The coalition government wants to set an “annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work”.
Immigration isn’t the problem it’s made out to be. The angle that the government is working is that immigrants will take your job, and the government will protect you from that. It’s the lump of labour fallacy. In the end, the more people there are, the more jobs there are to do. This is self evident: there are millions more people living in the UK than a hundred years ago and they are not all unemployed. The more people there are, the more people go out to restaurants, so the more waiters need to be employed. More fundamentally, a “job” is just a specialisation, something you get someone else to do because they can do it better or more cheaply or more conveniently than you can do it yourself. People will always do things for each other no matter how many people there are.
There are dynamics to the situation. Sudden changes in the make-up of the population can cause problems for some. If you’re a plumber, and lots of plumbers move from Poland and are prepared to do the same work as you for less money, I can see why you’d be worried: you don’t want to lower your prices, increase the quality of your service, or provide a different service. The government talks about limiting immigration because it wants your vote. But doing so doesn’t help people in general. The sudden influx of cheap plumbers is good for me: I get my plumbing done for less. And I have money left to spend on something else, so whoever provides the something else benefits too.
You can’t pretend that limits to immigration are good for “the economy”. No overall good is done by limiting immigration. It helps one group (the incumbent plumbers), but only at the expense of other groups (the would-be immigrants and anyone who wants to hire a plumber).
In the long run, freedom of movement makes everyone richer. You could say that it enables labour, like any other commodity, to move to where it is best able to be used. But there’s more to it than that. Being able to move freely is valuable for its own sake. Left alone, people figure out how to improve their lives. That improvement, whatever form it takes, is an increase in wealth. If a Pole wants to move to the UK and do my plumbing, and I want to pay him to do my plumbing, then left alone we are both richer.
If a third party wants to stop us from making that agreement, they have to initiate force. That’s inherently evil. That’s what goverments do: they’re the go to guys if you want evil done to make sure you can continue to charge high prices for your services.
The problem, as always, is the welfare system, in that it exists. Yawn.
Hmmm – the problem here is that you are looking at it purely from an economic perspective and one that ignores the EU immigration/benefits system perfect storm.
To ignore the social and cultural issues is to do the debate a disservice. I’d agree with your post in it’s narrow context but there are a whole heap of more serious aspects that don’t involve a penny.
I mainly wanted to answer the “they’re taking our jobs” argument, as voiced by Mrs Duffy and evoked by the term “economic migrants”. Perhaps I’ll do a follow up post addressing the other angles.
Well said. Speaking as someone who migrated from the UK a quarter-century ago, first to Spain and then to Latin America, I find the “they’re taking our jobs” riff particularly tiresome: if I really did “take someone’s job” in Spain, he or she was just as free to go and take the notional one I left in the UK. When I left Britain, a recent survey among young people stated that 80% “would rather live abroad”. And why not? I tend to think that if the entire population of Britain moved to France and Spain, the same number of French and Spanish moved to the Caribbean islands, and a similar number of those who lived there moved to the UK, the world would be a much happier (and more colourful and multilingual) place. Immigration controls of any kind, in my view, are a pointless anachronism, but it’s depressingly hard to find anyone willing to brave the new political correctness to make this point.