[cherdano]

A miraculous thing: Tokyo has avoided a spike in housing costs despite strong population growth by - drumbeat, you won't believe it, drumbeat - by BUILDING MORE HOUSES!!!

http://www.vox.com/2...ing-costs-tokyo

[Cyberyeti]

cherdano, on 2016-August-08, 11:12, said:

A miraculous thing: Tokyo has avoided a spike in housing costs despite strong population growth by - drumbeat, you won't believe it, drumbeat - by BUILDING MORE HOUSES!!!

http://www.vox.com/2...ing-costs-tokyo

This is as I thought, we are knocking down our highrises because they're terrible places to live, Tokyo is building more.

[Winstonm]

Cyberyeti, on 2016-August-08, 15:50, said:

This is as I thought, we are knocking down our highrises because they're terrible places to live, Tokyo is building more.

Why is a high rise a terrible place to live? Are we so jaded we think we are entitled to housing?

[cherdano]

Cyberyeti, on 2016-August-08, 15:50, said:

This is as I thought, we are knocking down our highrises because they're terrible places to live, Tokyo is building more.

In some cities they are called highrises. In other places, they are called fancy condominiums.

You are just continuing to prove that your aversion to more immigrants is based on irrational reasons throughout.

I wonder whether there is a word for aversion to immigrants based on irrational reasons.

[MrAce]

cherdano, on 2016-August-06, 03:51, said:

What I meant is something different. Nobody likes to think they are xenophobic. So they invent other reasons why England cannot take in any more foreigners. There is no space to house them. (Yes, there is.) The NHS cannot cope with so many immigrants. (In fact, immigrants pay taxes helying to fund NHS. And they help the NHS to find enough staff.) Etc.

https://www.youtube....h?v=ADQCeC0tF0o

[StevenG]

Winstonm, on 2016-August-08, 19:41, said:

Why is a high rise a terrible place to live? Are we so jaded we think we are entitled to housing?

Where do the children play?

[helene_t]

Migration allows people to move to where they can contribute best to society, and to move away from overcrowded places.

If you want to reduce overcrowding, think about birth control instead.

[Cyberyeti]

cherdano, on 2016-August-08, 21:11, said:

In some cities they are called highrises. In other places, they are called fancy condominiums.

You are just continuing to prove that your aversion to more immigrants is based on irrational reasons throughout.

I wonder whether there is a word for aversion to immigrants based on irrational reasons.

No, I'm saying the highrises that we had in the UK were built to house council tenants in the 60s, degenerated into slums and this has given them a bad name.

The housing required is low end not "fancy condos", and I suspect our experience would make it unacceptable to build more. Also it would require repeal of a lot of legislation as most councils prohibit building beyond n stories where n is a pretty low number and this is popular. You should see the planning furore caused here if you want to build an extension that blocks out the light from somebody's garden let alone a tower block.

I don't know if it's something to do with the higher incidence of home ownership in the UK compared with most of Europe, but there seems to be a feeling that a flat is something you buy if you can't afford a house (or as a pied a terre where you mainly live somewhere else) among some people. This is not present in France and Germany.

And to Helene - look at Germany and the UK, most of the population growth is among the immigrant population, I believe Germany's may even have been falling without that. I actually think the housing crisis has in part coincided with many families needing 2 houses rather than 1 after family breakdown, which has made it worse although not caused it.

To Winstonm - in the UK you ARE theoretically entitled to housing and this is what causes some of the resentment. People are housed by the councils in order of priority subject to availability, and historically immigrants arriving with kids (something which ups your priority) go into the queue ahead of childless locals, meaning the locals never get a council house.

[helene_t]

MrAce, on 2016-August-08, 23:25, said:

https://www.youtube....h?v=ADQCeC0tF0o

Youtube's copy is copyright restricted. I believe this version can be watched from everywhere:
https://vimeo.com/131934966

[StevenG]

I find it interesting that the posters on this who are so pro-immigration seem to be middle-class people who move around from country to country to their own advantage, without in any way considering the impact of their lifestyle on the inhabitants of those countries they happen to be living in at any one time. Meanwhite the British, who can see what is going on in their own country, are wrongly (and offensively, in my view) accused of racism.

The seems to be an implicit assumption that the people of a country have a moral duty to degrade the quality of their own lives (which quality has often been built up by sacrifices made by their ancestors) for the benefit of others who have no reason to live here other than their own immediate economic advantage. I do not accept that assumption.

I grew up in, and still live in, what used to be one the the most diverse towns in England. We had Poles who came here during the war and stayed, the infant school I attended had a large contingent of Italians who had come to labour in the local brick industry; large numbers of Commonwealth immigrants were arriving at the same time. And, again, people of Indian origin who were forced out of Idi Amin's Uganda (many of whom still a marvellous job running our local convenience stores). And there have never been any significant racial tensions in Bedford. In general we get on well and respect each other's culture. We are not xenophobic.

But the country has changed. In the '50s & '60s when we encouraged mass immigration, we were a manufacturing country running a trading surplus. We are now reliant on the services sector and running a huge trade deficit. We have appalling productivity compared to other advanced countries. Boys growing up could have reasonable expectations of learning a trade and earning a reasonable living. Now they look forward to nothing more than juggling multiple jobs with irregular hours. On a personal level, the local services we all rely on and take for granted are slowly disappearing. It's not just post offices, libraries and refuse collection, it's major things like hospitals.

The problem with immigration is population growth, not immigrants themselves. There would be no problem with immigration if net immigration was zero, if we were simply losing people with a skill set surplus to requirements and replacing them with others with skills we need. That's a win-win for everybody. But we are not coping with the increased numbers. Yes, to some extent that's political. We could have state housebuilding, but we don't. Small governemnt has been the ideology for the last thirty years and more. But a political failure doesn't change the reality for those that have to live with it. Similarly, our employers have forgotten how to train people. Why train local people when you can poach someone with the appropriate skills from a lower-wage country? It's bad for everyone. We don't get trained, our young people see no future; meanwhile, the other country loses a worker it has paid to train.

I feel we have to sort our own problems out at a structural level and that is politically difficult. Making things worse in the long run with the quick fix of more immigration is not - for now - the solution.

[helene_t]

StevenG, on 2016-August-09, 03:06, said:

without in any way considering the impact of their lifestyle on the inhabitants of those countries they happen to be living in at any one time.

huh? We drive in the left side of the road. We play 4-card majors when partnering locals. We speak English. We don't make our own Yorkshire pudding but we do slowly exchange some cooking ideas with the locals. We bring business to this country. We take jobs for which zero locals applied. We pay taxes. As for our impact on the housing crisis, we bought a completely f-u house that had been empty for a long time, refurbished it and let it to a junior doctor from the Middle East. So sorry, yes we did take a house away from the English and gave it to a bloody immigrant. But the NHS needs staff.

I admit we probably receive more than we give, otherwise we wouldn't have chosen to live here. But it is a positive-sum game.

[Cyberyeti]

Steven, so why has Bedford "worked" while nearby Luton seems to have more tension and radicalised Muslim youth ?

Immigration by professionals doing professional jobs has never been an issue.

Immigration by people doing unskilled jobs is more of an issue, and more particularly low skilled but not unskilled jobs. This is where the resentment is generated.

The problems in the UK are largely home grown, but thrown into much sharper focus by immigration.

[StevenG]

Cyberyeti, on 2016-August-09, 03:43, said:

Steven, so why has Bedford "worked" while nearby Luton seems to have more tension and radicalised Muslim youth ?

I don't really know. It's probably a mixture of two main factors. Firstly, Luton is significantly closer to London, therefore attracts a lot more of the problems emanating from London, whereas Bedford is more of a rural(ish) market town. Secondly, and this is probably more important, Bedford was historically a lot richer than Luton. We had a huge engineering industry, now gone. But we also had the Harpur Trust, a charity concentrating on education. A century ago, Bedford School and Bedford High School were close to the best independent schools in the country, while charging only a fraction of the amount. Bedford was full of retired Army officers (and coffee planters, etc.). We were very stable. It probably also helped that the Italians were easy to absorb, and that made the non-white immigrants who came a few years later much less intimidating.

[Trinidad]

StevenG, on 2016-August-09, 03:06, said:

The problem with immigration is population growth, not immigrants themselves.

The primary problem in Western-Europe is ageing of the population. This causes economic problems, health problems and social problems. Immigration is a fast, inexpensive, and relatively easy way to rejuvenate the population.

So, your "problem" is, in reality, actually closer to "the solution".

Rik

[StevenG]

Trinidad, on 2016-August-09, 04:55, said:

The primary problem in Western-Europe is ageing of the population. This causes economic problems, health problems and social problems. Immigration is a fast, inexpensive, and relatively easy way to rejuvenate the population.

So, your "problem" is, in reality, actually closer to "the solution".

Except, of course, that in the long run the immigrants age too, and we have an even bigger ageing population.

[Zelandakh]

StevenG, on 2016-August-09, 05:22, said:

Except, of course, that in the long run the immigrants age too, and we have an even bigger ageing population.

Apparently in the world of Brexit the immigrants are both breeding like flies and not having any children at the same time. But that's ok, after we have locked our borders we can encourage our nice clean white women to have more babies, both lowering the average age and removing them from the unemployment statistics. It will give the NHS something to spend that extra 350 million a week on too.

[Zelandakh]

StevenG, on 2016-August-09, 03:06, said:

I find it interesting that the posters on this who are so pro-immigration seem to be middle-class people who move around from country to country to their own advantage,

How are you defining middle class? Since you know nothing of the history and circumstances of those you are discussing with, you might want to be careful about giving offence. Not that that has stopped those on your side from making sweeping statements about the people from entire countries has it? And that is rather the point. What assumptions are you making about a person based on their nationality or family of origin before having gotten to know them at all? Everyone makes some broad guesses, it is human nature. When those guesses are primarily negative and go beyond a certain point it is reasonable to refer to it as racism. The exact line is not clear and has certainly shifted over time. Almost everyone would also place themselves on the "right" side of the line. That does not mean that society should not set a high line. The UK does not have to do that - we could vote in a completely racist government - but I hope that in time the events of the referendum, particularly the last 2 weeks of the campaign, will serve as a warning to people on how easy it is to fall on the wrong side of that line without realising it. If not, well I probably qualify for German nationality by now...

[StevenG]

Zelandakh, on 2016-August-09, 05:42, said:

Apparently in the world of Brexit the immigrants are both breeding like flies and not having any children at the same time. But that's ok, after we have locked our borders we can encourage our nice clean white women to have more babies, both lowering the average age and removing them from the unemployment statistics. It will give the NHS something to spend that extra 350 million a week on too.

Both ridiculous and offensive.

[StevenG]

Zelandakh, on 2016-August-09, 05:54, said:

Since you know nothing of the history and circumstances of those you are discussing with, you might want to be careful about giving offence.

I know what posters have said about themselves over the years I've been reading, and occasionally contributing to, these forums. That is rather more than nothing.

[Zelandakh]

StevenG, on 2016-August-09, 06:26, said:

Both ridiculous and offensive.

You are correct. The promise of 350 million a week for the NHS was certainly both ridiculous and offensive.