Because without it there won’t be nearly enough doctors, nurses and carers for the elderly.
I suppose if we take a Logan’s Run approach to society then it won’t be necessary any more. It may actually have to come to something like that eventually; not here hopefully, but elsewhere. I’m struggling to see how countries like China and Russia are going to be able to cope with the demographic tsunami that’s coming their way.
There's no "correct" answer.
The NHS, while being a source of pride for this nation, has become untenable in today's economy. I don't know how to put this with any tact, but the problem is that people now live too long. We can take people with serious illnesses and treat them for long past the time where they should have naturally died. In addition to the average life expectancy raising by around 12 years since the NHS was conceived. It's now at 81. As an average.
Ultimately, this country cannot afford to continue that without a better demographic make up. There's 13 million people over the age of 65 in the country, most of which will need the NHS or pensions that come from the public purse and they'll be drawing that without economic activity for almost 20 years on average. There's literally not enough people to maintain the economy in terms of the technological advances we've made in terms of the tax base needed to sustain. Perhaps we could do a Japan like population incentive? But that solves the problem in 25-50 years rather than now. The only two answers to this problem is that you fuck pensioners out of money and services they've worked their entire life for as part of the social contract, or you increase immigration to bring in more tax paying people. There's no third option in the short to medium term. New industries are always the answer I hear about this but presuming that new/as yet undeveloped tech economies will solve everything is a very common coping mechanism in my experience and it's essentially faith. I watch football every week, I love a bit of faith, but I don't consider blind faith in an unseen tech miracle to be a reasonable solution to a very serious issue of governing a nation.
With that said, with immigration comes societal issues. When two very distinct cultures such as Western liberal and conservative Islamic cultures collide then the social norms are so different that issues are going to arise. There's also the idea that immigration does depress the wages of the poorest in the country which is a huge benefit to companies who really want a greater amount of potential workers and it often can disrupt unions power and workers rights if those workers are willing to sacrifice hard won freedoms. The phrase "immigration is a net economic positive for any nation, but it benefits middle class people while being paid for by working class people" is apt in my opinion. It's also why people who aren't working factories or warehouses saying that the working class right are "brainwashed" or "stupid" is so fucking pretentious and offensive, like these grown adults need someone else to tell them what's good or bad for their lives and need to be led around like children. If you don't trust the electorate to each vote in its own interests then you're not a democrat. It's that simple.
The biggest issue in this whole immigration debate has always been dishonesty from all of the major political parties. They lie about immigration; both in terms of the purpose of it, the desperate need for it, and the potentially large social cohesion issues it can cause. It's a type of intellectually dishonesty I've always found distasteful, these aren't radical ideas, they're just common sense. Immigration needs to be managed and the parties (none of which ACTUALLY want to stop immigration including Reform) need to start telling people that they have a choice of things like the triple lock or immigration because there's no way to make the numbers add up otherwise.
Actually there is a third way. It's to remove immigration and then borrow Covid levels of money every year but as mentioned, I'm talking about the serious business of governing a nation rather than being absolutely mental and bankrupting the country for the next 100 years
