Immigration. Problem or Cure?

Barrie Skelcher in his letter (EADT 23rd July) raised concerns over immigration. A concern a lot of people have. It does not help that we do not have accurate figures to enable a proper discussion of this thorny issue, but should taxpayer's money be wasted counting, or attempting to count people? There are more pressing needs such as social care and care of our elderly. Indeed care of the elderly is one of the areas that foreigners are prepared to come and work here on low wages. Our sick in hospitals are looked after by many foreign doctors and nurses, and despite high levels of unemployment farmers still struggle to find British people willing to earn a wage in sporadic employment picking fruit.

It is not as if British workers are rushing to fill these jobs.

Our education is part of the problem. Urging people to university is all well and good, but we need skilled plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. In these basic skills our education service is failing employers and British workers. Our construction industry is starved of key skills and they are being filled by foreign workers, without them our house prices would be even higher, but we do need to readdress our efforts at education and skills training. It is of course, not entirely down to schools. We have too many employers who want to make a fast buck, and do not spend money or time training apprentices.

However, have we lost the plot when we worry about immigration? It is claimed by some that there are one million immigrants living and working and paying taxes in the UK. If we sent them all home then surely other countries would retaliate by sending home British people living abroad. There are five million Britons living abroad. Would my son be forced home from Australia, or my uncle kicked out of California? Would the retired pensioners living in Spain, Italy, France etc be forced to return here? How would out health services cope with all these returning pensioners? Where would they live? What would happen to house prices with 4 million more people wanting somewhere to live?

With a falling population we are heading for a pension time bomb, immigrant workers are arriving and paying the taxes to alleviate that problem. There are only a few towns where the immigrants are causing a strain on education services and the government need to take the taxes being paid by them and use them to deal with the problem. It takes five years for an immigrant worker to get social housing. Under 25yo there are not entitled to benefits, and also have to have worked for 2 years before having any entitlement to benefits. We are not losing out because of them, quite the contrary they were filling a needed gap. Due to the recession hundreds of thousands have already left for home so perhaps the debate should now be how will we cope without them?