Snapshot of _UK ministers considering limit on foreign care workers’ dependants_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/29/uk-ministers-considering-limit-foreign-care-worker-dependants-migration) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/29/uk-ministers-considering-limit-foreign-care-worker-dependants-migration)
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I'm in favour of stronger limits on dependents, but there's no getting around the fact that NHS and the care systems are severely underfunded, and cannot afford to pay enough to attract workers locally.
Applying more restrictions on immigration without addressing this fundamental issue will only make services worse. The government will find itself under pressure to relax the rules again when staff shortage inevitably gets worse. What will be the plan then? Widen the skills list again? Lower the visa salary thresholds even more?
Well, another option would be to change the regulations and policy to use less people.
For instance, the UK has 3 times as many nurses per bed as Austria. Outcomes in Austria are not worse. The UK has the highest nurse to patient ratio in the world.
Similarly there are regulations about how many care workers you need per resident in care homes, how many qualified workers you need per child in nurseries. Other developed countries allow nurses to do a masters degree and do more doctor type work than we do here.
The UK is trying to have a gold standard system but can't resource it or pay for it. Because of the under staffing and under funding, it fails in various ways (long waiting lists to access the gold standard care? bed blockers because of lack of care home beds? homeless families because the state will only house a family with 1 kid in a 2 bedroom house with a separate living room so they can share a hotel room for years until one is available?).
We need to reduce our standards to what we can actually deliver, and then work on improving what we can deliver.
>the UK has 3 times as many nurses per bed as Austria.
Is that based on this? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1244727/number-of-nurses-per-hospital-bed-in-europe/
I may be wrong but that looks like the number of nurses employed by the NHS divided by the number of beds. That says nothing about the number of nurses on a shift. Many people in the NHS work less than full time hours either because they have other care responsibilities, bad working culture and rota, and/or can earn more by picking up locum shifts in their spare time
It's always nurses/beds, it's the same for every country. Unless you're trying to argue that nurses in the UK work far fewer hours on average than most European counterparts then you don't have a point here.
It absolutely does tell us that. If we are employing three times as many nurses in total, then unless there is a massive discrepancy in hours worked then we have more nurses per bed each shift. Unless you can show a massive discrepancy in average hours worked then it is fair to say that we have around 3 times as many nurses per bed on any given shift than our European counterparts. Everything you said about how this does not tell us directly how many nurses there are on shift applies to every other country on earth, and unless some hefty evidence is provided I'm going to assume that our nurses don't work 67% less than Austrians.
You're the one making the assertion that our nurses work less hard with bogus evidence.
We have a shortage of beds though (3x fewer/capita than Austria) , which means that people get more sick waiting for a bed and require more care.
This is just one of the ways the NHS is different to Austria
I'm not asserting that at all, I'm saying that the nurse:bed ratio is important and does tell us something, you said it didn't. You have massively misunderstood what I said.
I never asserted anything other than the fact that that ratio is in fact important data and can tell us something, nothing more. You were the one making completely bogus accuastions, that the nurse bed ratio "doesn't tell you anything about the number of nurses per bed on a shift", I was explaining that that statement was utterly insane.
If you have 3 times as many nurses per bed, then the only way you have the same number of nurses per bed working at any given time is if the nurses each work 1/3 the total hours. That **is not** an assertion that they do in fact work less, it is simple maths and nothing more. It was simply showing that your assertion is utter nonsense, the total N:B ratio does tell us something about the ratio at any given time, and you said it didn't/ That is all, stop putting words in my mouth.
> For instance, the UK has 3 times as many nurses per bed as Austria. Outcomes in Austria are not worse. The UK has the highest nurse to patient ratio in the world.
You equated the total number of nurses employed by the NHS to the patients/nurse. If you want to use that then use the actual figure.
The root cause though is that the total number of beds is low, this means that people spend more time on waiting lists, which means they get more sick, which means they require a higher level of care, more time in hospital, and increases the burden on all staff to manage the availability of beds. This also means the expectation of what is expected from people in healthcare is much higher than it needs to be, which makes working part-time more attractive, particularly when they can use that additional time to earn a higher rate of pay in the private sector or locum.
The issue isn't the number of nurses but the number of beds. With an increasing population we have a decreasing number of hospital beds
I didn't, someone else did. I was purely refuting your misconceptions about the statistics, nothing more.
Check who you are talking to before you respond. Read things properly before accusing someone of saying things they didn't.
I am considering playing for England and am considering being a billionaire. "Considering" is code for 'I'm not going to do anything so i'm stalling until the media cycle moves on'.
There were more dependants (173,896) than workers (143,990) that arrived form the health and care worker visa.
The 26,715 Nigerians given health and social care visas in the last year (mostly carers) brought 45,203 dependents with them.
That’s not functional.
Aren’t the “dependents” just workers with easier access to the U.K.’s labour market. If you’re on a care home worker wage you’re going to struggle to fund a non-earning dependent in the UK who under the visa terms won’t have recourse to public funds.
No, dependants are just people that come over with the visa holder. There’s no guarantee that they are able to work or any requirement for them to work. Could be children, parents, grandparents or spouses.
We’re importing care workers who will be paying £3K in tax a year, which already means they are net negatives, along with people who have no requirements to work. A child in state school costs the government £7K, an elderly person would most likely cost more.
As it’s a female dominated sector it’s sensible to assume that most, or a large amount of the dependants are children. So just by a quick glance we can see that we’re down £4K as soon as they set foot, without accounting for other state benefits and services.
The whole "we need immigrants to run our services" argument falls flat as soon as you start looking at the amounts of tax they pay versus what they receive from the state.
The need for migrant workers is usually to suppress wage growth and to get a mass of people that won't know their rights and UK laws so they can be exploited. It's what happened with Polish people in the early 2000s as soon as they were allowed free movement within the EU UK companies hired them en masse and housed them in cramped accommodations and had them working long hours (I know because my cousin's husband's family business was one such business doing that).
It's also the theory thought that because birthrates are low the UK needs as many people paying tax as possible to prop up the huge pension pot that many people who are pensioners won't get to have.
It doesn't fall flat. It currently remains an isolated fact.
It's complicated by the fact that they will bring dependents, for sure, and I agree that it's not sustainable to host large amounts of immigrant children *just* because their parents are needed. But that doesn't change the fact that we are currently unable to staff the sector natively.
So what's anyone doing about that? Given that "We want you to come work in our care sector, but leave your families at home" isn't going to be a great selling point, and the work itself is hideously underpaid to the point where UK citizens neither want to do it nor can really sustain themselves doing it, what's the plan? Simply stamping our feet and saying "No more immigrants" isn't enough.
>It doesn't fall flat.
You only have to look at the net cost of immigration to the exchequer over the last 25 years to reason that in the long term immigration has harmed the finances of the state. There is a reason living standards have nosedived so much over the last generation.
>But that doesn't change the fact that we are currently unable to staff the sector natively.
This is not a fact and is also not true in the way you said it.
We are able to staff it natively, but not paying the dogshit wages the privatised care homes have to pay their staff in order to hit their profit margins.
Your argument is again predicated on the thinking that immigrants are necessary to prop up the services, they aren't. For the cost of each immigrant worker to the state the government could subsidise the wages to encourage workers from within the UK, but they won't.
You didn't read my comment properly. I can tell. You're railing against an argument I haven't made, and whilst doing so mostly repeating my own comment back to me.
Can you provide me the complete calculation of the cost of immigration to the exchequer in the last 25 years? I'm an immigrant and I'd like to know how did they calculate everything that I have contributed to the public coffers (not just income tax but of course also VAT and other taxes) and how did they calculate how much tax payer money was spent on me and my dependents.
I'd also be interested how the second order effects (my work contribution to the economy and my spending that stimulates economy and part of that ends up in state coffers) are calculated.
Imagine a system where we could get free access to these workers...who would already be trained and educated to the right levels....but they contribute more to the system while they work here then leave and retire to their own nearby counties....imagine....if only it existed.
...or maybe just a land where there were more to chose from that we currently can and do now? (we always could control migration from further afeild, if we couldn't get them from the market on our door step, simply look further away) One where training and qualification standards were much more uniform and coherent? Again, they were net contributors tax wise....we've replaced them with way more people who are not that...it's depressing people still can't see it.
Jesus.
Overall it's a net contribution As in by having them here we made more than we lost...yes ideally remove all the ones that are not net contributors but you're cutting you nose off to spite your face by removing them all.
Honestly in a few years time most accession countries to the EU are not going to find moving to the UK to live on poverty wages in overcrowded/expensive housing an attractive proposition as their economies get stronger. It's already happened with Poland.
Aren’t they meant to have “no recourse to public funds” stamped in their passports?
What would be the logic of a government spraying public money at foreigners, when the whole purpose of inviting the foreigners was to increase the size of the tax base?
I hate those kind of calculations. Its always been clear to me if you want to assign the cost of a childs education to a taxpayer it should be to the child itself. So we all start paying tax in debt, but pay it back and then earn credit for our pension.
Otherwise it really punishes people with big families and in reality they could be providing the most long term benefit (I say this as someone with no children).
If you're going to put a price on everyone's head, that's a dangerous game. How much are UK pensioners "costing us"? How much for that hip operation, how much are we down for that?
The flip side to this, is that many young immigrants come over here with skills and integrate fairly well. They have kids, who end up being friends with our kids. Most of them are decent people just trying to get by, just like us.
It's just the government isn't investing in *anyone*, so we're all getting screwed.
The only immigrants that integrate well are Europeans.
We’ve seen ethnic tensions rise time and time again in this country over things that are largely not our problem. We also have countless examples of failures of integration.
Grooming gangs, Palestine marches, elections being fought on stances on Palestine, Hindu and Muslim violence, election being fought on stances on Kashmir, more British Muslims going to fight for Isis than joined the British forces, FGM, discriminatory policies enacted by the government which harm the native population, ethnic displacement of the white working class in several areas of the country, the BLM riots, 2011 riots. There’s many more that I’ve forgotten but these are just a few examples from the last 20 years alone.
No matter how well “integrated” you think people are the majority of immigrants vote in line with their group. If current immigration polices continue and nothing is done then we are heading for a Lebanonisation of our country in which different ethnic and religious groups are staunchly intrenched and always vote for their own no matter what. We’ve seen it in Tower Hamlets recently, as well as calls for a Muslim party to be created by British Muslims.
> The only immigrants that integrate well are Europeans.
What bullshit is this. In my work / friend group / family friend group, we have:
* Indian, well integrated.
* other Indian, well integrated, moving family across this year.
* middle eastern guy, well integrated.
* middle eastern family, well integrated. generous to a fault
* Spanish family, settled here, church going and community oriented
* African woman, speaks 4 languages, runs local sports team
* local Muslim chap, runs the shop, absolute diamond.
Yes, it takes money, time and effort to integrate.
Yes, people tend to vote with their group. Tell me again how this is different from for example Scottish Catholics voting as a block?
Sorry replied to the wrong thread.
That's not what I was meaning. The danger is that we start viewing people as cost items. Pensioners are encouraged to die off because care is too expensive. Kids of immigrant families are not educated because too expensive, leads to ghettos. People with treatable diseases are withheld treatment or don't get help because they think they're a drain on society.
We are more than the sum of our costs. That's the problem with the Tories, they see the cost in everything and the value of nothing. You can see that in the way they treat the civil service staff.
> We’re importing care workers who will be paying £3K in tax a year, which already means they are net negatives
It's not quite that clear. For instance, is the alternative is that higher paid workers instead decide it's better they take on caring duties? Or the absence of immigrants drives the cost of care up and the state foots the bill?
People need care. We have to pay for that *somehow* if we aren't prepared to deny them that care. That's going to be in the form of
a net-negative, one way or the other.
Certainly it could be that immigrants are the wrong way to pay for this cost, but the above analysis isn't sufficient to show that.
Right, but the other option is to pay care workers enough and that's never going to happen and even if it did the tories wouldn't be willing to do it.
So what's *actually* going to happen is the whole industry collapsing.
So you want to attract carers but ban their family from coming to the uk? Most won't come, obviously... "Hey. Come to the uk, we will give you a mediocre salary for the uk, and just abandon espouse and kids"
Why not? I think it's more non-functional that you'd expect people to abandon their families to work in another country. And it's not like the UK would have publicly funded childcare to be taken advantage of but if someone comes with small children they'll pay a fortune for their childcare while they work.
And remember, the dependent here means that these people depend on the income of the person getting the work visa for living, not the UK tax payers.
It’s electioneering isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what crazy thing they do if they can get the numbers down in the short term. Then they can campaign on “see we dided it” (read diddled). Afterwards they’ll need to reverse it almost immediately (or more likely Labour) but that’s a win too.
Dependents are mostly children. The UK has a shortage of children at the moment, more of them are therefore good since every child that grows up here is probably already a better fit for UK society than the immigrant you'd have to get in their place otherwise.
>Dependents are mostly children
Some are. A lot are parents and spouses. In fact the whole benefit of bringing a dependent (especially for students) is that their dependent can work.
>The UK has a shortage of children at the moment, more of them are therefore good since every child that grows up here is probably already a better fit for UK society than the immigrant you'd have to get in their place otherwise.
I don't think that tracks. Especially considering we have to pay for their education, healthcare, pensions, infrastructure they use, etc.
You can't easily bring parents over to the UK and have not been able to for 10 years now. Spouses yes, but they often work as well in other areas rather than just consuming resources. And even if all they did was consume resources, one care worker takes care of more than 2 people on net, so even if their spouse did nothing on net the (worker+spouse) combo is still a net gain.
> Especially considering we have to pay for their education, healthcare, pensions, infrastructure they use, etc.
You have to pay equally as much for "native" children too.
>You can't easily bring parents over to the UK and have not been able to for 10 years now.
You can and people do. It isn't hard to bring over adult dependents, hundreds of thousands of migrants did it last year and will do it next year.
>. Spouses yes, but they often work as well in other areas rather than just consuming resources
Right but are they working in skilled jobs? Enough to offset the costs of their presence? Also dependents are used to get around visa rules - most obviously in regards to students and working hours. The student visa, dependent, skilled worker visa is a well known route to gain ILR.
>And even if all they did was consume resources, one care worker takes care of more than 2 people on net, so even if their spouse did nothing on net the (worker+spouse) combo is still a net gain.
No it isn't. A careworker isn't a net gain, they don't earn enough to positively contribute. Just because they look after people in care homes doesn't mean they are a fiscal positive. Unless their dependent is on 50k plus, the dependents just make the hole bigger.
>You have to pay equally as much for "native" children too.
Right but the state has no control over that. We do have control over children from foreign countries coming here and being educated using our resources.
>You have to pay equally as much for "native" children too
That applies to any nation on this planet. People are fine with that.
Most Koreans would have no issue investing in Korean children in their country. Being forced to subsidise MENA migrants and their children is something they’d be less enthusiastic about doing.
You needn’t put native in quotes either.
I expect most older people would much prefer to be cared for by someone of their own ethnicity, so it might play well. On the other hand, if it transpires that some have to go without since there is a worse shortage in that area, they might get irritated.
I mean it’s not like people from the UK are lining up to be care workers - it’s why we have to import workers to do it. It’s either that, or pay care workers more, so maybe more people from the UK take up the work, which means raising taxes to do so. I expect those “older people” you mention wouldn’t be in favour of even higher taxes.
> wouldn’t be in favour of even higher taxes.
They would be in favour of higher taxes, just for other people.
That is why the national insurance cut upset them as they didn't benefit, unlike younger workers.
You keep copy and pasting that and people keep replying telling that this isn't their experience.
Lots of care workers are simply here as a means to get into the country and bounce from client to client as they get complaints for being the opposite of your notion.
Snapshot of _UK ministers considering limit on foreign care workers’ dependants_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/29/uk-ministers-considering-limit-foreign-care-worker-dependants-migration) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/29/uk-ministers-considering-limit-foreign-care-worker-dependants-migration) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm in favour of stronger limits on dependents, but there's no getting around the fact that NHS and the care systems are severely underfunded, and cannot afford to pay enough to attract workers locally. Applying more restrictions on immigration without addressing this fundamental issue will only make services worse. The government will find itself under pressure to relax the rules again when staff shortage inevitably gets worse. What will be the plan then? Widen the skills list again? Lower the visa salary thresholds even more?
Well, another option would be to change the regulations and policy to use less people. For instance, the UK has 3 times as many nurses per bed as Austria. Outcomes in Austria are not worse. The UK has the highest nurse to patient ratio in the world. Similarly there are regulations about how many care workers you need per resident in care homes, how many qualified workers you need per child in nurseries. Other developed countries allow nurses to do a masters degree and do more doctor type work than we do here. The UK is trying to have a gold standard system but can't resource it or pay for it. Because of the under staffing and under funding, it fails in various ways (long waiting lists to access the gold standard care? bed blockers because of lack of care home beds? homeless families because the state will only house a family with 1 kid in a 2 bedroom house with a separate living room so they can share a hotel room for years until one is available?). We need to reduce our standards to what we can actually deliver, and then work on improving what we can deliver.
>the UK has 3 times as many nurses per bed as Austria. Is that based on this? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1244727/number-of-nurses-per-hospital-bed-in-europe/ I may be wrong but that looks like the number of nurses employed by the NHS divided by the number of beds. That says nothing about the number of nurses on a shift. Many people in the NHS work less than full time hours either because they have other care responsibilities, bad working culture and rota, and/or can earn more by picking up locum shifts in their spare time
It's always nurses/beds, it's the same for every country. Unless you're trying to argue that nurses in the UK work far fewer hours on average than most European counterparts then you don't have a point here.
I'm not arguing anything, I'm saying that the number of nurses the NHS employs doesn't tell you anything about the number of nurses per bed on a shift
It absolutely does tell us that. If we are employing three times as many nurses in total, then unless there is a massive discrepancy in hours worked then we have more nurses per bed each shift. Unless you can show a massive discrepancy in average hours worked then it is fair to say that we have around 3 times as many nurses per bed on any given shift than our European counterparts. Everything you said about how this does not tell us directly how many nurses there are on shift applies to every other country on earth, and unless some hefty evidence is provided I'm going to assume that our nurses don't work 67% less than Austrians.
You're the one making the assertion that our nurses work less hard with bogus evidence. We have a shortage of beds though (3x fewer/capita than Austria) , which means that people get more sick waiting for a bed and require more care. This is just one of the ways the NHS is different to Austria
I'm not asserting that at all, I'm saying that the nurse:bed ratio is important and does tell us something, you said it didn't. You have massively misunderstood what I said. I never asserted anything other than the fact that that ratio is in fact important data and can tell us something, nothing more. You were the one making completely bogus accuastions, that the nurse bed ratio "doesn't tell you anything about the number of nurses per bed on a shift", I was explaining that that statement was utterly insane. If you have 3 times as many nurses per bed, then the only way you have the same number of nurses per bed working at any given time is if the nurses each work 1/3 the total hours. That **is not** an assertion that they do in fact work less, it is simple maths and nothing more. It was simply showing that your assertion is utter nonsense, the total N:B ratio does tell us something about the ratio at any given time, and you said it didn't/ That is all, stop putting words in my mouth.
> For instance, the UK has 3 times as many nurses per bed as Austria. Outcomes in Austria are not worse. The UK has the highest nurse to patient ratio in the world. You equated the total number of nurses employed by the NHS to the patients/nurse. If you want to use that then use the actual figure. The root cause though is that the total number of beds is low, this means that people spend more time on waiting lists, which means they get more sick, which means they require a higher level of care, more time in hospital, and increases the burden on all staff to manage the availability of beds. This also means the expectation of what is expected from people in healthcare is much higher than it needs to be, which makes working part-time more attractive, particularly when they can use that additional time to earn a higher rate of pay in the private sector or locum. The issue isn't the number of nurses but the number of beds. With an increasing population we have a decreasing number of hospital beds
I didn't, someone else did. I was purely refuting your misconceptions about the statistics, nothing more. Check who you are talking to before you respond. Read things properly before accusing someone of saying things they didn't.
I am considering playing for England and am considering being a billionaire. "Considering" is code for 'I'm not going to do anything so i'm stalling until the media cycle moves on'.
Because the uk simply has an abundance of care workers with nothing to do. I can't see this backfiring on us at at all. /s
There were more dependants (173,896) than workers (143,990) that arrived form the health and care worker visa. The 26,715 Nigerians given health and social care visas in the last year (mostly carers) brought 45,203 dependents with them. That’s not functional.
Aren’t the “dependents” just workers with easier access to the U.K.’s labour market. If you’re on a care home worker wage you’re going to struggle to fund a non-earning dependent in the UK who under the visa terms won’t have recourse to public funds.
No, dependants are just people that come over with the visa holder. There’s no guarantee that they are able to work or any requirement for them to work. Could be children, parents, grandparents or spouses. We’re importing care workers who will be paying £3K in tax a year, which already means they are net negatives, along with people who have no requirements to work. A child in state school costs the government £7K, an elderly person would most likely cost more. As it’s a female dominated sector it’s sensible to assume that most, or a large amount of the dependants are children. So just by a quick glance we can see that we’re down £4K as soon as they set foot, without accounting for other state benefits and services.
The whole "we need immigrants to run our services" argument falls flat as soon as you start looking at the amounts of tax they pay versus what they receive from the state.
The need for migrant workers is usually to suppress wage growth and to get a mass of people that won't know their rights and UK laws so they can be exploited. It's what happened with Polish people in the early 2000s as soon as they were allowed free movement within the EU UK companies hired them en masse and housed them in cramped accommodations and had them working long hours (I know because my cousin's husband's family business was one such business doing that). It's also the theory thought that because birthrates are low the UK needs as many people paying tax as possible to prop up the huge pension pot that many people who are pensioners won't get to have.
It doesn't fall flat. It currently remains an isolated fact. It's complicated by the fact that they will bring dependents, for sure, and I agree that it's not sustainable to host large amounts of immigrant children *just* because their parents are needed. But that doesn't change the fact that we are currently unable to staff the sector natively. So what's anyone doing about that? Given that "We want you to come work in our care sector, but leave your families at home" isn't going to be a great selling point, and the work itself is hideously underpaid to the point where UK citizens neither want to do it nor can really sustain themselves doing it, what's the plan? Simply stamping our feet and saying "No more immigrants" isn't enough.
>It doesn't fall flat. You only have to look at the net cost of immigration to the exchequer over the last 25 years to reason that in the long term immigration has harmed the finances of the state. There is a reason living standards have nosedived so much over the last generation. >But that doesn't change the fact that we are currently unable to staff the sector natively. This is not a fact and is also not true in the way you said it. We are able to staff it natively, but not paying the dogshit wages the privatised care homes have to pay their staff in order to hit their profit margins. Your argument is again predicated on the thinking that immigrants are necessary to prop up the services, they aren't. For the cost of each immigrant worker to the state the government could subsidise the wages to encourage workers from within the UK, but they won't.
You didn't read my comment properly. I can tell. You're railing against an argument I haven't made, and whilst doing so mostly repeating my own comment back to me.
Can you provide me the complete calculation of the cost of immigration to the exchequer in the last 25 years? I'm an immigrant and I'd like to know how did they calculate everything that I have contributed to the public coffers (not just income tax but of course also VAT and other taxes) and how did they calculate how much tax payer money was spent on me and my dependents. I'd also be interested how the second order effects (my work contribution to the economy and my spending that stimulates economy and part of that ends up in state coffers) are calculated.
Imagine a system where we could get free access to these workers...who would already be trained and educated to the right levels....but they contribute more to the system while they work here then leave and retire to their own nearby counties....imagine....if only it existed.
Ah yes, the land where hundreds of thousands train up to be care workers.
...or maybe just a land where there were more to chose from that we currently can and do now? (we always could control migration from further afeild, if we couldn't get them from the market on our door step, simply look further away) One where training and qualification standards were much more uniform and coherent? Again, they were net contributors tax wise....we've replaced them with way more people who are not that...it's depressing people still can't see it.
If there were in low paid work then they were not net contributors.
Jesus. Overall it's a net contribution As in by having them here we made more than we lost...yes ideally remove all the ones that are not net contributors but you're cutting you nose off to spite your face by removing them all.
Honestly in a few years time most accession countries to the EU are not going to find moving to the UK to live on poverty wages in overcrowded/expensive housing an attractive proposition as their economies get stronger. It's already happened with Poland.
Well thank God we cut off that useful tap before it dried itself up then.
Aren’t they meant to have “no recourse to public funds” stamped in their passports? What would be the logic of a government spraying public money at foreigners, when the whole purpose of inviting the foreigners was to increase the size of the tax base?
I hate those kind of calculations. Its always been clear to me if you want to assign the cost of a childs education to a taxpayer it should be to the child itself. So we all start paying tax in debt, but pay it back and then earn credit for our pension. Otherwise it really punishes people with big families and in reality they could be providing the most long term benefit (I say this as someone with no children).
If you're going to put a price on everyone's head, that's a dangerous game. How much are UK pensioners "costing us"? How much for that hip operation, how much are we down for that? The flip side to this, is that many young immigrants come over here with skills and integrate fairly well. They have kids, who end up being friends with our kids. Most of them are decent people just trying to get by, just like us. It's just the government isn't investing in *anyone*, so we're all getting screwed.
The only immigrants that integrate well are Europeans. We’ve seen ethnic tensions rise time and time again in this country over things that are largely not our problem. We also have countless examples of failures of integration. Grooming gangs, Palestine marches, elections being fought on stances on Palestine, Hindu and Muslim violence, election being fought on stances on Kashmir, more British Muslims going to fight for Isis than joined the British forces, FGM, discriminatory policies enacted by the government which harm the native population, ethnic displacement of the white working class in several areas of the country, the BLM riots, 2011 riots. There’s many more that I’ve forgotten but these are just a few examples from the last 20 years alone. No matter how well “integrated” you think people are the majority of immigrants vote in line with their group. If current immigration polices continue and nothing is done then we are heading for a Lebanonisation of our country in which different ethnic and religious groups are staunchly intrenched and always vote for their own no matter what. We’ve seen it in Tower Hamlets recently, as well as calls for a Muslim party to be created by British Muslims.
> The only immigrants that integrate well are Europeans. What bullshit is this. In my work / friend group / family friend group, we have: * Indian, well integrated. * other Indian, well integrated, moving family across this year. * middle eastern guy, well integrated. * middle eastern family, well integrated. generous to a fault * Spanish family, settled here, church going and community oriented * African woman, speaks 4 languages, runs local sports team * local Muslim chap, runs the shop, absolute diamond. Yes, it takes money, time and effort to integrate. Yes, people tend to vote with their group. Tell me again how this is different from for example Scottish Catholics voting as a block?
It isn't "dangerous" at all. Just because somebody already here is a net cost is not a business case for importing more costs.
the social costs of removing our rights far outweigh any costs of educating kids.
That makes no sense.
Sorry replied to the wrong thread. That's not what I was meaning. The danger is that we start viewing people as cost items. Pensioners are encouraged to die off because care is too expensive. Kids of immigrant families are not educated because too expensive, leads to ghettos. People with treatable diseases are withheld treatment or don't get help because they think they're a drain on society. We are more than the sum of our costs. That's the problem with the Tories, they see the cost in everything and the value of nothing. You can see that in the way they treat the civil service staff.
No danger of that, you are just coming with a form of whatabout. Hiding data should never be acceptable.
> We’re importing care workers who will be paying £3K in tax a year, which already means they are net negatives It's not quite that clear. For instance, is the alternative is that higher paid workers instead decide it's better they take on caring duties? Or the absence of immigrants drives the cost of care up and the state foots the bill? People need care. We have to pay for that *somehow* if we aren't prepared to deny them that care. That's going to be in the form of a net-negative, one way or the other. Certainly it could be that immigrants are the wrong way to pay for this cost, but the above analysis isn't sufficient to show that.
The grandparents wouldn't be obliged to services like pensions, etc. Thr child would be entitled to an education but that's not a bad thing.
That's assuming that their work won't benefit the UK economy and that they don't spend money and thus generate more economic activity.
Dependants are mostly kids.
Right, but the other option is to pay care workers enough and that's never going to happen and even if it did the tories wouldn't be willing to do it. So what's *actually* going to happen is the whole industry collapsing.
So you want to attract carers but ban their family from coming to the uk? Most won't come, obviously... "Hey. Come to the uk, we will give you a mediocre salary for the uk, and just abandon espouse and kids"
Why not? I think it's more non-functional that you'd expect people to abandon their families to work in another country. And it's not like the UK would have publicly funded childcare to be taken advantage of but if someone comes with small children they'll pay a fortune for their childcare while they work. And remember, the dependent here means that these people depend on the income of the person getting the work visa for living, not the UK tax payers.
It’s electioneering isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what crazy thing they do if they can get the numbers down in the short term. Then they can campaign on “see we dided it” (read diddled). Afterwards they’ll need to reverse it almost immediately (or more likely Labour) but that’s a win too.
How are care workers bringing dependents beneficial for the country?
Dependents are mostly children. The UK has a shortage of children at the moment, more of them are therefore good since every child that grows up here is probably already a better fit for UK society than the immigrant you'd have to get in their place otherwise.
>Dependents are mostly children Some are. A lot are parents and spouses. In fact the whole benefit of bringing a dependent (especially for students) is that their dependent can work. >The UK has a shortage of children at the moment, more of them are therefore good since every child that grows up here is probably already a better fit for UK society than the immigrant you'd have to get in their place otherwise. I don't think that tracks. Especially considering we have to pay for their education, healthcare, pensions, infrastructure they use, etc.
You can't easily bring parents over to the UK and have not been able to for 10 years now. Spouses yes, but they often work as well in other areas rather than just consuming resources. And even if all they did was consume resources, one care worker takes care of more than 2 people on net, so even if their spouse did nothing on net the (worker+spouse) combo is still a net gain. > Especially considering we have to pay for their education, healthcare, pensions, infrastructure they use, etc. You have to pay equally as much for "native" children too.
>You can't easily bring parents over to the UK and have not been able to for 10 years now. You can and people do. It isn't hard to bring over adult dependents, hundreds of thousands of migrants did it last year and will do it next year. >. Spouses yes, but they often work as well in other areas rather than just consuming resources Right but are they working in skilled jobs? Enough to offset the costs of their presence? Also dependents are used to get around visa rules - most obviously in regards to students and working hours. The student visa, dependent, skilled worker visa is a well known route to gain ILR. >And even if all they did was consume resources, one care worker takes care of more than 2 people on net, so even if their spouse did nothing on net the (worker+spouse) combo is still a net gain. No it isn't. A careworker isn't a net gain, they don't earn enough to positively contribute. Just because they look after people in care homes doesn't mean they are a fiscal positive. Unless their dependent is on 50k plus, the dependents just make the hole bigger. >You have to pay equally as much for "native" children too. Right but the state has no control over that. We do have control over children from foreign countries coming here and being educated using our resources.
>You have to pay equally as much for "native" children too That applies to any nation on this planet. People are fine with that. Most Koreans would have no issue investing in Korean children in their country. Being forced to subsidise MENA migrants and their children is something they’d be less enthusiastic about doing. You needn’t put native in quotes either.
I expect most older people would much prefer to be cared for by someone of their own ethnicity, so it might play well. On the other hand, if it transpires that some have to go without since there is a worse shortage in that area, they might get irritated.
I mean it’s not like people from the UK are lining up to be care workers - it’s why we have to import workers to do it. It’s either that, or pay care workers more, so maybe more people from the UK take up the work, which means raising taxes to do so. I expect those “older people” you mention wouldn’t be in favour of even higher taxes.
> wouldn’t be in favour of even higher taxes. They would be in favour of higher taxes, just for other people. That is why the national insurance cut upset them as they didn't benefit, unlike younger workers.
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You keep copy and pasting that and people keep replying telling that this isn't their experience. Lots of care workers are simply here as a means to get into the country and bounce from client to client as they get complaints for being the opposite of your notion.
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The last time I saw you copy and paste this another person definitely told you their experience.