Immigration and the impact on British Jobs – a side issue

The @BBCNewsnight story on the specific impact on of immigration on British Jobs is a relevant issue but there are other equally pressing concerns. “Whether for every additional 100 immigrants 23 British workers would not be employed” or whether it is less, what we do know is that there are 917,000 young British unemployed. The priority for a cohesive society has to be to get them into work, and fast.

More importantly, we also know for a fact is that there was net migration into this country last year of 212,000 – or put it another way a city the size of Northampton or Norwich was created.

Where are these people to live? We cannot build enough homes to house or already rapidly growing population and added to this the growth of population is focused on London and the South East. The result is a housing price bubble in the south East that shows no sign of cooling. Great for those who already own houses, but what about our children.

So when senior politicians say that putting “any target on migration is totally impractical, cannot be delivered and would do great damage to the economy” are they really thinking through the implications of this?

The wider debate as increasingly being articulated by Nigel Farage, is just what sort sort of country and society do we want?

It has to be more than economic efficiency. It can be of little surprise that the economy continues to grow when migration and population is growing at such a pace. But at what cost?

What we need is a real debate on what sort of future we want for this country. How do WE want to see it in 25 years, rather than just being at the mercy of a globalised market.