EU Referendum

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Shadowless Formless Legs Dec 2015 12:05pm, 18 Dec 2015 371 posts	0 Shadowless Formless Legs Yes, but under pressure to reduce immigration the government capped non-EU immigration at 20,700 people per year. With immigration at approximately 650,000 per year that means that we are only ensuring that 3% of the people coming into the country are people that we really need. It seems like a bad system when the only people that you can prevent from coming are the ones that you actually need.
DeeGee Dec 2015 3:23pm, 18 Dec 2015 16,856 posts	0 DeeGee Are they people that we really need? If we didn't need these millions of unskilled fruit-pickers and bog-cleaners that are battering down our borders every day, then they wouldn't be finding work. So they wouldn't be travelling over a thousand miles to take the punt, especially with our high cost of living and comparatively meagre unemplyment benefits. It's like it used to be in Germany, they didn't import British economists and financiers. They imported British builders, because that's where there was a labour shortage. As long as we continue giving a massive percentage of 18 year olds the belief that it is their right to go to University, and continue to have a commercial market in degrees now because the students pay for them, then we're going to have a lot of graduate with no graduate employment who consider manual work to be beneath them.
DeeGee Dec 2015 3:37pm, 18 Dec 2015 16,857 posts	0 DeeGee Here's one for you. I was born in the UK, educated in the UK and hold a UK passport. I'm British. I'm also a qualified schoolteacher, in Modern Foreign Languages, which required, as you are no doubt aware, a four year Undergraduate Degree and a year of postgraduate study. I taught a shortage subject, in a career area where recruitment is tough, in a location where recruitment is tough. Many British schools are staffed in part with foreign-trained teachers, from countries such as Canada, and they are often preferred over British ones, because a fully-qualified British teacher automatically commands a higher wage than an overseas-trained teacher, because they are considered for the first two years to be "unqualified". Canada is awash with teachers, it's almost impossible to get into the profession over there. there's loads of space here. Should I choose to return to the classroom, in a straight contest against a Canadian, me on nearly 30 grand, them on about 20 grand, who do you think would get the job? There's no value in arguing with me that we can't fill shortages of skilled staff from outside the EU while we are in the EU, because in my experience it's just not the case.
Shadowless Formless Legs Dec 2015 7:01pm, 18 Dec 2015 373 posts	0 Shadowless Formless Legs "It's like it used to be in Germany, they didn't import British economists and financiers. They imported British builders, because that's where there was a labour shortage." - and that's exactly the point. They imported the people they needed. Not just anyone who happened to turn up. If we don't need talent from outside the EU, why were the non EU immigration figures 290,000 prior to the introduction of the cap? All of these 290,000 would have been recruited to fill vacancies.
Shadowless Formless Legs Dec 2015 7:50pm, 18 Dec 2015 374 posts	0 Shadowless Formless Legs Also this article seems to contradict your point and shows that the cap is actually preventing skilled vacancies from being filled from outside the EU (and specifically within the teaching profession) : independent.co.uk
DeeGee Dec 2015 9:38pm, 18 Dec 2015 16,858 posts	0 DeeGee But these migrants aren't coming here speculatively to join a line outside the labour exchange. They have jobs lined up before they come. They are filling vacancies. Maybe I'm deluded (clearly I've made up these teachers coming from the Commonwealth to fill our hard-to-fill teaching vacancies in run-down coastal towns), but if the best the employers can manage to recruit is folk with limited command of the language and culture then I can only assume that the quality of the British candidates is pretty poor. You do still have to do an interview before being given a job, don't you?
DeeGee Dec 2015 9:45pm, 18 Dec 2015 16,859 posts	0 DeeGee And I didn't say we don't need talent from outside the EU. What I said was you can't expect a job in the UK if there's no need for you, regardless of where you are from. There's work for builders and plumbers (and some of them come from Poland, for instance), but if there's no vacancy for you, then you won't get a job, whether we're in the EU or no. After all, one of the most important economists in the country is a Canadian.
Shadowless Formless Legs Dec 2015 11:12pm, 18 Dec 2015 375 posts	0 Shadowless Formless Legs I'm not saying that you are making up teachers coming from outside the EU. Quite the opposite infact, it seems that we are in desperate need of them theguardian.com but can't recruit enough due to caps on non EU recruitment. That's the whole point of what I'm saying. I haven't seen anything to persuade me that all EU migrants come here with a job already lined up. I work downstairs from a recruitment agency and they have a never ending stream of EU migrants who are speculatively looking for work, so the line outside the labour exchange is exactly what they are joining. I don't really understand how you can argue that a system where anyone can just turn up hoping to find a job is better than a system where we could actively manage immigration to suit the needs of the economy.
simbil Feb 2016 12:07pm, 2 Feb 2016 7,150 posts	0 simbil Cameron's wheeler dealing has produced a bit of something: bbc.com
DeeGee Feb 2016 12:35pm, 2 Feb 2016 16,950 posts	0 DeeGee So we're going to be on the hard-shoulder of a three-speed Europe, allowing our government to block any legislation which could protect us but doesn't fit in with its own unpublished agenda (because I sure as hell don't believe that this government would have allowed the Working Time Directive, for example), and without addressing our own fundamental issue that no British employer should be permitted to pay employees so little that they have to be bailed out by the state. Still, I'd rather be the Austin Allegro on the hard shoulder with the bonnet up than still sitting on my driveway waving my fist at passing pedestrians.