New Years Immigration

Considering today is the last day before 28 million, not 29 million as UKIP claim, Bulgarian and Romanians are able to come to Britain it is worth commenting on. A news report in the Telegraph said that it is likely 385,000 immigrants will come to Britain it total, but the honest answer is we have no idea how many people are coming. However, it definitely won't be the whole populations of Romanian and Bulgaria despite UKIPs scaremongering. All we know is a lot of people are coming, mass immigration in other words.

UKIP is busy scaring half the population about immigration.

Personally I don't have any problems with people coming over and contributing to Britain. Immigration is a boon to Britain. I take a rather Athenian Metic view of the whole situation. The Athenians allowed foreign peoples (Metics) to come live in their city to trade and make money. They were required to fight for Athens but did not get the vote. This turned out pretty good for Athens as people like Aristotle were able to go to the Acadamey and the army and, most importantly, the navy was bolstered. Although I doubt every Bulgarian and Romanian is going to be required to fight in the British military the idea of immigrants trading goods and labour is overall a good thing.

The Greeks used to know something about economics, before they joined the Euro.

However there is one problem Athens didn't face which we do. A large part of our economy is under the control of 'the public sector', these are the council houses, schools and hospitals etc. . Unfortunately for us we don't live in a free market and so the country cannot react in these areas very well to mass immigration. Unlike Plato who could just set up the Acadamey it is astoundingly hard to set up a school in response to an increase of people. We cannot plan for a huge unknown amount of people coming to Britain. Nor do we have the upfront money to do so.

The likelihood also is that immigrants will come mostly to specific areas like Wisbech in the Fens where there is a lot of agricultural work. In other words Wisbech's schools, council housing and hospital services could come under great strain. Wisbech's population has increased by a 1/3 or 10,000 in a decade and that is over 90% due to immigration. Despite people being quite resilient to the mess Tony Blair dropped us in, we need to be build a large amount more of schools, council houses and increased hospital capacity for the people of Wisbech. This of course comes for a large part out of the Cambridgeshire County Council budget which coincidently has one of the lowest spends per capita of all the counties across the whole country, it might be about to get lower still. Our centrally planned public service economy is/ will be creaking in the areas of mass migration.

To be fair though this is not the fault of immigrants and so people shouldn't be attacking them. They do contribute to the country in taxes, but this money is not up front and thus we have mass planning problems. They are not just here for benefits the vast majority of them want to work. They're only trying to look out for their families so they have better lives by escaping a post Soviet country. And they're certainly not taking our jobs because the more people in work the more economy grows which in turn produces more jobs.

A lot of this is our fault as a nation because we for a long time have has sub standard education which a lack of choice so that people can't compete. Furthermore we have has an NHS run by chimpanzees who seem to be eating half the vast amounts of money spent on health and a benefits system which means you're severely disadvantaged if you work and earn the average or below the average wage. My suggestions is we start to fix these problems before we start letting mass migration take place because we could soon be again in a position where public services are close to grinding to a halt in the areas of most strain. We will still be able to feel a net positive benefit from migration if we allowed 100,000 migrants into the country. Mass migration however would cause too many problems.

Lefties of course want to ignore all these points. Indeed both Red Ed and Nick Clegg seemingly want half the European Continent to turn up in Britain. However, as often escapes their mind, we don't even have the money to throw at these problems in a vain attempt to solve them. The deficit may have been cut by a 1/3rd but we still have one and our mahousive national debt is still going up. We are in real terms only a bit better off than we were in 2010.

In other words Britain wants migration but mass migration is too pie in the sky. With an economy relying too much on the centrally planned public sector unable to respond properly, let alone the massive debt and deficit we have which will be strained even more. I think we need to make sure our public services are able to serve the public and that we're not creating more debt.