orlared: 'Failure to control immigration was key driver for Brexit and utterly unsustainable'
Journalist Isabel Oakeshott says the number of people coming to the UK is 'utterly unsustainable'. She remarked on Question Time that "the failure to control immigration has been an absolute disaster for this country" and "Labour and remainer types who are desperate to stop Brexit should look to themselves for their deplorable record on immigration as one of the key drivers for people voting to get out of the EU." She said nearly 300,000 people immigrated to the UK every year and continued "while it suits employers because it depresses wages, it is the people at the bottom who end up suffering the most".
Celebrity economist David McWilliams has expressed similar remarks about Ireland writing:
"But there’s the rub. Immigration is a class issue. Immigrants by definition compete with the poorest local people in the job market, in the housing market and for access to health and schools. This is a fact.
Economists tend to miss the central point, of immigration which is that while the economy might get workers, society gets people. Therefore the technocratic language of the economy is not able to deal with the totality of immigration and can’t deal with the fact that there are winners and losers in this game.
If you have, like me, the luxury of writing for the newspapers and working as an economist, there’s little chance that a new immigrant will take your job. If, on the other hand, I am labouring on the sites or working in a bar, there’s a serious chance that my wages and job security will be affected by new people coming into the country looking for work.
So for the relatively wealthy, immigration has been a boon. There are more taxi drivers, more cleaners, more shop assistants, more nannies; in short, the service economy, the one that services the relative wealthy, booms. But are wages in that sector booming? No.
The relatively wealthy don’t have to worry about immigrants pushing up rents because, frankly, the immigrants can’t afford to live in posh areas, so they compete for housing not with the relatively wealthy, but with the relatively poor.
It’s a similar story in schools. Immigrant kids don’t, by and large, go to private schools. They go to state schools where they compete for the state’s resources with Irish citizens.
These are the facts. Immigration is a class issue, and the richer you are, the greater the luxury you have to pontificate about immigration because you are not affected – or if you are, you are affected positively.
When the relatively poor – those who are threatened by immigrants – voice their concerns, it is far too easy for the rich to dismiss these people as “racist’ or “xenophobic”, whereas maybe they are just voicing everyday real concerns."
Broadcast: Question Time BBC | 04 October 2018
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=XYpWiAPXY4c
https://www.invidio.us/channel/UCgzyycFR6PEv-B90rAiFsQg
