Tim Streater posted
In article , Dave Plowman (News)
wrote:

In article ,
Handsome Jack wrote:
"Dave Plowman (News)" posted
In article ,
Handsome Jack wrote:
But I thought mass immigration was good for a country's economy,
bringing a vibrant and flexible new workforce that invariably
contributes more to the public finances than it takes out?

You plainly don't understand the difference between EU workers (and
others) coming here to work, and those fleeing oppression.

What is the difference (as far as benefitting the economy) between
an unskilled, penniless Romanian peasant and an unskilled, penniless
Syrian peasant?

Which type of UK peasant are you? Are you the sort that can take over the
work on farms etc currently done by EU workers? If so, join the non
existent queue.

I haven't followed the broader point you are both arguing,

Briefly: Rod summarised EU migration policy as spreading illegal
migrants across the EU instead of leaving them all in Greece whose
economy can't handle them. I replied by citing some of the claims we've
seen in the past year or two, that uncontrolled mass immigration has
been beneficial to the UK's economy, so the Greeks should welcome it (I
was being ironic). Dave replied by saying (I paraphrase) that it's only
Eastern European immigration that's so beneficial, not Syrian refugee
immigration. I asked him why, and he gave the above nonsensical reply
("Which type of UK peasant are you?...")

but it is
certainly the case that a Kent fruit farm I visited 3 or 4 years ago
needed migrant workers (Poles in this case, although their origin was
not important. These folk move to the UK for the fruit picking season
and then return home at the end of it, and there is decent on-site
living facilities while they are there.

The issue is that this type of manual work requires that you do it
regularly, even if fit. Otherwise your muscles can't take it over an
extended period, as a British couple, keen to make a go of it, found
out when they were hired on this farm for this work. They lasted a
week.

In fact these workers are not unskilled. You have to know how to pick
fruit which is the correct ripeness, and without damaging it then or
letting it get bruised in the basket later. And without dislodging
other fruit which may or may not be ready for picking.

These may not be earth-shattering skills but are nonetheless important.

This is just a special case of the standard "We haven't got enough
people with skill X to do jobs Y, so we have to import them from abroad"
argument. It suffers from the same deficiency as all of them. Namely,
importing skilled workers is not the only answer: we can train people
who are already here to give them these skills, just as we always used
to do before mass immigration began.

--
Jack