A majority of Britons are concerned about population growth due to mass migration, with 66% concerned about projections of the UK population reaching 85 million by 2046.
43% are “very concerned” about migration-driven population growth, and 42% believe immigration is detrimentally affecting the quality of life in Britain.
Libs consistently try to argue that allowing mass migration of poor people from all over the world is one of the key ways to make a country a better place. Mass immigration is such a sacrosanct position of today’s Left and one of core foundations of their ideological positions that to question it is heresy. The reality is that the facts don’t support that, and it looks like the UK is learning that lesson as well:
Living standards have fallen. Net after tax earnings have gone down, and so have the numbers of self-employed, and participation in the labour market.
There is, however, one set of statistics in which the UK is still booming. Net migration. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, the number of people coming to the UK hit an estimated 672,000 in the year to June, while the figure for the whole of 2022 was revised up to an astonishing 745,000.
…it creates dependency. For more than two decades now the UK has been trapped in a low-skill, low-wage, high immigration cycle. Companies don’t invest in machinery or training because it is always cheaper simply to bring in foreign workers instead. And because they haven’t invested they need more and more people to keep filling all the vacancies. We can’t blame businesses for that. They are simply adapting to the economy they are part of. But it means that the UK remains dependent on more and more cheap foreign workers.
Finally, the economics doesn’t add up. We keep being told that we need immigration as our population ages to fill all the vacancies, and to keep the public finances stable. And yet that is looking less and less true all the time. Professor David Miles, member of the Budget Responsibility Committee at the Office for Budget Responsibility, argued in a paper published in September that very often the overall quality of life is better in countries with static or even shrinking populations. “Predictions of dire effects” from falling populations, he wrote, “are implausible”.
Clearly the economics of bringing in poor people to do low-wage dead-end jobs who will then require various forms of public assistance to support themselves doesn’t add up as pointed out here as well:
There is mounting evidence of the truth of that conclusion. The UK has been running very high levels of net migration for the last 20 years without becoming noticeably richer. Indeed, according to World Bank figures, GDP per capita has fallen from $50,000 in 2007 to $45,000 in 2022. By contrast, Japan, an advanced economy with a shrinking population, and one that has only increased immigration modestly over the last few years, although the country is almost twice the size of the UK), has grown steadily wealthier despite its challenging demographics. As Miles argues, immigration adds to total output, but it also means higher costs in infrastructure and extra state services. Net-net you are not necessarily better off.
