UK Politics

The problem is that this is a poisoned dogwhistle topic. In general, immigration on average has a positive effect on the economies the people are migrating to; however, the people who want to create in group/out group dynamics are keen to use immigrants as a scapegoat to blame for the failings of a country.

For every grooming gang or place of congragation of immigrants unwilling to assimilate, there are many more people just integrating, getting jobs and contributing to the economy with their skills. However, due to news being sensationalised, only the bad apples get the spotlight, people who are looking for an easy solution are shown the bad apples, etc etc.

For a similar topic of study that is less charged, look up statistics on how long people are on benefits for. Are there many scroungers, or do people get jobseeker's allowance through a tough period, find work, and get off benefits? Also bear in mind that whenever you have any kind of system, there will be people looking to abuse it and succeed.

It has been made to be an issue, by people with sinister ulterior motives.

I'm an immigrant. My wife's a more visible immigrant, though she arrived here long before I did. We're both professionals who mind our business, pay our taxes, get on well with the neighbours and support the values that most British people claim to believe in. When we were a young couple, I have clear memories of being harassed by skinheads and encountering more subtle but more pernicious forms of othering too. Our kids grew up here and are fully integrated. And when I see the anti-immigrant demonstrations, I remember those fucking skinheads. It's the same mentality and in some cases, the same people.

Firstly, there's a basic issue with semantics: there's no such thing as an illegal immigrant. You have migrants, who use established immigration pathways to legally enter a country (for example, nurses who get recruited from Singapore to work the the NHS). You also have asylum seekers, the majority of whom have no legal mechanism to enter the country (as until their asylum claim is accepted, they have no right to enter the country) and so who enter the UK through an illegal route (such as crossing the channel on a small boat via a people smuggler).

When I last looked at the statistics, there's a 2/3rds majority in favour of people legally migrating into the country and asylum seekers form a smaller proportion.

The biggest issue with the system as it stands is the delay in processing asylum applications and appeals which has dragged on to take more than a year, the entire length of which time we're obliged to house and feed them. Should a claim be successful, they become a legal migrant to the UK and earn an indefinite right to remain. If its unsuccessful they're returned either to their country of origin or the last safe country they left before entering the UK.

Legal migration is a vital part of our economy, without them we would have not enough nurses, farm workers, care home workers, street sweepers, and all the other jobs that British citizens now no longer are able or willing to do.

Asylum receiving is our legal and moral obligation but the system has been horribly under funded and managed and allowed to become the flash point issue we're now seeing.

Obviously there's going to be some among both the legal migrant community and the asylum seekers who are exploiting the system, there are those who are criminals and paedophiles but we can't use those as an excuse to say "we're closed" despite what an increasingly large proportion of the country (fueled by bad actors and populist demagogues) believe.

At the moment, yes. I was shocked to find out that the enormous cost of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers was actually not made up by Farage - it is costing billions per year (though decreasing, according to the latest numbers) - about £2bn now.

At a time when we're facing fiscal difficulties (only partially self-imposed by the government) this is a lot. So that is one issue I think most people should agree on.

At the same time, these arrivals have increase dramatically - from near 0 in 2019 to 40-50,000 per year nowadays. These crossings are inherently dangerous and discouraging them will save lives.

One way to discourage them is simply to accept asylum applications from other countries. The UK has done this on a tiny scale for years, but because the scale is so small, it doesn't relieve any pressure on illegal crossings in order to seek asylum. The fear is that doing so at a large scale would result in a large burden on the state. I don't know if that fear is valid; you typically see statistics for the economic benefit of migration as a whole, which is swamped by legal migration. It would be reasonable to suspect that those seeking asylum are more likely to need more healthcare, to have fewer skills since there are no skills requirements, or to have dependents perhaps, which would change this equation.

Other ways are to make the crossing less likely to succeed: more enforcement in French waters (aka "smash the gangs", being pursued), physically preventing boats from making it to the UK (worked for Australia, but fraught with danger and difficulties); or to make the asylum process less likely to succeed: send asylum seekers somewhere else (Rwanda, France).

If we care more about the hotels, we need to reduce the backlog. We could do this by improving claims processing (will cost money, probably) or by cutting corners in claims processing (by making the standards stricter or looser so that it's easier to accept or reject someone quickly), but this will annoy people either way. It may be possible to make the case for it though, for example spinning a time limit on identifying where someone comes from as discouraging people who deliberately destroy documents. Whether that's actually a big thing though, I don't know (people do say it is though, so it might not matter for spin purposes).

If we care more about fundamental problems, the asylum system never contended with a scenario where such large numbers of people would be travelling such large distances to try to resettle. The fair way to address the problem is to come up with a formula that takes into account a country's wealth, population, landmass and assigns them a proportion of the world's refugees to accept each year. Instead, globally we rely on the luck of each country's location with respect to dangerous countries and the cost of getting places to apportion asylum seekers, which results in poor, small countries like Lebanon accepting millions, while much wealthier ones take far fewer. Though there's no regulation on it, the purpose of the international asylum system was not, I don't think, to let asylum seekers travel through many countries on the way to the one they prefer to seek refuge in. Given that every single person crossing by small boat is doing this, there is something to be said for trying to address the issue, but it won't get anywhere.

And where exactly can I go to get factual information about this sort of thing?

Basically nowhere. Meaning you can get numbers, but even those are under "don't trust statistics you haven't falsified yourself".

Everyone is working with different sets of assumptions and morals and rules.

There is a tldr at the end.

One economic angle is that "we need immigration" because of jobs. However it's undeniable that any amount of workers, be they "home grown" or immigrants, always increase the supply of labor and therefore drive down the price that people can negotiate. So, naturally, everyone who wants to employ people for cheap or weaken union negotiation leverage will want immigration.

The same economic angle from the other side is that "we need immigration", because there are a number of jobs where not enough people are applying and working and the economy and society as a whole does depend on that work being done.

One option is to not allow immigration, let prices rise, which will price out some people out of some services (like elderly care), but will also raise the standard of living for the workers working those jobs.

The other option is to allow immigration, keep prices low and affordable, but also implicitly exploits people doing the work and keeps them with less negotiation power.

Which is which, is up to you.

Then there is the moral / integration angle.

On the one hand, taking people in, when they need help is good. That's the basis for the Asylum system.

On the other hand, what actually is the limit of taking people in? Is it 10.000 per year or is it 100.000.000? Clearly some limit does exist, but who sets it?

To use a totally overblown scenario: the government could force people to shelter migrants in their own homes, use bunkbeds and recreate conditions that existed during the industrialization. For some asylum seekers, that would still be an improvement to being persecuted in their countries of origin. But obviously everyone who likes NOT having bunk beds of strangers in their living room, wouldn't like it. In an abstract sense, they would still have a moral obligation to help, but it's difficult to stand by that if it's about people's living rooms.

Some people may say, less than 5 people per living room still leaves plenty of space, for others even 1 is too much. The "limit" is subjective.

And the rest is more or less that issue, although it's not literally about people's living rooms:

• can demands be made of the "guests" and which kind and how many?
• should they work to offset the costs, or (see above) is that problem for the economy?
• do you "set the rules" because it's "your living room" but that's going into the culture bit.

I'm leaving out a huge chunk about culture, but that's also equally subjective.

So is there actually an issue with immigration, or do the people that argue that case actually have it backwards?

It's a problem, because people feel it is a problem and because they voice that. If it's a "fake concern", but "real outrage", the outrage is still a problem for the country, even though the motivation may be nonsense.

It doesn't have to be rational.

There may not be a solution that's acceptable to everyone. If so, how much forcing which perspective is acceptable?