The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
- Most developed countries have below-replacement child rates from citizens
- Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
- Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation, wealth disparities and concentration of poverty, and structural limits to economic prosperity.
Fighting immigration is just shooting oneself in their demographic foot. (See Japan and Russia)
> The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
The UK has had increased (net) immigration for decades, including a huge jump in the past few years[0]. The population grew commensurately, likely mostly due to immigration, since as you accurately point out the birth rate is low; there are roughly 13% more people in the UK now than 20 years ago. Why, then, has the GDP per capita flatlined in the same timeframe? Where is the growth that immigration is supposed to fuel?
> Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
This is a core neoliberal claim that smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
> The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation
By all means, let's have that discussion! If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
But the same neoliberalism that supported increased immigration to developed countries on these economic grounds also morphed into a dual prong of claiming that diversity is our greatest strength and that it's racist to expect immigrants to have to conform to their new host culture. Both attitudes are directly at odds with assimilation and acculturation.
Other wealth European nations that took in a lot of immigrants, mostly from grossly incompatible cultures, have seen concerning increases in violent crime and other things deleterious to social cohesion and quality of life.
> (See Japan and Russia)
Japan's population has been shrinking since 2010; its GDP per capita has been treading water for even longer, since the early 90s. Similar story for Russia, whose population has been flip-flopping from growing and shrinking for a few decades, and whose GDP per capita hasn't seen any sustained growth since the late 2000s.
So it's entirely possible to have a stagnant economy, whether or not you receive immigrants.
> Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
This is about the only unarguably true statement you made. A nation composed of too many nonworking people receiving transfer payments from working people cannot exist in that state for long.
> If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
What? This isn't remotely true. Anti-immigrant sentiment is deliberately induced, because they're an easy target—it has nothing to do with how well they do or don't acculturate. Although, anti-immigrant sentiment does make acculturation more difficult as well—which hey, makes it even easier to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment!
Why the artificial constraint of assuming technology is constant? In not necessarily one to hope that tech will automatically bail us out, of the growth in the previous decades has been from tech innovations like automation.
Technology has a ceiling for a given time, across the world, which is really what you're competing with in a globalized economy.
Which is to say that more technology isn't a solution out of a demographic hole, when you're competing with a country that has the same technology and better demographics.
You think the relentless replacement of UK services by unhinged sovereign wealth funds is caused by 'uncontrolled immigration'? I'll have to study this more.
Ah yes the migration boogieman. migrants are simultaneously uneducated and abusing the welfare system, but also take away people's jobs and push up house prices so that "ordinary" people can't afford houses anymore. Never mind that those accusations are contradictory.
UK was the only EU member not part of the Schengen Zone as-in it was the only member you couldn't freely immigrate to. As well as it's an island, nobody hoping a boat from Morocco and landing in London.
Pakistani's aren't taking your job. The economy is just stagnating.
Post-Pandemic is a huge anomaly [1] but the article is talking about stuff pre-2019.
> it was the only member you couldn't freely immigrate to
Aside from not being the only nation outside of Schengen, Schengen only implies freedom from borders checks. As an EU citizen you could still emigrate freely (or as freely as anywhere else in the EU) to a non-Schengen countries. I know I did.
Ireland was also not in Schengen. And still isn't due to being bound to the CTA with the UK in the good Friday agreement. Cyprus also. And Romania and Bulgaria weren't in it until last year.
Actually both the UK and Ireland were the only two EU members not part of the Schengen Zone (opt-outs since 1997). Since UK Brexit'ed in 2020, that just leaves Ireland.
They're taking large portions of Bradford, Leeds etc.
Also, the boat can go from Morocco to Ceuta, and its cargo can be delivered via lorry across the Channel.
> Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
"Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric.
And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control.
[0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
> It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
This resistance falls away quickly when food price inflation spirals out of control because you cannot find cheap labour for your harvests. (In 2025, there are zero highly developed nations, (yes, including Japan!) that do not heavily depend upon seasonal migrant labour to help with harvests.) Same when sick and elderly people have unreasonably long wait times at clinic or hospital due to doctor/nurse shortage.
yeah, because despite the UK training a huge number of doctors and nurses, the government doesn't want to pay them enough to stop them emigrating the the US or Australia, which have a lot of demand and much higher wages. So then they try to import health workers from elsewhere. Great plan.
Not to take the spotlight away from the UK, but I am pretty sure that all highly developed nations are struggling to find enough nurses amongst their citizens. Even Japan (gasp) has a special programme to help foreigners learn Japanese and immigrate as a skilled nurse.
