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Uber Member
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Woking
Posts: 32,078
Party: Libertarian Party
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Godfrey Bloom writes in the Yorkshire Post about immigration
http://www.ukip.org/ukip_news/gen12.php?t=1&id=2806
Quote:
Can immigrants resist the corruption of the welfare state?
1 January 2007
(c) 2007 Johnston Publishing Limited
GODFREY BLOOM
Godfrey Bloom is a United Kingdom Independence Party MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber.
IT is, of course, well known that you will usually find three opinions when you get two economists together. Nothing
re-enforces this belief more than speculation on the economic benefits of immigration.
Let me nail my colours to the mast straight away. I am an unreconstructed Adam Smithite and I believe in the mobility of both labour and capital. I married into a Polish immigrant family, albeit they were not economic migrants but wartime allies displaced in 1945.
So, if I come to the subject as a financial economist with any
predisposed position, it is in favour of immigration per se.
There is a strong historical perspective on the phenomenon, both ancient and modern. It is generally accepted that the Huguenots, who came to our shores over 300 years ago, were a tremendous economic and social benefit to the English economy. They brought an infinite variety of skills and made a significant contribution in the more liberal economic climate of England.
As such, the economic case for immigration has historic - and sound - foundations. However, I do not accept that what is happening today, with Bulgaria and Romania the latest countries to join the European Union, has any historically accurate precedent.
What is it then that makes the present situation different? In a word, welfare. Welfare is a dynamic which poisons the well of natural economic growth and social cohesion. It maintains a small but significant group of people in a twilight world of state dependency.
It is a form of subsistence dwelling reminiscent of the dark ages only without the moral value of human endeavour. It undermines self-worth and continues a downward spiral into the abyss of drugs and violence reflected everywhere in our inner city estates.
What has this to do with immigration? It seems to be accepted by most political and economic commentators that immigrants, half of whom come from Eastern Europe, are doing the jobs the Brits will not do. I think it is difficult to dispute this if one looks at the Government figures - 37 per cent work in factories and 10 per cent in warehouses, with the remainder breaking down almost equally into cleaners, packers, farm workers, waiters.
Now bear in mind that 24 per cent of employable Britons do not work. At the risk of horrifying "Dave" Cameron's "not the Conservative Party", I would suggest a very high proportion of this figure are shirkers and lead swingers. Therefore, immigrants are simply doing the jobs that these people have no interest in doing. Why get up at dawn to pick sprouts in freezing weather for the minimum wage when you could lie on the sofa watching daytime TV?
How long will today's immigrant resist the corruption of the welfare state? Under European law, the eastern EU immigrant is entitled to the same so-called benefits as the indigenous population after a relatively short qualifying period.
Indeed, the Government's own statistics show 10 per cent have already succumbed to this temptation.
So, at this stage of the British economic cycle, we see the "fool's gold" of immigrant-driven economic benefit in sustained GDP growth. But for how long? Unemployment is already at a seven-year high. Take out those on fake disability benefit, and those working in Gordon Brown's non-jobs, and the number of people not working is at a frighteningly high level.
Let us, therefore, look at a new system. We need to be absolutely sure that the incomer is not doing a job that can be undertaken by a current citizen of the UK. We need to do away with an open border policy that means we do not know who has come in, or indeed, left the country; even the notorious Ellis Island in New York had some sort of crude system in the last century.
Let citizenship be based on work and behavioural records. Finally, when we look for "skills", perhaps we should question the moral implications of sucking highly trained individuals from emerging countries to do
menial jobs in welfare dependency states. Should fully qualified nurses, for example, be serving tea and coffee on the Gatwick Express? That is the sort of grotesque situation you get when you mix mass immigration with an anachronistic economic system.
So things are never quite what they seem. For it is an interesting paradox that Poland, for example, is now trying to acquire workers from Romania to replace those leaving to take up more lucrative work in the UK. And Moldavians, perhaps, will move to fill the vacancies left when Romanians come to the UK and western Europe, as they surely will.
What happens when the music stops and some economic force takes away a few chairs? Where will we all sit?
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08-01-2007, 03:30 PM
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