The Immigration Pension Myth: 30 Years of Broken Promises

6 comments

1. Utter nonsense. All the problems we’re having now would be markedly worse without immigration because our population would be sharply declining.

   That’s a problem for a whole host of reasons, but the only real country that has prospered during a period of significant population decline is Japan, but that’s because they have an insane working culture and have pioneered technology.

   The reason our public services are declining is because of a total lack of funding for the last 15 years. Whilst Europe increased taxes to cover their budget shortfalls, we introduced austerity.

   And let’s be clear, immigration has helped delay the pension crisis, not made it worse. Without younger working-age migrants paying taxes, our old-age dependency ratio would be way higher, and the pressure on pensions even more brutal. The OBR literally said higher migration improves the public finances. It’s not even controversial — the numbers are right there.

   As for public services, immigrants aren’t the problem – they’re the ones staffing them. A third of NHS doctors aren’t UK nationals. Without them, the whole thing would have collapsed years ago. Again, the thing that actually gutted services was a political choice: austerity. Councils lost over 60% of their central funding since 2010. That’s why you’re waiting weeks for a GP, not because someone moved here from Romania.

   Other countries faced the same global challenges. The difference is they raised taxes or protected spending. We slashed everything and now pretend migrants are to blame. It’s just deflection.

   And this point about “low skilled migrants takin err jerbs” is a tale as old as time as well, but it’s just not true. Almost half of all “immigrants” are actually just university students – who weren’t included in the numbers until a few years ago. Approximately 30% are skilled workers, which only leaves about 10% for the rest which includes family of workers (who they have to pay extra for in visa fees etc), and 10% for refugees (including from Ukraine, Hong Kong, etc). Most of those people are ineligible to work.

2. The major problem we face is an ageing population.

   Immigration has helped mitigate that. One by providing younger tax payers. And 2 by providing a workforce willing to do the bum wiping jobs that the local population won’t do for minimum wage. This reduces the cost of care.

   Extra bonus is that children of immigrants tend to work in healthcare (look at the number of 2nd gen imm doctors in the NHS!).

   On the negative side, increasing the population has increased cost of housing somewhat.

   All of these need to be balanced. But we have to be honest and face into the fact that our population is ageing. If we don’t want immigration then we will have to pay more taxes and sacrifice a larger portion of inheritances/ wealth for elderly care.

3. This is the problem no one will openly tackle.

   Cutting immigration is – whatever your personal view on the matter – a popular policy with voters. However, cutting the NHS and pensions are deeply *unpopular*. We cannot pay for the latter without constantly increasing the former.

   Sadly many of us are under the impression that we “pay for” our state pension. We don’t. My parents paid tax throughout their working career to fund the state pensions of the day. My taxes now fund their generation’s state pensions. If/when I make it to state pension age, I have to hope that the working population will be large enough that the tax revenue will pay out a state pension for me.

   It’s a constant cycle which will never be tackled as governments will never look further than the next election. Why would Labour cut the NHS/pensions dramatically when they’ll be punished for it in 2029?

4. Perhaps we should ask WHY our population is shrinking rather than just importing more people of alien race, religion, and culture who hate us to (temporarily) mitigate the problem.

   Perhaps we should address the fact that 51% of the population is not fulfilling their proper social and biological roles.

   Perhaps we could get women out of the workforce and back in the maternity ward and solve all our societal problems in one go.

5. 30 years?? Try +100. As a country, we’ve been importing cheap labour since the end of WW1 and the collapse of the empire/all those countries getting independence and not having their wealth stolen to inflate the UK economy. The main things that have changed is that we’ve shifted from a production based economy to a services based one, and we’ve forgotten that redistribution of wealth from the crazy rich to the poor (or Taxes, oooh. Scary) is a great way to stop the poor lynching the rich. Both of those cause a larger and larger wealth gap to form.

   OP had identified that some of it is also successive waves of politicians (both sides, to different degrees at different points) blamed everything they could on immigrants, because having The Poors fight each other is a grand trick. So, yes: there are broken promises, but they are much older and higher up the chain than this one situation.

6. An aging population could have meant cheap housing for everyone as there would be fewer people, sustainable economies based around more trades rather than growth(ex. plumbing needs to be done, renewable power installed and maintained.) focusing on maintaining the relatively immense wealth England has had.

   Instead the rich have used immigrants as cheap labor to concentrate the wealth into their pockets.

   And the costs of importing cheap labor is yet to be fully seen. Like from the article “when they get old, they’ll need pensions too”.

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