E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Indeed:

Controls? You mean like the controls on the numbers of non-EU immigrants?

"Positive outcome" for those who wish to trade in goods and services? Means what?

Basically it's the same statement of two months ago, repeated.

 

If you take the statement overall it says that we will be leaving the EU unambiguously. That has meaning.

What it doesn't say is what our relationship will be outside the EU with that block. That is the ambiguity.

Yes

 

You do realise that "no attempts to sort of stay in the EU" can mean to wholly stay in the EU and still remain valid as a sentence. It can also mean to wholly leave the EU and remain valid as a sentence. It's ambiguous language. She seems to be quite good at speaking whilst actually saying nothing.

 

When the entire sentence is in context of leaving the EU, considering that she has explicitly said that we are leaving the EU in various other statements[1] and that the very term brexit was coined as shorthand for leaving the EU, it would seem pretty unambiguous to me on the point of leaving.

The brexit means brexit slogan seems to have been made to counter those who somehow think that a vote for leaving the EU meant remaining in the EU, a Brexit means bremain position.


[1] About the only thing she said about the whole central matter in her Birmingham speech launching her campaign was: "There will be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it by the back door, and no second referendum.

"The country voted to leave the European Union, and as prime minister I will make sure that we leave the European Union."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36782922

 

"Controls" can mean anything. It certainly has not reduced non-EU immigration.

More fundamentally, after a big meeting at Chequers, we basically get a repeat of the speech she made in July.

 

Like i said this isn't about the Eurozone, as I've said many time now "I have neither the time or the inclination to discuss Greece's predicament or the Eurozone, mainly because i already know your opinion differs from mine on those two subjects and i feel neither of us are going to alter each others opinions on those two subjects no matter how long we discus them."

Every time you try to link Greece's predicament with the Eurozone you're demonstrating you lack even a basic acceptance of HOW Greece got into it's mess, the only reason they were allowed into the single currency was because they cooked their book and made it look like they had a lower debt to GDP ratio, i mean what part of this don't you understand...

If they hadn't cooked the books they'd never have been allowed entry in the first place.

It maybe part but it's not a policy to build houses, or get people saving, those are policies to incentivise people to do those things, if you can't see the difference between incentivising someone to do something and doing it yourself then you really need to get out in the word.

A housing policy would be something like we're going to build 500k houses a year, a saving policy would be like we're going to take 5% from people wages and lock them away in an ISA, a policy that incentivises is nothing more than an encouragement to do something, i mean we could introduce a policy to incentivise someone to fly to the moon, does that mean we now have a space program?

Nah i don't think so, look right here, you were the one to raise the point of low skilled migrant workers, not me.

And yet most studies have found that the positive or negative impact of migration is less than 1% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

And i miss the day when people didn't play logical fallacy bingo.

 

There's also that the leaders of the 27 EU countries have already made it quite clear that they can see no favorable deal for the UK. What the UK is saying right now 'we want to get access to the single market without freedom of movement', which as Switzerland found out as well simply will not happen.

So the question remains, why would the EU say 'yes' to the UK where they said 'no' to Switzerland, a country which is arguably far more important in Europe than the UK?

Brexit is still nothing but a pleasant masturbatory dream for nationalists, xenophobics and similarly inclined individuals, with no foundation in reality.

 

Everything coming from Government ATM is intended to both placate and prepare the ground.

It's intended to placate the 51.9% who voted to leave, most likely for as long as possible, although if that goes on for another 10-11 months then the likelihood of ever triggering article 50 drops significantly, if article 50 isn't triggered by May 2017 then Brexit is defiantly going to be in long-grass territory.

It's also intended to prepare the ground work for any future negotiations with the EU.

 

Considering EU migration only became significantly positive net after the A8 countries joined in 2004 and we stopped controlling immigration from there I'd say controls work.

What you are doing is looking at RoW migration vs EU migration seeing that they're at similar levels and coming to the conclusion that immigration controls don't work without considering that the EU is only a block of around 500mn people and the rest of the world is over 6500mn people.

And it's that kind of sneering that get's you votes with these results in the first place.

Not to mention the inaccuracy of those labels. If that were the case then a xenophobe now is someone who simply wants to have control over the numbers of immigrants, not someone who thinks all foreigners are bad. That nationalism is now some kind of far right policy of self determination and rule, rather than the kind of nationalism of the Far right of the kind that is inherent in nationalist socialism.

Then cease from discussing it.

The EU themselves bent their own rules for Italy to join, Italy joined with a debt to GDP ratio of around 100%, higher than Greece's at joining. It's not even clear that they'd have been disallowed from joining or, even if they couldn't at that time, joined at a slightly later date. (Cyprus joined in the late 00s and they ended up in a right mess too)

It's the function of an incomplete currency union with no lender of last resort and horrendous competitive imbalances as to WHY this is a problem of the scale it is, not simply cooking the books alone. Even if they got their deficits down to join the EURO, after joining, they'd merely be taking on large amounts of private debt because they'd still have a trade deficit, still would have to finance it and that would have still led to the same problems as are happening now with the exception that individuals can go bankrupt. The whole issue of the Eurozone failings is a lot more complex than just Greece cooked the books.

That's not to mention how obviously political the monetary union was overall rather than economic. The convergence criteria in the Maastricht treaty, IIRC from when I studied this, has only about a third of the conditions that were deemed necessary in Mundell's theory of optimal currency areas, which is one theory economists are quite certain of. And that's not to mention the lack of auditing the EU had in this process of letting members join, considering they were letting a country in that had form for running up unsustainable debts.

That's also not to mention the fact that Eurozone debtor countries have had high unemployment enforced upon them, by the IMF and EU institutions, for the very reason of trying to redress the competitive imbalances that lead to this being a problem by forcing deflationary internal devaluation policies. Not to mention that fact that to redress the balance Germany could help by reducing their own competitiveness through inflationary policies to reduce the burden on the periphery since they caused much of this through beggar thy neighbour policies.

But no, it's none of that is it? Because if it were then that would mean admitting that the EU Is run with no thought for the practicality of its policies and that they have made the greatest policy mistake since the second world war.

Well it's funny how the IFS disagrees with you and from what I personally know the entire economics profession. Actually doing something is merely a policy that is statist.

No one was saying you raised the point. "I raised it as a point to your counterpoint"
See why I think you're complaints about grammar are just a smokescreen for your lack of reading comprehension. The fact that I said "your counterpoint" implies that you were making a response to a point I made not that the issue was raised by you.

Compound 1% over 20 years and it doesn't look so good does it. Besides it was you who said that low skilled immigration would provide more money for public finances in reply to my arguments about low skilled migration negatively affects those at the bottom through the labour market.

And yet again if you lump all migration together then the high skilled will cancel out the low skilled so considering we were discussing low skilled migration it might be an idea to not try to prove things with something that talks about migration as a whole. Furthermore I'd expect migration benefits to be higher than 1% of GDP if it were mostly high skilled.

Considering you tried to prove the migration point in your favour with a fallacy of composition, lumping all migration together as if it is all the same, you could probably start by ceasing from trying to fill out your own bingo card.

 

That argument only holds if the UK strives for proportional immigration, which it obviously doesn't. If it desires to reduce immigration in absolute terms, it would make sense to start with the population you can restrict most easily. 150000+ non-EU immigrants hardly help cutting down the overall quota to "tens of thousands" after all.

So I don't see how subjecting EU immigrants to the same rules as non-EU immigrants is going to make any difference.

Yeah, Vote Leave totally didn't ride to victory the racist tiger that Farage fed. Sorry, you tend to get judged by the company you keep.

 

Brexit was not about racism but about culture, as for racism it is what ever the regressive left wants it to be. It's used as a weapon that's always leveled as an accusation against anyone who do not agree with – for example - mass immigration policies.

I've touched upon the difference in this thread actually, unfortunately most people do not grasp the difference.

The European Union isn't run as an economy but as a political union. The political union is more important to these people than the economy, they have demonstrated this on numerous occasions. They have invested a lot of time, political prestige and egos into this project.

 

The problem is that the controls on outside the EU mean that only 29% come here for economic reason i.e. looking for work/ definite job. 48% come here to study and 20% for social reasons (marriage and family)

Edit: oops forgot my source link https://fullfact.org/immigration/eu-migration-and-uk/

(compare with the EU 72% economic, 9% social and 14% to study)

What has actually happened is that restrictions have been placed on marriage, as a reason for migrating here. as the 10-15 parliament increased the amount someone has to earn to bring a marital dependant into the country.
What's worse is that because of only being able to concentrate on the non EU group and the largest proportion of non eu migrants are study migrants is that the government have had to try to reduce numbers from here which as I have said before harms our education exports which is a major service the UK has a comparative advantage in delivering.

The controls are at such a point as to which any further controls will mean we will lose students from abroad, put restrictions on social migration for family reasons or on people meeting work reasons to arrive who will likely have skills we need. The first and the last will cost us a lot more than it benefits and the restrictions on social reasons could be seen as rather unfair.

So if the numbers are too high it would make sense to control the migration that is not already controlled since more controls on the non EU will be very costly to the UK economy (skilled economic and study) or be inhumane (social).

Controlling one non EU migrant that has the necessary skills to enrich the UK skills base or contribute a tuition to our universities at the expense of an additional low skilled worker from the EU seems foolish and from a moral perspective wrong.

Barbara castle in the 1975 EEC oxford union debate:

From 1975 EEC debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2jUYryRYII

Doesn't mean that guilt by association is valid.

I wonder how many "reverse racist" racists or "reverse sexist" sexists or "positive discrimination" discriminators were on your side (and those people are much more dangerous because their views are actually being implemented)
(I wonder how many white supremacists prefer white European migration to the possibility of less white migration for more brown people migration are on your side for that matter.)

Not to mention that what you're calling racism is often not racism.

Fixed

 

Appreciate the correction & reminder. Been a long day.

 

Not so, because lumping foreign students in with immigrants was a purely arbitrary choice by government. The government could easily have excluded them from immigration numbers as they are, in fact, not immigrants but visitors --and instantly cut those numbers nearly in half.

Is that why Aberystwyth University lost around 100 EU student applications the first weeks after the referendum vote (that was about £3.6 million, by the way)? There is no reason whatsoever why students should be treated or counted like immigrants. It is a non-issue.

That would assume that EU immigrants cannot provide the workforce and expertise that non-EU immigrants would bring. And anyway, the UK is not striving for proportional immigration --it doesn't care one hoot about where its immigrants come from. It cares about the economy. The fact is that the UK has the immigration rate it has because its economy needs the cheap labour, and needs the specialist skill it couldn't be bothered to go through the expense of training itself. If it had invested in a high skills economy and a trained workforce, those immigrants wouldn't even be here --not from the EU nor anywhere else.

You're assuming that you need to choose, when the fact is that if both can find work here, you obviously need both. If the thought of that extra immigrant offends, then the UK is thinking about it wrong: economic immigrants are not a burden; they are supplying a demand. As you yourself said: there is no such thing as a finite supply of jobs. If the economy demands it, there is always more to go around. All this BS about quotas conveniently forgets that they are purely arbitrary numbers.

There are not just too many immigrants in the UK. This country is not crowded. This is about some locals feeling like a bunch of losers and externalising that by blaming immigrant scapegoats, as encouraged by tabloids telling them how to think and which politicians to vote for, both owned by a wealthy elite that aims to thus distract them from the fact that it rigged the game against them all along.

It is when you choose to hang out with bad company.

 

They're migrating to study not visiting and that sounds like a typical civil service style response, fiddle the figures. International students often turn out to not be very temporary also, it might be better for accuracy reasons counting them coming into the country than necessarily tracking whether or not they stayed after graduation.
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Edit: also even still is the most glaring error in the Idea that removing students would make a difference to the net figures, which is how everyone measures migration, is that assuming those students just left after study then you'd be removing them from the emigration side also. So while you'll see a 47% reduction in non EU migration and 14% in EU migration on the figures in a given year you'll also lose those who finish their studies and leave from the emigration figures in similar numbers in that given year.

So it would pretty much just be a wash and you'd still have the same surplus of people staying vs those who are leaving. I.e net migration would be pretty much the same.

(yeah, I know it's maths not math.... bloody Americanisms)
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EU students pay the same as what British students pay at 9000 pounds. International students pay 13k to 14.5K at Aberystwyth and we have had to restrict those outside the EU (at oxford it's in the region of 22K). The government has implemented reforms to this area of migration to reduce the sheer numbers of people moving here for a long stay to study to the detriment of those who are non EU.

No the economy doesn't need cheap labour, if that work cannot be done profitably because of a lack of interchangeable low skilled labour then it doesn't have to be done at all.

And your analysis more fundamentally misunderstands how an economy works in relation to labour and other factor inputs in normal times. That is the point in your analysis that states that if they can find work the economy needed them. That is false. A growing economy expands to fit the factor inputs available to it at a given time: add more labour then that labour will be employed, add more capital equipment then that will be employed. If you add 1 million, 2 million, 3 million people they'll all find work over a year or so, doesn't mean the economy needed them in any way.

You're basically making the same mistake that anti immigration people make in relation to the "they took our jobs" fallacy of immigrants causing unemployment.

And I also didn't say that the UK should concern itself with the proportion of immigrants to come here, which is an outcome, but with an equality of opportunity to come here for economic/study and social reasons if those people fit the given criteria.

As far as burdens go a person migrating from the EU for purely economic reasons doesn't have a control on the level of wage that person will earn. I.e that at low levels of income people don't pay much tax effectively meaning that additional person, that didn't need to be here, is unlikely to be paying the full cost of the addition public services, housing and infrastructure needed in order to not be a net negative for everyone else's provision. I.e they are causing a negative externality by their addition to the workforce that they aren't and couldn't pay for.

Then there is the burden of the opportunity cost. Because we don't control from the EU, and we can't have ever larger numbers overall, we have to exercise control over migration from elsewhere. So we allow EU people who wouldn't meet the non EU criteria for economic, social or study reasons coming here at the expense of tighter controls for Non EU people who would have met the criteria of a previously looser or possibly looser controls under an equalised system.

Low skilled migration also causes wage depression in those low skilled jobs and too loose a policy on skilled migration can give some disincentives for business to train labour also. Also in terms of a numbers game increasing the number of people who need housing is going to increase housing prices. Now while you might say that's because the government haven't built houses in one way or another that doesn't justify making the problem worse through deliberately increasing the population without control. and low skilled migration can't possibly fully cover the costs of their requirement of public services by their existence in the country negatively affecting public service provision and negating gains made from skilled migration.

And that's not to mention it's the have's not the have not's that benefit from low skilled wage depression, rising rents, house prices and lowering incentives to train them in a grand display of Directors law.

Those are genuine problems when taking uncontrolled economic migration into account and just because those affected might not be able to articulate that well, understand or describe the mechanisms by which those problems are occurring doesn't mean it is not a problem and deifinitly doesn't mean it's driven by racism.

And when did people "hang out" with them? And it's still fallacious. I'm pretty far from a communist and I have known plenty self identified communists personally doesn't mean anything about me politically or personally. And furthermore what you probably think is racism isn't actually racism.

 

Except that the ones who finish their studies and leave are replaced with the next semester's intake of more or less equal size, so the number is not cancelled out; it's an added constant. If people knew that about 30% of all immigrants are in fact contributing about £10000,-- plus self-sustained subsistence per year to the economy and do not compete for jobs, I wonder if that would change the picture a bit.

That would seem counterproductive. Why simply not increase places at University?

The point is that the economy could make use of them and has grown very healthily from them. As has been the case since the Asian and Caribbean immigrants of yore.

Nobody who voted Leave because of immigration would agree with you.

I would suggest that this is a problem with the UK economy as a whole: allowing employers to underpay their workers so that they have to be subsidised by higher earning tax payers. In any case figures show that overall, EU immigrants pay in more than they take out so that argument doesn't add up.

Again, that assumes that EU immigrants cannot provide the skills that you would otherwise draw from non-EU immigrants. The UK really doesn't care where its immigrant workforce comes from. The average UKIPper doesn't.

That is all theoretical. Fact is that low skilled immigration has had very little effect on depressing wages and indeed on house prices. The main forces on wages and house prices are the government's cumulative policies since the 80's. To wit:

Immigrants don't determine government policy.

The next time some youth stomps on a Polish face I'll remember that they're not racist, just suffering from a poor ability to reflect on and articulate the causes of their socioeconomic deprivation.

Just because people's concerns are valid, that doesn't mean their thinking about it or acting on it is. Racism for reasons is still racism.

And "uncontrolled migration"? Really? The UK has lower immigration than Spain, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Italy or even Finland.

Yup, some of your best friends are Communist. You're not a Communist yourself (you're smarter than that), but basically, you have no problem with people who are. You think that Communism is a rather eccentric philosophy, but basically legitimate.

Now replace "communism" with "racism". See the problem?

And if you join your comrades in a Communist parade, or in a Communist party meeting, people seeing you there might assume that you share their views, no? And how is that, as far as the world is concerned, any different from actually doing so? You're still adding to the numbers in the parade.

At no point did Vote Leave make any effort to distance itself from Farage's campaign. In fact as soon as his campaign showed that immigration was the swinging argument, Vote Leave hastily reconstructed their arguments to align with his. The result has been a peerceived legitimisation of racist expression which has increased since 23rd June.

And yeah, it's racism.

 

I'm pretty sure Polish and Syrian are nationalities and not races

 

I'll be sure to tell UKIP. They seem to get a bit mixed up on ethnicity and religion as well.

 

When people sloppily and incorrectly categorise discrimination under racism, it can indicate they are using sweeping generalisations as part of their argument.

 

I'm not, you are, or at least you're attempting to, rather poorly i might add.

See what i mean, you can't help yourself, it's the EU they made me do it, if the EU wasn't so X, Y, or Z i wouldn't be in this situation, the big nasty EU, grrr, grrr, if it wasn't for them life would be perfect, typical junkie logic.

Whhaaa the Eurozone, you do know no one forces countries to join it right? I mean Germany didn't line up their tanks on the border and say join the Eurozone or else, it's typical junkie logic, i only took the drug because of X, if only Y would stop doing that I'd quit, let's blame everyone other than ourselves.

Are you seriously saying all these counties are so weak and pathetic they can't make their own choices, take responsibility for their own actions?

What the IFS and the entire economics profession also don't know the difference between doing something yourself and incentivising others to do it for you, no wonder we're in such a mess the IFS and the entire economics profession don't actually do anything they just put incentivise in place so other people will do their work for them.

The head of the IFS incentivised someone to attend a meeting with heads of states today, the economics profession incentivised someone to write up a report today.

Only i never said what you claimed i did, i never said "more national income on the part of low skilled migrants will result in more public services" So not only did you put words in my mouth you then proceeded to rebuke something i never said, strawman much?

There's also a big difference between the trivial grammatical mistakes I've made and the ones you've made that have not only lead to incomprehensible sentences but also to you blaming others for your mistakes, then again with your junkie logic it's to be expected i guess.

So did you just ignore the word positive?
Compound 1% over 20 years and it looks good doesn't it, and again i didn't say low skilled immigration would provide more money for public finances, once again i refer you back to your reply where you raised the topic, in case your myopia is playing up you may need to read what you quoted from me a few times, here let me help, i said...

Now do tell me where in that sentence does it mentions low skilled immigration?

Next thing we know you'll be saying we should deport low skilled natives.

That wasn't a fallacy of composition because we, as a country, don't get to pick and choose the skill level of EU migrants, at this present moment in time we have to lump them all together, it would only be a fallacy of composition if there were parts that made up the whole and there's not.