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Thursday, 04 August 2011 21:25

Further thoughts

Well that stirred up a reply or two, herewith my response....

There are perhaps 100m people on this planet in various conflict zones who could reasonably claim asylum here, and there are perhaps 1bn who would like to move here as economic migrants given the chance.


 These small islands already have one of the highest population densities on the planet. We cannot feed ourselves from the available land and I see massive encroachment and building work in progress on much of our remaining green spaces and farmland. I also notice massive soil erosion in many of our heritage sites and we have apparently such insurmountable waste disposal problems now that we have to ship it abroad.


I cannot therefore support further immigration. I have no racist or ethnic agenda, I just don't think we should let anymore people in, from any category, on a permanent basis, although I'm not opposed to a certain amount of tourism and some short -term work permits, plus immigration of partners in the case of genuine marriage or civil partnership. It would seem humanitarian to let political refugees in, but we simply don't have the facilities, rather we should consider arming them and giving them all affordable possible fire support to democratise their homelands.


I do not agree with the principle that we may need some 'indespensible' specialists, surely we can fill any conceivable vacancy from our existing 67 odd million, if not we should adjust our education system and our ridiculous benefits system accordingly. We already have substantial unemployment. Plus imported labour tends to depress real wages, to the capitalist's delight.


Further importation of skilled people will only exacerbate skill shortages and inequalities in developing nations. Poland for example has in the last decade lost 1m of its most dynamic people, who are predicted never to return.


As a small scale entreprenneur let me assure you that the free movement of capital is largely illusory, no significant amount of capital ever moves internationally without political approval, the same applies to labour, try getting a job in France, friends of mine have tried and failed.
I think the current EU financial crisis demonstrates that you cannot 'Globalise' divergent systems sucessfully even on a European wide basis.

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