Hard disagree on this. Immigration was the only realistic option to shield against demographic collapse and stabilize unskilled labor supply for decades, and it is no suprise that politicians took it.

I honestly think that if politicians had blocked this (reform style) in 2000, the resulting economic slowdown and increasing cost for labor intensive products would've seen them voted out in short order.

I do agree that negative consequences of the approach were played down/underestimated/neglected, but painting it as pure uncaring negative is just disingenuous.

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baiac 4 hours ago | parent [-]

"stabilising unskilled labour" in this context means dumping the salaries of the natives, making it so unskilled sectors no longer provide a living wage.

	▲	myrmidon 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but local supply of labor was looking even worse than now back then, and cost of labor intensive stuff like daycare, nursing homes/residential care have gone through the roof, still. Just look at how Brexit alone affected lorry driver wages; if you cut immigration 25 years ago, you'd have seen the same effect across multiple sectors magnifying each other (because labor supply is simply insufficient), and there is a lot of people that would have suffered from higher costs in all those sectors without getting any compensation. As a "sanity check" for this: If the UK economy did not "need" immigrant labor, you would expect significant unemployment and very high difficulty in finding unskilled labor jobs. Neither is the case.