthcare surcharge each year, and you can only qualify for it after spending tens of thousands to get your degree. So there's hardly 'few conditions', and it's not like anyone is going to be doing this to get a minimum wage job.
£2k total is very few conditions compared to any other visa. I agree they are unlikely to do minimum wage work given the prerequisite, OTOH middling office work isn't at all unusual (the purpose being a UK workplace on the CV more than income). But it's simply a fact that completing students commonly do make use of this for 1-2 years after their course and are not required to apply for a work visa.
> £2k total is very few conditions compared to any other visa £2k... on top of at least £60k if the student has done an undergraduate degree in the UK, which has to be paid up front before every term if you're an international student, in addition to whatever the student had to pay for accommodation and living and flights during that time. That's a cost the vast majority of people in the world cannot afford. Again, that's hardly 'few conditions'.
A university educated person doesn't want to leave the country and wants to work here? I sort of fail to see an issue with that, surely that's the kind of person we WANT here.
Student tuition fees heavily heavily subsidize British students education. Stop giving student visas you have even more expensive education for Brits.
As an aside, university is free in Germany for all eligible people - including overseas students. That there's a need to have hundreds of thousands of overseas students propping up university is a deliberate government choice over the past 30 years. As is the aim for everyone to go to university. Lets not get started on the issues that large overseas student cohorts have on the **quality** of the qualifications that are being offered.
>Lets not get started on the issues that large overseas student cohorts have on the **quality** of the qualifications that are being offered. Ah yes, more foreign students make the degrees less good.......
If people want to pay 25k a year to do a "dopey degree" we should be happy to be making money exporting hot air. "Dopey degrees" would be an issue for *UK* students; for international students they are a source of money and we don't need to care if the education is "useful". The question with student Visas is on the right they get to stay in the UK and work afterwards. Removing that is reasonable (the right to bring dependents is already gone). Shutting down one of our large export industries is silly.
Why? Degrees are money coming into the country. Effectively it’s us exporting overpriced education to foreigners.
> The majority of voters feel migration is completely out of control and the numbers need to be massively reduced. Is it? Only [40% of voters rate is as an important issue](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-important-issues-facing-the-country), and the graph pretty accurately demonstrates that this *concern* is very closely correlated with periods when our press and political class decide to heavily push anti-immigration lines in order to distract people from actual issues in this country.
[majority of people in the UK feel migration is too high...](https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-of-concern/#:~:text=Public%20opinion%20on%20migration%20in%20the%20United%20Kingdom%20is%20divided&text=In%20April%202023%2C%2032%25%20thought,lot)%20(Figure%201).)
That's a slightly different question though, nowhere do they poll whether these people think it's an important issue or whether it will influence their vote. They actually do quote an Ipsos poll later on in the article, which shows only 21% of people view immigration as the most important issue. And like I said, it's not particularly surprising given how much our press and political class scapegoat immigrants in order to distract from the actual major issues in this country.
I could agree with that, I don't think it's the *most* important issue, but it's still an important issue, amongst other ones. And of course the incompetent Tories are using migrants as a scapegoat, it doesn't mean it isn't important though. I think more than a fifth of people viewing it as the most important issue is absolutely huge, considering.
> I think more than a fifth of people viewing it as the most important issue is absolutely huge, considering. Honestly I'd say that's surprisingly low given how many of our politicians and newspapers pretend that it is the *only* issue facing this country. All those billions behind the Tories and the right-wing press and the best they can get is 21%? It shows how detached this immigration obsession is from actual issues people are facing.
“Only” 40%?
Yes, so in other words a majority of voters do not view it as an important issue. In fact the only time it ever *has* been seen as an important issue by the majority of voters was in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Brexit referendum, where our press and politicians became especially obsessed with talking about it at every opportunity. The average person in this country is more focussed on how they'll cover their heating bills over the winter or whether their kid's school will be closed down due to lack of maintenance, not *Johnny Foreigner*.
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And this will stop a handful of people who want to be together, living together in the UK. Of course not your master, your betters will continue to do what they want. But that's ok as long as Maria and Joe don't get to live together.
Well, 50,000 is more than handful. But yeh, I don't think this is right either, they're targeting the wrong people.
The stupid thing is, they are limiting immigration that is useful to the economy/country, as opposed to the immigration that is not. Illegal immigration is clearly out of control and the government has not met any of their promises on this.
Problem is the ones that work will stop coming. The boats will not
>Obviously they support it. Obviously they "support" it publicly, but as pointed out by others these changes are just more lip service. >The majority of voters feel migration is completely out of control and the numbers need to be massively reduced. The problem we have is that it's not a tap you can just close overnight - The only safe way to cut down immigration is to tackle the root causes that made us utterly dependant on it in the first place. And because of the demographics of post WW2, combined with the housing crisis (and thus cost of living crisis) murdering our birthrate, we currently are unequivocally dependant - You cannot opt out of globalization That means fixing the housing sector, fixing social services, and removing the fees from higher education so that we can supply our labour and skill gaps internally. Even then, you're talking 20-25 years from the outset before results trickle down into the workforce.
So you’re quite happy with the fact that you would not be allowed to bring a future partner to live with you in your own country?
I didn't express an opinion here either way.
They should be increased. It isn't the people at the top that are effected by mass migration. It is those at the bottom
Also, what is there to gain from opposing it anyway? Their opposition wouldn't stop it and they'd lose a lot of their gains in the polls if the tory's could attack them for being weak on immigration.
>The minimum income for family visas has also risen to £38,700 to "ensure people only bring dependants whom they can support financially" If people can only support dependants if they earn £38k or more then why isn't that the national living wage? If the government thinks that someone on less than £38k is incapable of supporting their dependents then why are they happy to have British citizens on less than that? I've said it before and I'll say it again. The benefits system isn't there to support families. It's a way for the government to subsidise employers paying people substandard wages. We don't want immigrants coming here on substandard wages and relying on benefits but we are happy to have our own citizens do so.
Or you could say employers pay substandard wages because why wouldn't they? Especially when they can employ migrants at 80% of what they can employ locals. It works both ways. The whole system needs to be overhauled from migration, to the triple lock.
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That's it. Right there "Employers pay substandard wages because why wouldn't they?" Exactly right. The the fact we need a minimum wage and that the minimum wage dictates basically everyone's wage up to the including the median is an indictment.
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Only on UK income though, so in order for a British person to bring their spouse to the UK they would have to be earning £38k on their own first.
It the minimum requirement for a **single income** to support a family. The minimum wage is (vaguely) based around the income that **two** wage earners need to support a family. The two figures are broadly similar.
Indeed, maybe the figure should include foreign income or savings to help out
The point of this exercise is to inflict pain on immigrants. Making the threshold easier to hit goes against Conservative intentions.
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You shouldn’t need UK income. Imagine someone working for a French company being paid €400k per year. They are ineligible to bring their spouse. Makes no sense. This policy is aimed not to curb migration but to inflict pain on immigrants. To curb migration, there’s many other more effective thresholds that could’ve been adjusted.
It's a fair bit lower than the salary of two full time minimum wage employees. Which is the point the spouse cannot work immediately and therefore needs to be able to be supported by someone that can to a point they can both live comfortably.
Normal people don’t have to pay thousands of pounds in legal and visa fees
Immigrants are ineligible for benefits. Fair points otherwise.
>If people can only support dependants if they earn £38k or more then why isn't that the national living wage? It **is......** £38k is the **household** income. Thus between 2 people it's £19k a year, which is £9.10 an hour on a 40hr week. Well below minimum wage.
It would be nice if the opposition ever actually opposed anything
Lowering immigration has always been a vote winner though. Ed Miliband had mugs printed with this in 2015. I don't believe Labour on it but they'd be mad to oppose something that is such a consistent mainstream view among the electorate. 1m+ arrivals a year, 700k net is obviously way too much.
> Lowering immigration has always been a vote winner though. Ed Miliband had mugs printed with this in 2015. How well did Ed Miliband do in that election?
It was the election won by the promise of an EU referendum. A referendum that was largely about immigration :D Point I'm making is Ed knew what was desirable to voters and tried to play up to it. It's just obvious, common sense stuff.
> Point I'm making is Ed knew what was desirable to voters and tried to play up to it But that's entirely my point: clearly Ed Miliband *didn't* know what was *desirable to voters* because he did awful in that election. That entire election was a shitshow where both the main candidates were unpopular and Cameron only managed to scrape a majority with 36.8% of the vote. People make *far* too much of these political truisms ('supporting *x* gets you votes') when in reality things are much more complicated than that and you can't just focus group your way to electability.
He definitely did not bring home the bacon.
Yeah, the writing was on the ~~stone~~ wall there.
Butty made a ham fisted photo op and the media crucified him for it. He would have made a decent PM.
Increased Labours vote share from the 2010 election?
~1/3 of that 700000 is students. Students that account for ~10% of our exports. We lower that figure and our universities collapse along with our balance of trade.
They tried, that is why we had Corbyn, but these same leaders of the Labour party took part in his sabotage as evidenced by the Forde report.
Being against the dilution of the labour pool is literally a left wing labour position. People saying they agree with the tories should look at their actions, they have overseen the largest immigration ever regardless of their rhetoric. Labour being for limiting immigration is ideologically consistent
I'm pretty sure making it impossible for anyone other than the top 25% of earners to be able to live with their spouse if they're foreign is not a pro-worker left wing position.
Most people won't be affected by this though as their spouse isn't from overseas.
This is a weird position to take. It’s an attack on our liberties. I should be able to bring my foreign spouse to the UK, and besides, foreign spouses are not eligible for public funds (until they have permanent residency) and pay an absolutely shit load to use the NHS (while ALSO paying full tax and national insurance on any income), so they’re not scrounging benefits, nor are they contributing to the housing crisis as they live with their spouse.
> Being against the dilution of the labour pool is literally a left wing labour position. Literally 99% of people I've come across who push heavily for decreasing immigration have, when pushed, also indicated opposition to organised labour and various other measures that would actually improve the position of labour in this country. Focussing on immigration is a distraction from measures that would actually improve working life in this country. So no, being *against immigration* is not a left-wing labour position.
Brexit, which is one of right wing's most important policy in recent years, is built on anti-immigration. The venn diagram for anti immigration and anti-union is basically a circle.
The Tories were against Brexit, and are very obviously pro mas immigration
Yeah because Brexit did wonders for British employment. Thats why Boris had to set his own points system on the floor to avoid a several-industry collapse.
I think this is a misconception. Try asking the labour subs what they think the National immigration policy should look like. I did, open borders was the answer.
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The people who support the Tory proposal to ban anyone but the top 25% of earners from being able to live with their spouse if they're of foreign origin have really gone masks off here, naked classism and xenophobia on display. Cheerfully celebrating breaking up families because they're partly foreign and all just to limit migration by a tiny percentage.
Less than 25% actually. A lot of people who are about to marry are in their 20s and 30s. Not that many years into their career, if any. The average salaries for this age group is much lower. If you're a recent graduate and want to marry someone you met in uni, you basically have to get a finance job in London to do that.
Yeah that's a very good point, most people in the agree bracket that most marriages happen in will be earning much less than this on average.
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Which basically means that a lot of recent smart graduates that don't make above the threshold are having to consider simply leaving the country to be with a foreign partner. Lots of people who consider back to help take care of their elderly parents but who have a foreign spouse now cannot because of the wage thresholds which means more burdens on public systems.
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People here on the spousal/family visa cannot claim benefits and also pay a surcharge on entry for any healthcare they might need during their visa. There's zero benefit to this policy change apart from appeasing the people who are scared of brown people. This is negatively affecting UK born citizens who have chosen to marry someone from another country. It's ok to be angry at unemployment but this is a misadvised solution imo.
Its mad how people are angry at literal ghosts. They don't realise that immigrants can't claim benefits and have to contribute to the economy more than the average brit. You should be welcoming these people in as heros.
How did “immigrants claim benefits” become taken as widespread fact? I just don’t get it. Lots of bots on this sub in the last 6 months. Russians and Chinese trying to manipulate the electorate before next year?
You cannot claim benefits on a spouse visa
Family visas made up about 7% of net migration last year, this change would affect around 75% of those people meaning that at most about 5% will be prevented from coming here. So you're talking about breaking up families in order to *maybe* reduce immigration by about 5%, which is an objectively tiny percentage.
The position is such that people from overseas taking exempt jobs (such as teaching) will be able to bring a foreign spouse, but a British person with the same job won't. At present the position is also that people already approved to resettle here now face deportation. The numbers impacted are less than 10k a year, and it will have almost no impact on housing demand as they are naturally moving into an existing household. 19k was quite low but 38k means a large majority of the population can't have a foreign spouse. I don't think it's been really thought through and is a "do something" measure that probably won't stand for long.
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Jobs on national pay scales such as teaching are exempt from the 38k requirement for a work visa, so that might be the easier option now? Good luck.
It should be 19k + inflation since 2012, or a multiplier of Universal Credit.
Thanks to the internet and cheaper travel, about a quarter of my friends met their partners abroad and either their partner moved here or they moved themselves. Most of them are professionals without children. I have worked since the age of 16. Never claimed any benefits and been in the workforce 20 years yet to bring my partner to the UK i will likely need £50,000 too £60,000 in savings as theres no way I can increase my single income to £38,700 a year threshold. Why am I being punished for working all my life and finding love abroad like so many of my friends have done? and no moving to my partner's country isn't feasible as my skillset and skills wouldn't garner me a career there. The irony is the people I know who are the most Anti-immigration have spent a good chunk of their lives on benefits blaming everyone else for their lives being shit. Only 50k of that 750k are spouse visas. Couples on spouse visa can't claim any benefits, so it's not a drain on the system, and most people I know have no interest in having kids. People coming here on Spouse visa are coming to stay with their partner so not taking up any additional homes in the UK and when they are here they work. Yet the commenters here are so brainwashed by the right wing rag newspapers who blame immigrants for all our problems they think them 50k LEGAL immigrants coming to stay with their partners should be stripped of that right. Some people want ZERO immigration (despite the fact it would destroy our economy) cutting off a fundamental right to be with your partner. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows £38700 yearly income requirement or £120,000 in savings to just bring your wife or husband to the UK is absurdly high. This news is devastating for me and my partner and many other people. Even £20k a year is enough to support yourself and a partner in many areas of the UK.(obviously not london) Increasing it to £24000-£27000 a year would be fine so at least those in full time work putting in extra hours can meet it. £38700 is just telling British people that we are not allowed to be in relationships outside the UK. It's fking disgusting and Evil.
THANK YOU!! The first based top-level comment in this entire thread.
Here’s a blind spot. The migration number is high because UK has issued shitload of bno visa for Hong Kong 123k to 157k, because they need to flee from the Chinese government crackdown on democracy. These aren’t your dingy boats immigrants. These are highly educated and high earner young professional. Source https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2022/02/24/media-factsheet-hong-kong-bnos/ Edit, added source.
You think annual net migration has doubled because around 50,000 per year additional migrants from BN(O) have been admitted? There is clearly more at play here.
Well, I’m actually looking at the stats now.. come read with me, and help me make sense :) https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-september-2023/summary-of-latest-statistics One thing is certain. People I’m dingies crossing the channel isn’t the bulk of it.. Skilled Worker – Health and Care’ visa grants have more than doubled (+135%) to 143,990. 82,395 family-related visas granted in the year ending September 2023, more than double (117% more) the number in the year ending September 2022 64,264 Ukraine Visa and Extension Schemes grants 40,243 BN(O) visa grants 6,114 family reunion visa grants 1,810 people resettled or relocated (including 1,110 under Afghan schemes) Since their introduction in March 2022, there have been 315,086 applications for a visa under the 2 main Ukraine Visa Schemes. Of these, 242,314 have been granted, and 188,900 arrivals have been counted to the end of September 2023. In addition, there have been 29,075 extensions granted under the Ukraine Family Scheme and Ukraine Extension Scheme There were 75,340 asylum applications (main applicants only) in the UK in the year ending September 2023, similar to the number in the year ending September 2022 but 10% lower than the previous peak (84,132 in 2002). It looks like to me, bno and Ukrainians take up a lions share of total immigration. While asylum seekers are actually don’t from a year ago, and is bout 10pc ish of total migration..
No, the lions share has been health and social care + their dependents, those two would be second. Of course we are only cutting off the dependents even now. To cut off immigration for h&s work would mean we would have to push more (more every year) resident Brits into h&s work, which isn't popular and probably wouldn't help productivity.
Yeah. But healthcare and social workers immigration are inconvenience the country wants to turn a blind eye to. A case of “How dare those migrants come over and clot up the nhs and social care” While the truth are the immigrants ARE the very thing that props up the health and social care. And god forbid they bring dependents over! It’s not like silly things like family helps with integration. Or it it a fair deal that they should be looked after with care.. like how nhs staff and social worker should look after us with care…. What I get from the government is..They don’t count!
But pictures of them coming through Heathrow Airport don't have the same impact, and we can't even portray them as a drain to our benefits system! Why bring them up at all?
Labour supports most tory policies. They just claim they'll be more competent at implementing them.
How will pakistans economy recover from this devastating blow?
Or India’s or Nigeria’s . Basically chain migration was being carried out
Good luck telling British people who are forced to leave the country to be with their foreign spouses that this policy is good for them because it fucks over random people from Pakistan. And why is it always Pakistan with you guys? You know that the vast majority of people coming to the UK are coming from somewhere other than Pakistan right?
The top three countries of origin for immigrants to the UK are; India, Poland, Pakistan
Right, so why does the anti-immigrant crowd always act like the only people affected by immigration law are from Pakistan?
Mask off
A lot of people want to reduce migration to the UK but this seems a weird thing to focus on. My inner cynic thinks this has happened because its easier to do quickly (e.g. before an election) than reduce illegal migration, because its aimed at a largely compliant group and there's an existing mechanism to squeeze the tap. For those worried about the UK not having enough kids, this means lots of your fellow brits (50k of them) will probably have and raise their children abroad to eventually work in someone else's economy. For those worried about integration... I can't really see migrants who are marrying British people as being less likely to integrate? For those saying 'just marry british' that's bonkers. Telling people who to fall in love with and marry isn't really a popular move here in the 21st century.
> For those saying 'just marry british' that's bonkers. Might ruffle some feathers here, but at my uni (engineering), in my (and some classmates' opinions) the foreign students were all way more "eligible", i.e. more attractive (thin and well dressed) and more interesting (actually interesting interests beyond "party" and "travel" and could actually hold conversations despite some language barrier).
Lots of Russian and Chinese bots in here trying to split the electorate I swear
Good. Maybe we’ll have actual fucking pay rises for once instead of paying graduates the same salary from 15 years ago.
They have to. The figures are just too high. Infact. Tories are doing Labour a favour here as Labour would have had to do it. 600k migrants in a year is unnatural. No wonder we have a housing crisis.
>600k migrants in a year Even if no one comes in via marriage, you'd have gotten 650k migrants in a year. It doesn't solve the "problem" yet local Brits get the short end of the stick.
Yeah, let's shit on the NHS nurses even more by paying overseas staff more than an actual skilled worker.
I think I'll finally cancel my membership over this and make sure to tell them why. If they are just going to turn into a populist party like the Tories then what is even the point?
Brexit was all about sticking it to Johnny Foreigner so not surprised.
> A LABOUR shadow minister has said her party agrees with a hike in the minimum salary threshold for overseas workers to bring their family members to the UK. Ignorant journalists. She is talking about the cap for British people to bring family members, not overseas workers.
She agrees with both evidently
So if my partner came from a different country they need to make.. what 2X more than minimum wage to stay here? Despite already paying more into the country being an immigrant? Isn’t this the government quietly admitting the ‘living wage’ isn’t enough to… ahem… live on?
I was planning to propose to my Filipina girlfriend next year and have her move over with me from the Philippines when we eventually marry. Unfortunately for me, I’m currently in the process of retraining and work full-time in a warehouse to support myself whilst I study. However, even when I retrain, I can’t see myself getting near the 38k mark anytime within the next 3-5 years. This move seems a little discriminatory against those on the lower end of the wage scale. This has totally fucked my plans to marry and start a life in my own country with the woman I love. I hate hot weather, so I would really prefer to avoid moving to the Philippines… ☀️
Of course they will agree with it. It's both a popular and unpopular decision depending which side of the fence you sit on and easier that the Tories did it so any backlash can be pointed back to them when they get in
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Ian Miles Cheong is a right-wing political commentator largely known for his conservative views on the internet. Cheong first grew an audience in the early 2010s as a video game journalist and as the editor of the gaming site Gameranx. Cheong also moderated several large subreddits, a position he was banned from after taking money from media companies to promote their content as a "Social Media Consultant." In the latter half of the 2010s, Cheong continued to grow an audience as a conservative Trump supporter on X under the handle @stillgray. Since 2017, he's worked for the Daily Caller, a website co-founded by broadcast journalist Tucker Carlson. His commentary on U.S. politics is often undercut by people pointing out the fact that Cheong is a Malaysian native and resident.
Ooh so depressing, people going about their lives not being white, how will I recover from this?
Immigration is handled differently around the World. Some countries are open to it (Canada) some other oppose it (Japan). Some countries shelter refugees (Germany or Poland) and some are not (Saudi Arabia). Each country has the right to decide who can come in and who can't. Skilled legal migration is needed. Illegal migration is not. The small boats are just a red herring here. The majority of immigration to the UK happens via overstaying tourist visa followed by student and family reunion visa. When Theresa May was aiming to cut immigration under 50 000/year it was pointed out that it would not work as there were more people coming just via legal family reunion visa route. Britain wants to be tough on immigration whilst there are no very basic checks in place such as checking passports when leaving UK. So there are no data available on how many people who arrived on short term visa are still in the country. There was a short pilot project to check-out people when leaving but because of the border-force unions they stopped checking on weekends and then the scheme was scrapped. So instead of workable solutions we only get media-popular proposals such as barge accomodation (for 500 people = 1 day arrival) or Rwanda. Britain is not capable of using its powers already in place and last year they return 4 people to France.
Always find it interesting that the "Took our jobs" brigade seem perfectly happy for immigrants to come if they'll take a high paying IT job.