Social media truly killing off any form of debate. Can’t immigration be discussed in terms of skill set? Education levels? Falling birthrate and replacement? No, everything now is ragebait and you’re either black or white or else marked as dumb/naive, the very opposite of how proper debate should be run on something this important.
how is the average Scot able to give a fair and accurate reply to this ? What data and information will they have to give constructive comments ? And how valid will any replies actually be ?
Insane how effective spamming a message every day on all channels for decades is.
Scotland’s population grows by like a village worth every year, and our birth rate is declining. You’d think we were living in 19th Century New York or something the way people talk about it…
53% of Scots don’t understand shifting age demographics, or what’s happening in Japan and Korea right now.
I bet it’s actually a lot higher than that.
That Brexit really worked out
Is there any country in the world where the majority of people want more immigration?
Fascinated by the 1% of Reform voters who want to increase immigration
Daily media spam having a predictable effect.
I reckon if you dedicated 4 hours of coverage every day to asking “are ghosts ruining Britain?” within 2 years, you’d have 50% of people arguing the government should spend more on ghost defences.
Nobody that has been following the views on immigration across the continent should be surprised by this, immigration is blamed for everything across all forms of media. It’s already happening but I believe we will continue to increase the requirements for immigrations to only skilled migrants. The problem though is that a skilled worker from India for example will likely want to go to the US or Australia not to Europe.
The framing of this is interesting – it presumes there *is* a right or wrong level of immigration. I wonder how different the results would look if the question could be framed in such a way so as not to force the choice between too much, too little, or just right?
There does seem to be a lot more English people moving up.
Scotland’s average age is 42 with over 20% 65+.
This math is not hard.
Did the pollster first provide respondents with data on recent immigration levels so as to get an informed response, or did they just ask what people’s feelings were without checking their existing level of information?
The pace of change definitely plays a part in perception. A lot of it has been international students and Ukrainian refugees, though. Also point to consider that our population would have declined without migration.
But only 1% of them know how much immigration there has actually been.
Ok, I made that up, but I reckon it’s not too far off. I can’t tell you on average how many people immigrate to Scotland every year, or whether it’s changed relative to overall population size, or whether immigrants as a whole contributed more to the economy than they took or vice versa recently, and I suspect that’s true of most people who don’t have an academic interest in the topic.
Without that information it’s an impossible question to rationally answer, so all this really tells me is that about half of the respondents to this survey are morons. And ‘half of the people in this room don’t know what they are talking about’ is a finding you can replicate in most situations, from parliament to the pub.
It’s bizarre that the right wing free market capitalists are against cheap foreign labour which makes GDP line go up, while those who position themselves as left leaning are all for undercutting workers and making it harder for those born here to start their careers (because why run apprenticeship schemes if you can get experienced cheap labour straight off the plane?).
It’s completely upside down. The left are taking the economic right wing position and the right are taking the economic left.
In the 1960s the children per woman average was about 5; now it’s 1.3
If you don’t want immigration the average children per woman needs to go to something like 4 or 5 to meet population targets to maintain our economy.
We’re well below the replacement rate.
Would Scottish women accept this? Would a Scottish government support a high birth rate beginning early policy? How would such a policy work for a “healthy demographic system”? Or is it just easier to import people of working age?
I wonder what the % of Scots is that know:
A) Know what immigration numbers were 10 years ago
B) Know what it is today
Ask how many actually know the immigration numbers
This is how propaganda works, this view has been getting pushed for years now and the more nuanced reality is being ignored.
On paper we still need a significant amount of immigration to grow and solve a lot of the problems we are facing as a country.
It’s distasteful to the sense of family planning propriety in Scotland, but the reality is the births per woman is far below the replacement levels.
Immigration is the economic solution to low birth rates to maintain standards of living.
The alternative is to dramatically increase births per woman.
Or face a demographic crisis that will hit us when you are too old to look after yourself and there is no one left to care.
These are the conversations we must be having. The taboo must be broken.
25 comments
They won’t be “true scots”
The overall yougov survey has already been covered here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/1pjwz03/how_do_scots_feel_about_the_major_political/
Social media truly killing off any form of debate. Can’t immigration be discussed in terms of skill set? Education levels? Falling birthrate and replacement? No, everything now is ragebait and you’re either black or white or else marked as dumb/naive, the very opposite of how proper debate should be run on something this important.
how is the average Scot able to give a fair and accurate reply to this ? What data and information will they have to give constructive comments ? And how valid will any replies actually be ?
Insane how effective spamming a message every day on all channels for decades is.
Scotland’s population grows by like a village worth every year, and our birth rate is declining. You’d think we were living in 19th Century New York or something the way people talk about it…
53% of Scots don’t understand shifting age demographics, or what’s happening in Japan and Korea right now.
I bet it’s actually a lot higher than that.
That Brexit really worked out
Is there any country in the world where the majority of people want more immigration?
Fascinated by the 1% of Reform voters who want to increase immigration
Daily media spam having a predictable effect.
I reckon if you dedicated 4 hours of coverage every day to asking “are ghosts ruining Britain?” within 2 years, you’d have 50% of people arguing the government should spend more on ghost defences.
Nobody that has been following the views on immigration across the continent should be surprised by this, immigration is blamed for everything across all forms of media. It’s already happening but I believe we will continue to increase the requirements for immigrations to only skilled migrants. The problem though is that a skilled worker from India for example will likely want to go to the US or Australia not to Europe.
The framing of this is interesting – it presumes there *is* a right or wrong level of immigration. I wonder how different the results would look if the question could be framed in such a way so as not to force the choice between too much, too little, or just right?
There does seem to be a lot more English people moving up.
Scotland’s average age is 42 with over 20% 65+.
This math is not hard.
Did the pollster first provide respondents with data on recent immigration levels so as to get an informed response, or did they just ask what people’s feelings were without checking their existing level of information?
I feel ‘over the past **five** years’ would be more accurate, as that’s when it really spiked. You can see this in the most recent data: [https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/scotlands-population-2024-the-registrar-generals-annual-review-of-demographic-trends/](https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/scotlands-population-2024-the-registrar-generals-annual-review-of-demographic-trends/)
The pace of change definitely plays a part in perception. A lot of it has been international students and Ukrainian refugees, though. Also point to consider that our population would have declined without migration.
https://preview.redd.it/ixbiefpl9s6g1.jpeg?width=1128&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=23efa76db8f5258b0bd23f27e5cb3cb919e5b174
But only 1% of them know how much immigration there has actually been.
Ok, I made that up, but I reckon it’s not too far off. I can’t tell you on average how many people immigrate to Scotland every year, or whether it’s changed relative to overall population size, or whether immigrants as a whole contributed more to the economy than they took or vice versa recently, and I suspect that’s true of most people who don’t have an academic interest in the topic.
Without that information it’s an impossible question to rationally answer, so all this really tells me is that about half of the respondents to this survey are morons. And ‘half of the people in this room don’t know what they are talking about’ is a finding you can replicate in most situations, from parliament to the pub.
It’s bizarre that the right wing free market capitalists are against cheap foreign labour which makes GDP line go up, while those who position themselves as left leaning are all for undercutting workers and making it harder for those born here to start their careers (because why run apprenticeship schemes if you can get experienced cheap labour straight off the plane?).
It’s completely upside down. The left are taking the economic right wing position and the right are taking the economic left.
In the 1960s the children per woman average was about 5; now it’s 1.3
If you don’t want immigration the average children per woman needs to go to something like 4 or 5 to meet population targets to maintain our economy.
We’re well below the replacement rate.
Would Scottish women accept this? Would a Scottish government support a high birth rate beginning early policy? How would such a policy work for a “healthy demographic system”? Or is it just easier to import people of working age?
I wonder what the % of Scots is that know:
A) Know what immigration numbers were 10 years ago
B) Know what it is today
Ask how many actually know the immigration numbers
This is how propaganda works, this view has been getting pushed for years now and the more nuanced reality is being ignored.
On paper we still need a significant amount of immigration to grow and solve a lot of the problems we are facing as a country.
It’s distasteful to the sense of family planning propriety in Scotland, but the reality is the births per woman is far below the replacement levels.
Immigration is the economic solution to low birth rates to maintain standards of living.
The alternative is to dramatically increase births per woman.
Or face a demographic crisis that will hit us when you are too old to look after yourself and there is no one left to care.
These are the conversations we must be having. The taboo must be broken.
Comments are closed.