Semantron 2015

if we were to synthesize all the evidence relating to the labour market, we might conclude that overall there is little or no impact on unemployment and probably some relatively small negative impact on wages at the bottom of the distribution. (Wadsworth, 2010, 2014; CREAM, 2014 according to: Portes, LSE, 06.2014), Indeed, this inequality and potential emergence of the ‘underclass’ that was unsuccessfully competing against immigrants in the 3-D jobs is the issue that concerns economists at most. In case of use of public services, immigrants are relatively much cheaper than internal migrants. (Whitehead, LSE, 06.2014). Therefore many forecasts overestimate immigrants housing needs, because of treating them and their behaviour as natives’. Moreover, country benefiting from single market shall respect also other resolutions following from the same international agreements (European Court of Justice has already started procedure against United Kingdom – compare with Brady, 2013). As pointed out in the said article, ‘EU migrants cannot simply arrive in Britain, sign on to the dole and put themselves in the queue for a house (…) they have to be ’habitually resident’ for at least six months. Before then, their home country is responsible for their social security needs and any (say, medical) expenses related to their stay in the UK are reclaimable’. Moreover, problems such as not enough supply of housing (especially social), access to NHS and JSA will not be solved only by restricting migration numbers. Another thing is that significant reduction in immigration numbers would have damaging impact on the demographic structure of the UK. In a period of aging societies, withdrawal of young and able to work people could lead to a collapse of pension system. Although UK society is not threatened by population fall in real numbers, the structure of citizens plays crucial role in the realization of social contract. The issue described as the ‘greying’ of society is not clearly visible due to immigration, which acts as an injection to the work force and splits the current pensions burden for bigger number of people preventing fall in real wages, perhaps increasing of retirement age and loss of competitiveness. Thus when economic situation due to immigration has overall significant positive impact, where is the devil? When analysing natives’ attitude towards immigration, sociocultural concerns are more important than economic concerns. According to T. Philips (LSE, 06.2014) natives ‘tend to use the narrative from 70’s; have not seen that immigration has now became circular, richer, higher skilled and coming from wider origin’ which marks a positive trend for everyone. Due to such narrative, critics raise issues of segregation (and as a result for example white flight) and loss of culture and national identity. However, these concerns are not measureable, and are rather the object of interest of different social sciences than economics. One of the most hot-topics of political debate is so-called white-flight. It involves value judgement to choose the best from number of explanations (sometimes contrarian) for such a phenomenon. Whereas some scholars (E. Kaufmann, G. Harris) prove that segregation is unconscious, perhaps the answer is to certain extent the sum of all of them, but simultaneously with analysing it as a response on high level of immigration it should be emphasized, that also age profile of ‘fliers’ matters (most of older people, and according to cited research of Preston people get more hostile when they get older), and it can be a flight to familiarity and aspiration found outside the capital as well. Some critics of immigration also point out that London owes its high youth unemployment level (26%) (Goodhart, LSE, 06.2014)– the highest number in the whole country to external residents. Frankly, competition in London is higher in different parts of the country, as well as the level of education (also due to London school’s transformation success, which is ascribed to immigrants), number of universities and therefore number of high-skilled workers without enough experience. What is less obvious is fact, that level of anti-immigration attitudes in the capital is significantly lower than in the rest of the country. Questions of possible loss of national identity seem to not be very reasonable. Of course, due to high immigration, particular components are changing. For example, the role of religion is becoming

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