In a growing economy there is never a finite number of jobs anyway; but the notion that migrants were stopping locals from getting jobs was, in Rugeley at least, a fiction. This goes back to point 1. There was no local clamour for these jobs. There were almost no English people at the various open inductions I attended and ones I did work with quit within a month. [...]
As things stand, the British working class is slowly being replaced by a foreign-born labour force. In a superficial sense this is neither here nor there; but if the people who toil in British factories have no say over the political direction of the country they live and work in, it will invariably create a distorted politics in which the only voters are middle class voters. Universal suffrage will, in practice, no longer exist.
You can of course infer from all of this what you will. As I say, I don't think that reining in free movement is the answer. But I do wish that liberals would show a proper interest in the impact immigration has on industrial relations, rather than simply playing a parlour game of reeling off the calculations of effete academics cocooned in offices at progressive think-tanks in London.
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