1) What about the fact that ALL the immigrants who come here have been a result of war cause by the UK feeling they need to BUT into someone elses life?

2) What about colonisation? You rape a country of all it’s feeding so much that you give independence during the 60′s but the World Bank still has power so that cocoa/chocolatem profits attribute to the UK economy, even though it IS from West Africa and you get confused why they want to come here?

3) The UK continues to promote its large businesses in Eastern Europe to get cheap labour, so they come here and we seemingly educated Brits acts like they’ve come out of their own pocket!?

WHY do people not from the UK want to immigrate/emmigrate here??

@ Elisabeth-Ms Realism

The Free Market?? ‘We deserve your oil!! For cheap because we’re over populating!! But F*CK you if you come to MY country!!’

Soo, WHO is overpopulating?? Greedy, competitive, aspirational middle class white people who want MORE, MORE and MORE?

OR poor people in under developed countries who have nothing (due to colonisation-come on, how quickly can a country transform itself with no profitable power?) and are told by the Catholic Church they shouldn’tn use condoms!!

Yep, that ol ‘came to your continent with a gun and a bible but left you with the bible and shot you with the gun’

Groan.

“Voter, you seem to be dealing in generalities about “room” again, which means the argument is back onto ground I don’t understand. The limited resources point was actually dealt with above – to say that resources are finite and cannot be expanded is what Malthus said and he turned out to be wrong. What makes you think that what was wrong three hundred years ago should be correct now?”

I think the argument Voter is making is not about room but about energy. For now ignoring the possility of colonsing other planets, there is a hard limit to the energy that can be used to support life (over a long period of time we are limjited by the energy coming from the sun).

Here, I guess we have to look at timescales, because yes, eventually, the sun will run out. But the timescale of human reproduction is rather faster than that. Also, yes space travel might allow us to move across to other planets although unless we can crack the light barrier it is unlikely that this is going to be significant on the timescale of the current population issue.

So, at some poiny Mathus must be right (in that the population must either colapse or stabilise, depending on certain criteria. He wasn’t all doom and gloom . The question is how close to this point we are. amd that is a tough one. Of course, you can argue that we can keep on growing more food, but at what cost? By increasing the human-domninated part of the ecosystem, everything else will get squeezed out. Now, of course we can imagine a human in which virtually all other creatures have ceased to exist outside of controlled environments, but is that the sort of future we want? Personally, I would prefer one with a fewer people and a bit of rainforest left. And the crucial point is that at some point we wil have to face these issues. Why not now?

In fact, I don’t have any huge argument with the idea that immigration boosts economic growth, just whether economic growth is really the metric we should choose to determine the success of a policy such as this.

I know, sounds a bit radical for a Tory But in fact, a surprising number think like me (and I had never put you in the “squeeze the wilderness” camp!)

Isn’t it a kind of smug self importance that leads people to imagine that everyone else in the world would be immensely better off if they all came to live in our country? Er, what’s so wonderful about us

Life may be bad here, but it’s much worse in many other parts of the world. There was a time when I had some fairly extensive contacts with one particular group of people amongst whom there were many illegal immigrants, and I know the desperation they had about staying here, and the ingenious ways they would use to get here. Some of of it is “grass is greener on the other side” thinking, but a lot of it is that a menial job here still pays what would convert to keep many people alive back there.

Britain is also popular because we speak what is a universal second language in many parts of the world, so there’s less of a language barrier than other European countries. There is also a big same ethnic community the illegal immigrants can mix into for almost any ethnicity you can think of in London. Plus, I am afraid, yes, we are considered a fairly soft touch compare to other European countries.

As for the energy question: Well, you could try increasing the number of photons from the sun, but really – we’re an awful long way away from using the photons that are already coming here. When it comes to energy use in particular, the problems we have are chiefly about using carbon-based, non-renewable resources; there are plenty of answers to these problems out there, though if we wait for free-market economics to bring them online we’ll probably suffer more than we need to in the meantime. (Of course, when I say ‘we’ I mostly mean the people in poor countries that we apparently don’t want to allow in here. That’s also human nature.)

There’s a cracking little rant over on the People’s Republic of Mortimer — I’ll link to it here if I can get it right – which expresses better than I can how exasperating this sort of green negativity can be:
http://fabulousblueporcupine.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/the-lure-of-the-crank/#comment-3819

Humans have a phenomenal capacity for technological innovation, and it’s just a modern-day sort of millennialism to cry doom and assume that the only answer is to get back under the rock.

The balance between costs of living and salaries is, as I understand it, a self-governing one, in the sense that if salaries in a given area drop, rent bills etc will go unpaid, houses will go unbought and fewer local goods & services will be sold. As a result, rents and house prices will drop to attract interest and local goods/services will stop being produced. This will accelerate the drop in house pricing because the amenities of the area are reduced, so housing (the biggest chunk of living costs as you point out) gets cheaper still. Then the cheapness attracts people back in. Again, no-one’s pretending this is a constant, it’s a matter of constant correction. But your point about cost of living vis-a-vis income isn’t a permanent objection.

The market, as far as I can tell, did exactly what it was supposed to do – the banks failed because they were badly run and monopolistic. That’s what should happen.

So you’re not up for colonising the rest of the universe and allowing free travel between planets and galaxies at any point in the future then?

Saying “let them come here” and expecting things to just work out does not wash (to use a Paddy Ashdown word). That is the same kind of thinking which said that banks can do what they wish and all will be well. Dreams of eliminating risk have come down to Earth with a thump

Surprise, surprise. That is human nature

Anyway, I can’t see what your remark is getting at, I’m afraid. “People” do indeed want both freedom and to have a decent quality of life. That’s basically why people who live here stay here, and why people who come here come here – because they want those things. (It’s also why people who leave here leave here of course – because they think they will be freer, or more prosperous, or more content, somewhere else.) I’m saying, let them.

But there isn’t some defined-size pie, and it isn’t made of Earth and sun. “Gross Domestic Product” may sound like something that necessarily involves making hard, lumpy things, but if someone sings a song in a room and charges people to come watch and listen, then that’s economic activity, which is part of GDP, but nothing is consumed (i.e. used up) that wouldn’t be anyway. And a lot of economic activity is like that, particularly in an advanced economy that pretty much has the basic resource needs sorted. This is one part of the reason that the pie really can go on increasing for, at least, a very very long time.*

Anyway, it’s no good citing arguments about the ultimate, global finiteness of resources as an argument for limiting immigration, as it’s no more relevant to people moving from Kenya to Kent than to those moving from Middlesborough to Middlesex. (Ooh, get me, I could be a politician with this quality of alliteration.) There may be reasons why the global human population needs to peak soon (though any argument that depends even a little bit on the idea that we’re simply going to “run out of room” should promptly be run out of whatever room it’s showed up in this time), but it makes little difference to resources whether those people are in Britain, Poland, or Timbucktoo.

*Of course, there are still problems about overconsumption of specific resources that need to be addressed, and I’m not suggesting that economic growth as presently constituted doesn’t involve consumption of resources, or indeed that we can all live on music. Though it might be nice to try, and would certainly be good for my waistline.

Freedom is all very well but people want to be both free and have a decent quality of life which is dependent on their income and the environment

It seems to me that as long as we accept the idea of continually increasing populations, people are bound to get smaller and smaller pieces of the pie, as the Earth and the sun are not increasing

Ironically enough, Mr Passing Tory (and have you tried any tablets for that? ), I think Judith’s point in the remark you quoted was precisely that we shouldn’t be letting all and sundry into the country on the assumption that they’d be better off here. Which, of course, rather misses the point, since no one here has argued that people from other countries should come to Britain, only that they should be allowed to do so if they believe that there lives will thereby be better – a position which, by the way, I wholly support, and to hell with the consequences.

“Isn’t it a kind of smug self importance that leads people to imagine that everyone else in the world would be immensely better off if they all came to live in our country? Er, what’s so wonderful about us?”

Well, you skip between two issues here; what people perceive and the reality on the ground. For the first, how many other places in the world you have lived? The freedoms and opportunity in the UK still far outstrip those in many countries. There is very little chance, for instance, of getting killed because you support the “wrong” political party, for instance (although it was somewhat alarming to see the UAF threatening to break down this particular barrier outside the BBC last week), or because you refuse to tow the line in some corrpution scam.

“We should be helping to develop opportunities in other parts of the world, not imagining that our country alone is worth living in. More lateral thinking needed, in my opinion. Keep your nerve, Chris Huhne.”

Indeed, but that raises the awkward question of how you do this. Does “helping to develop opportunities” mean “helping them to do things the way that we think is right”. This normally turns into “using trade deals and aid to force them to do what is convenient for us”. Not quite so ethical. And, how keen are we on having representatives from other countries (Saudis, for instance) telling us that we have got it all wrong and “helping” us to see the light (with the aid of a few homemade explosives, maybe)?

While I come instinctively from a “free movement” background, I think that in fact there is significant value to the nation-state firewalls, and keeping tabs on (and restricting) movement across such firewalls is necessary.

There is a school of thought which believes in an “efficient market hypothesis” but I have heard that this school has taken a hammering recently. Can we really believe that the failing banks are indeed efficient? The amalgamation of banks following failures would actually decrease competition

My reasoning is all pretty much common sense but I agree that this may not actually reflect reality which may be more subtle

Many of the arguements presented here are based on pure economics or just plain materialism . It is surely much more important to value the diversity of places around the globe and help everyone make the most of their lives wherever they live. Why is it assumed that the western/UK lifestyle is what every person on the planet should apire to?

It does not seem like a very saleable message

Isn’t it a kind of smug self importance that leads people to imagine that everyone else in the world would be immensely better off if they all came to live in our country? Er, what’s so wonderful about us?

We should be helping to develop opportunities in other parts of the world, not imagining that our country alone is worth living in. More lateral thinking needed, in my opinion. Keep your nerve, Chris Huhne.