I don’t really think anybody is disagreeing that immigration needs managing. And to say we all want better management is a bit of a truism, why wouldn’t we? I don’t see many people advocating open borders. I’ve made this point multiple times on here but this whole discussion is quite arbitrary and that’s why it’s so frustrating.
Pretty much nobody wants to be North Korea with totally closed borders.
Pretty much nobody wants to have totally open borders. Everybody wants the asylum process to be better, because currently it doesn’t benefit anybody.
We all want various shades of managed immigration. So what’s the right number? 10,000? 100,000? And who should they be? Nurses? Cleaners? Rocket Scientists? Refugees? Students? And in what proportions? Okay so let’s say we agree net migration ‘feels’ too high. Great, well it’s coming down significantly this year according to projections. So what will we be happy with? 300,000? 200,000? What’s the target here?
Unless people have a clear answer to all of these things then I’m not really sure what they want. They’re just shouting useless platitudes at each other with zero pragmatism.
My biggest problem is that this policy conversation isn’t the conversation people are actually having. It might be the conversation you want to have
@KS55, because you understand there’s nuance here. But the vast majority of people currently in the “concerned about immigration” conversation don’t seem to ever state what they actually want so that we can discuss the pros and cons of what they’re suggesting. It’s not based on policy or evidence for them, it’s based on a generic and vague feeling. And we can’t incorporate vague feelings into a manifesto.
For us to start having a serious value-add discussion on this, somebody needs to propose a cogent alternative to what we’re doing now. I think that is an adult conversation we all want, but we can’t have that conversation when so many on the anti-immigration side (like Farage) act entirely in bad faith and aren’t capable of maintaining the discussion at that level.