E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Unless it comes from racist sentiment. I can't help it if they make categorisation errors. That is because it's a bit more complicated than that. Ethnicity, culture, religion and nationality are all mixed up with each other.

 

Discrimination on the grounds of each element has its own name.

 

True, but it is not neatly categorised as such in the racist mind, as demonstrated by some people voting for Leave expecting Muslims to be deported (and in their mind all Muslims are brown). Perhaps we need a collective term. Xenophobia does not seem to quite cut it for me, although it's close enough.

 

General forms would include discrimination or prejudice.

 

I doubt that the average xenophobe makes such fine distinctions in semantics as we are doing now.

 

No, but they aren't going around calling themselves racist or xenophobe either are they? If your going to sling a label on them at least get it right.

 

Let me put it this way: the average xenophobe does not make a distinction between discriminating someone as "other" based on their nationality, skin colour, culture or religion. They are just "other" and that's bad. Muslims? Bad. Darkies? Bad. Polish? Bad. They are, generally speaking, not people with a complex and nuanced view of the world.

 

What you consider to be xenophobic may not be what others consider to be xenophobic, and the definition itself may not even apply in the first place.

Xenophobe
A person who hates or fears foreigners or strangers.

 

You keep stating your desire to no longer discuss the topic yet keep discussing it.

But Germany refuses to do the very things that would complete the monetary union and decrease the burden of readjusting competitiveness within the Eurozone.

You can't help yourself. The reason why this came about is because no countries actually did this for economic reasons, and were often oversold the benefits of it, and nor did the EU who designed it. It was made for political reasons. You look at the situation in Spain they were the good boys running government surpluses however they were still a debtor country in the sense they had a trade deficit so debt was built up in private hands. How do you stop debt building up in the private sector caused by a capital account surplus? Capital controls? Can't do that free movement of capital is a founding principle. Except when it isn't.

I think your logic is more the logic of a multinational pharma company that's been ruining people's lives with a badly designed drug. "oh they didn't have to take it...."

The headline act, the jewel in the crown, the pinnacle of the EU project; designed by the EU and sold by the EU is at its fundament the worst designed policy in the developed world in the post war period is a disaster by design and you can't stand it.

What's more is the short term pain of sorting the competitiveness problems out could be much less if the creditor nations weren't abusing their position of power for their own benefit (i.e they inflated while the debtors deflated) and the long term solutions are relatively straight forward and well understood. However none of this can happen by design of the false compromises the EU system creates, that means that the long term solutions are never properly put into practice, means that the response to this crisis has been the worst economic response that has ever been seen in the west and you can't stand that either.

And what happens when you look down the line of top policies of the EU, CAP and CFP for example? Totally inept disasters. When an organisation delivers poor results time and again in all their biggest and most ambitious policies it becomes an indictment of the inefficacy of that organisation and you can't stand it, so you'd rather deny it.

Yeah it's terrible enacting systems that people can voluntarily interact with from which positive results are gained by doing something positive and negative by doing something negative, thereby meaning it is in the best interests of an economic agent to do the positive thing. The Stalinist USSR were quite keen on "making sure things get done" and enacting policies by actively doing them through direct action, which reminds me I must visit that paradise of direct action that are surely enjoying great prosperity to this day........... Obviously the obsession with direct action would never have destroyed the incentives to actually do things well.....

Yes they do. They pay a salary if you do your job and a P45 if you don't, they don't have to write the report but if they're here to be paid then I'd assume it's in their best interests to do their job.

What you actually said is less income for the country means less public money:

Income for the country is measured in national income i.e GDP

And, ceteris paribus, what does a government need for more income? a larger size of GDP.

(to which I made the obvious point that the increase in public income by the additional person needs to outweigh the additional costs that person imposes on public expenditure, which at the low end of wages will be negative)

(and what, for that matter, does a government need for more income to spend per person a larger size of average GDP per person and if an additional person is to increase public income to spend per person their marginal addition to GDP must be greater than average GDP per person before their addition)

You said this:

As a response to this:

Now considering skilled migrants will cancel out the costs of low skilled migrants to some degree, lumping them together makes no sense.

No, we shouldn't deport anyone who currently has the right to be here native or migrant for the reasons stated, it's merely that we should not simply continue adding more.

But we're discussing low skilled migration and then you throw a source that is talking about migration as a whole.

 

Ask Farage what emotion his "Breaking Point" poster was intended to inspire, and of who. Or the "100 million (criminal, gun and knife wielding) Turks will come over here when Turkey joins the EU" argument. Or the "We'll expose our women to foreign rapists" argument. Or the "Immigrants will swamp our housing, our schools, our NHS, our labour market" argument.

 

No, i just keep pointing out how wrong you are and how flawed your logic is.

I don't have a clue what you said there as all i read was something about Germany and me denying it, i don't really need to read it all to know that it probably runs along the same train of thought you seem to have displayed all along, that it's the big bad EU's fault and Germany is the evil puppet master behind it all.

If i didn't know you were being serious I'd suggest writing a book about it, maybe it would get turned into a film staring Dr Evil, add a cat, world domination, and a space weapon though audiences love those things

We were also really good at building houses and getting people to save money for the future in the past, maybe you've forgotten the Greater London Plan, and the State Pension.

So they do nothing other than incentivising other people to do their job for them?

Nope I'm not seeing where i said that was related to low skilled migrant workers, like i said strawman, all i said was take your example, fact is EU migrant workers are less of a burden than the non-EU migrant workers, you know those non-EU migrant workers that consist of nothing but highly skilled workers, those non-EU migrant workers that we apply a strict points based system too, (yes it's the Mirror but they do link to the original government document)...

That sort of fly's in the face of your spurious claim doesn't it.

Yes i said that after you'd started blaming low skilled migrants, you really expect me to not counter you incorrect assumptions and accusations? That's not how things work, you initially attempted to link what i said with low skilled migrant and since then everything I've said was countering your spurious claims, basically you started it, all I've been doing is pointing out how wrong you are.

Maybe we should give you a nick name of Mr Strawman.

No you're discussing low skilled migration, I'm just pointing out how wrong you are.

 

Immigrants will over run our services is not a xenophobic sentiment. It appears to be inaccurate, given that the immigrants are working and therefore there should be enough NHS /  houses for everyone given that they are paying their tax just like that nationals.

It is not borne out of a fear or hatred of foreigners, but a fear of loosing important services. The finger is pointed at foreigners because it is simple and appears to make sense if you don't actually think about it.

 

No I mean cancelled out in the sense of the Net migration figures. If we have 100000 students leaving and 100000 arriving every year then Net migration would be the same.

You know the number the Cameron wanted to get down to the 10s of thousands or the number everyone references when talking about "too many people coming into the country." What you said would be an issue if the argument didn't take into context those leaving

*I've seen personally the fiddle that goes on with students with tier 4 visas.

and the debate has never been framed in terms of immigration alone but immigration minus emigration.

It is and it happens because people don't actually just leave after study so you'd be increasing net migration and obviously when they're qualified will also be skilled.
So the Burden of reducing net figures falls on Non EU immigrants, of which nearly half come here to study as the entry reason (and some often qualify for their degree and remain), rather than on low skilled workers from the EU who wouldn't meet the entry requirements for non EU people.

If you don't account for population growth or the composition of migrants then GDP has grown because of migration but accounting for population growth and focusing on the low skilled section of economic migration it is a net negative for the current residents of the country on average.

Just to illustrate the point is that if over the next 30 years we could grow our population to 500mn through low skilled migration and effectively turn the country into one giant city, like the coruscant of star wars, then we'd likely have an economy much larger than that of japan and somewhat smaller than that of the USA but, even not mentioning the environmental impacts of that, the average person would be poorer, the average public sector provision would fall because despite the addition of 436mn people it wouldn't change the fact that most of them are low skilled.

It's funny that when I talk to them they do and you forget how many non EU migrants with indefinite leave to remain don't like the fact that unfettered opportunity for EU migrants is restricting non EU migrants opportunity and for that matter how many non EU migrants think the levels of migration overall need to be lowered.

I only think the actual xenophobes and definitely the racists are in fundamental disagreement.

No it still adds up. Because we aren't discussing overall we are discussing the net effects of one section which is migrants from the EU who wouldn't meet the current standards of immigration for non EU people, i.e the low skilled. Because this argument is comparing to the alternative of controlling EU nationals in the same framework as non EU national.

In other words the positives from those high skilled migrants, probably like yourself, wouldn't be diminished by the net negatives of those who couldn't meet the criteria as a non EU national. So the net positives of migration from EU nations would rise.

No it simply relies on the fact that without control EU economic migrants that wouldn't meet the economic criteria (or social or study for that matter) are forcing the government to tighten rules on those controls therefore someone who could have got in with higher skills than the low skilled migrant has lost their place and the country has paid an opportunity cost of a greater addition to the work force for a lesser alternative.

It's not about caring where people come from but about the opportunity to come. The fact that the UK really doesn't and shouldn't care where their migrants come from is exactly my point i.e. why treat the EU with no rules and the rest of the world with ever more stringent rules as a result.

The fact is that low skilled migration does keep the same or lower wages depending on the numbers taken in isolation, which is what you do with any specific variable. It's supply and demand. In low skilled work labour is interchangeable between many different businesses by its very nature so it has significant effects especially in areas it is concentrated in.

The problem with studies showing this is that they have to estimate how much wages would have risen in the counterfactual and it is as inaccurate as economic forecasts in estimating what wages could have been. It fundamentally relies on the same econometric modelling which is subject to over representation of one factor over another and confounding variables. The problem is that they have only one labour market equilibrium to look at that is determined by all the current factors and are trying to determine another with less supply of low skilled labour. Often this is done relying on past data to do a regression to determine the effects but the problem with economic modelling is that it is incredibly hard to do a scientific controlled experiment. Then there is doing the modelling by comparing countries but then countries are vastly different too at a fundamental level.

Hell economists aren't even sure of the shape of the labour supply curve is it S shaped or / shaped over all types of labour and that's probably because the labour market isn't homogenous or a single market but a set of markets with different goods that are as unrelated as cars are to vegetables in the sense of a low skilled (unspecialised) worker compared to an accountant compared to a doctor.

What we do know though is that an increase in supply of one type of good, in this case low skilled labour, is going to decrease the price (wage) of that good. By how much is in question but from a perspective where you take into account that for example at such low wages unnecessary additional workers aren't going to cover their annual public service costs, never mind their lifetime costs, it seems rather pointless to risk exacerbating other negative consequences, that can only be negative the only question is: how much, vis a vis house prices, housing rents and low skilled wages for no national payoff.

and neither can the people in relation to immigration from inside the EU.

You know that's not what I'm saying because the vast majority of people complaining about the problems stated have zero intention of doing any such thing ever. It was a point that the vast majority of people who are against current immigration levels aren't doing so because they're losers.

* Thought crimes now? every now and then a chink in your reasoning opens up to show regressive attitudes.......

No one is saying that attacking people based on their ethnicity (racism) or nationality (xenophobia) is validated by the fact there are problems with current migration levels or that violence is mandated for any reason (other than self defence). This is just a red herring. The Insurmountably small number of people who have actually engaged in such acts compared to the population of people with a leave position is not something you can colour the entirety of people who want a reduced level of net migration.

Let me be specific since you couldn't infer, uncontrolled EU migration.

(aren't most of those places retirement migration hotspots too?)

No I think it is an illegitimate philosophy that it's adherents don't realise always leads to as evil as set of consequences as racism, communism has racked up some body count (more than the fascists in fact)

No I wouldn't join them in a parade or a party meeting.

Or it's compounded the effect of discussing immigration on racists inhibitions because they've been led by people like yourself to believe that any discussion of immigration is racist therefore all these other people against immigration must also be racist like them therefore if these other people can be openly racist, which in reality they aren't but hell you've expanded the definition of racist, then why can't they. That is how it's working.

Just to prove the point everyone on the leave side is disavowing the actual racism and stating it as categorically wrong, yet the remainiac fringe of the remain side is trying to lump us all in with them, which I'm sure does wonders for the actual racists sense of social appropriation and restraint. You're the side trying to make them think they have more buddies than they actually have.

People like yourself don't seem to realise that the expansion of the definition of racism has led to a trivialisation of real racism and has led racists to believe they have more racists with them than they actually do because "everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic" and people with your views thought they should "point it all out" even if that is not the case.

That word is having less and less impact. You've cried wolf too many times.

The fact that an immigration discussion explicitly about numbers, economic impact, social and sometimes cultural impacts and not once explicitly about race/ethnicity to me means the legitimisation didn't come from the leave side.

Is it racism though or your definition? The image isn't meant to be or in reality impactful because of the people all being brown but because it is a huge volume of people. People would be worried by that because of sheer volumes they are misled to believe (BTW) are coming here with an indeterminate origin, indeterminate impact and indeterminate cultural compatability.

And what it's racist because it matches one slide of a Nazi propaganda video? Well surprise, surprise nearly all propaganda shares superficial likeness with Nazi propaganda because believe it or not it was the thing the Nazis were best at.

Then further to that point if you look at the propaganda the Nazis did the reference wasn't the numbers but because of the very fact that they were Jews, i.e that the ethnicity of these migrants meant they would, in their proposition, be the reason those people would be the downfall of Germany. Which is what actual racism looks like.

Look at the actual difference:
One is propagating the idea directly and explicitly, verbatim, that people need fear these people because of their ethnicity to demonise them on the basis of that ethnicity

The other is propagating the idea that Europe has destroyed our border controls and Europe's border is insecure and this will result in an uncontrollable volume of people coming here. The only possibly racist thing is that most of the people in the photo are brown but that is what any picture of the migration crisis will look like.

It was bloody well misleading but for it to be racist would require proving the intention that it was meant to impact on the basis that the people were brown or of a certain ethnicity.

Racism is a very specific thing, it is the prejudice and/or discrimination of people based explicitly on their race or ethnicity. In this case it was volume and border security that was the message.

 

At the root of xenophobia is always tribal competition for resources. That doesn't make it any less xenophobic.

Why reduce them if their net contribution is positive?

Then why do all EU immigrants taken together add up to a positive balance?

The government better develop a high skills-based economy then, where low-skilled workers simply are not in demand. If the demand isn't there, they won't come.

Immigration is not controlled through points systems or even borders. Illegals will find a way in. Immigration is controlled by there simply not being any economic demand for them.

Hey, I think that uncontrolled immigration is a bad thing. I just don't think you control it through borders or visas. You control it by creating an economy that doesn't rely on cheap menial labour.

Because that's the price you pay for being in the Single Market. You no like? You leave (as you are doing). But there is an economic penalty. I would not even think that a bad thing if I trusted this government to invest in an economy that specialises in high-value, high-skilled manufacturing and services, with a well-trained workforce. But instead Nigel Lawson is already raving (from his country home in France) about the opportunity to finish the Thatcher revolution. More deregulation, yay!

No, it's because they feel they are. At least, that is what everybody has been attributing the unexpected referendum result to: people who feel disenfranchised and disempowered.

Last time I checked it wasn't a crime to have invalid thoughts or do stupid things, or we'd all be in trouble.

Every now and then a chink in your reasoning opens up to show your projections.

Or... UKIP engages in blatantly racist campaigning. Note how Farage, unlike yourself, does not engage in a rational economic argument about how uncontrolled immigration is bad. He appeals to xenophobia: darkie criminals coming to overrun your country, rape your women, do terrorist stuff. The stuff of racism, right?

Vote Leave, rather than distancing itself from that by saying something like: "Dude, WTF are you talking about? We are trying to make a valid economic argument here" re-aligns its campaign to fall right in step with it. The Turks are coming (proud importers of criminality, gun ownership and gangsterism) etc. If legitimate politicians are saying it, it must be OK, right? It must be true, right?

No, sorry, Vote Leave lumped itself in with them and made them feel all legit. Then Jo Cox got killed and things got messy with a surge in racist hate crime and all of a sudden Vote Leave is having a crisis of identity. Look at their mock-shock in Parliament when suddenly the residential status of current EU immigrants is cast in doubt. Well, what else did they expect was going to happen?

While many Leavers are not racist, and I agree that legitimate discussions about immigration have sometimes been cut short by:



the fact remains that when you allow Farage's brand of campaigning to speak on your behalf, and then add to that rhetoric, and that is perceived to be a deciding factor in the vote, then yeah, people are going to say it was racism that won the day. Because that's the way it looks.

Implication: Muslim terrorists are heading for the UK.



Implication: Hordes of (criminal, gun wielding) Turks are heading for the UK.

The thing with racism is that it is never explicitly about race. Nobody has even come out and said: "It's because they're brown/foreign". It's always for some other BS reason, but it's quite clearly one that only is an issue with brown/foreign people.

I'm sorry, but if you cannot see that this poster was blatantly racist then there is no point in discussing this further.

Stop digging now.

Seriously, stop digging.

A white dude was photoshopped out of the original getty image (bottom right).

Security from who? Hordes of brown Muslims, is who. Because Syrian refugees are representative of the average EU immigrant.

 

He's not been Photoshopped out, he just has a big white "Leave the European Union" banner plastered over his head, if you look carefully you can just see his bald head poking out above the word leave.

 

Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

 

How can't you understand that one section of eu migrants that can't pay enough taxes to cover their necessary public service provision, i.e. the low skilled, would be more controlled and therefore the net positives would be larger on future controlled flows. Just because something is at a net positive overall doesn't mean we shouldn't make it more positive by controlling the sections that are a drag on the size of those positives.

There is always demand when the economy is near the NAIRU (effective full employment). Do you really think that if we removed immigration controls migration would remain the same? That has never been the case any previous time that has happened, e.g. 2004 A8 countries given free movement, A2 romania and bulgaria, where migration from those countries haven't risen. It's empirically not the case that any control in legal results in a similar amount of illegal because we know that from cases where we have de restricted them from controls.

The only times it wont be the case that it wont be a net neutral movement, in terms of migration, is if we have a mutual free movement policy with countries of similar GDP per capita and wages i.e germany, france, USA, Canada.

You're economy will rely on cheap labour if quantity is more cost efficient than quality. Also even on high skilled migration there is less incentives for business to go through the expensive process of training if they can easily get that skill elsewhere without the cost. So then the costs and practice of implementing a high skills policy to the government. Can a government really beat through all the vested interests and do things like remove funding for the more useless degrees and have to determine that, as an example.

There's a supply side benefit to staying and supply side possible benefits to leaving. But if you disagree on many levels with something like the EU then it's not a good idea to stay in just for the fact that leaving comes with some risks. (Which wont turn out as large as stated because a lot of the hype over hyper globalisation is over hyped. From high tarriff to low tarriffs there are big marginal gains but when it gets down to really gritty things like NTBs and low tariffs the policy has run into diminishing marginal returns.)

I've rarely seen an EU policy where we already have better standards (holiday pay etc) and I've seen a lot of unbelievable incompetency that should never ever have happened in the Eurozone, I mean be part of the organisation that enforced the worst economic policy of the post war period? Then CAP CFP etc

It's just every now and then you sound anti democratic and a little bit authoritarian. It sounded like you said it's not okay for people to think things. And in this country more so called hate speech is being policed both criminal and in society in general (say something deemed "wrong" let's get them sacked mentality)

to be continued real life calls

 

They do this when they can't prove racism because they still want to be able to level the accusation, so they try to get into peoples heads reading into things that aren't there which to them then justifies "well you may not have said anything racist but by gawd sir I know you are"

It's like listening to them harp on about institutional racism "Oh man it's like everywhere among all these evil privileged white peoples, especially white men". Then when you ask them to show on a law that is racist in intent they look like deer caught in the headlights, they become quiet for a while, then quickly revert back to "well you may not have said anything racist but..."

If I recall we had this mindset demonstrated in this thread whereby a member was accused of racism – by a moderator – despite not having said anything racist. Unfortunately for him he couldn't keep his cool and lashed out and was consequently banned.

You are actually talking about altruistic survival strategy Nexxo, that's hardwired. It doesn't automatically mean you hate or fear foreigners or strangers.

In any case, there is always going to be conflicts with forced integration and assimilation, the vast majority of people do not want to be the same, they have identities they wish to keep, and you cannot live in a society in which you have different cultures living within the same borders sharing and competing for the same resources without there being conflicts.

 

No, I'm talking about tribal survival strategy. And like most survival strategies it is based in fear, and hence hate. Nature is natural, but it's also red in tooth and claw.

The human condition is constantly having to weigh self-preservation against the preservation of the tribe; one's individuality against tribal conformity. A civilised society manages to strike a fair balance. Hence it is possible for different cultures to live and work together without compromising themselves.

Diversity is strength. Homogeneity breeds weakness.

 

No, I just don't think democracy and free speech are inherently right. The will of the majority is not more wise, more just or more valid just because it is the majority will. Freedom of speech does not mean all statements are equally valid. I think such privileges are incredibly powerful and thus come with responsibility to be wielded wisely, lest they end up meaning nothing at all.

I also think that people tend to fuse thinking, feeling and behaviour. Just because someone's feelings may be valid, doesn't mean their associated thoughts and actions are. Just because their worries may be valid, that doesn't mean their responses to them are.