JazzG You're rationalising the tendency to blame migrants for the supposed macroeconomic effects of migration—your reasoning as to why "the grift works". My initial response is: where's the accountability for people who mistakenly accept these premises? Will they ever be expected to abandon this confusion? Why do we insist on their continued licence to think like children?
The support of the rump union movement for labour protectionism is a case in point. If these movements had expanded and won a truly international struggle in the past, then globalisation wouldn't have fucked workers in post-industrial economies so harshly since the 1970s.
Some say migration suppresses wages. Sure, and it does, if you think labour supply is the system's only parameter, and if you forget that migrants usually hugely increase their wages by crossing borders, because wages in the global South are 85% lower on average.
What suppresses wages is the preference of employers to pay lower wages, and the preference of the public to access cheap goods and services. It's not a crime, in fact in every other context it's considered a virtue to be a worker willing to work an undesirable job for a subsistence wage.
The frame tends always to be that migrants are "takin' our jerbs". Who's here admitting that the work done by migrants is socially necessary or at least preferable, or that the supply of migrant labour is the proper object of law and policy for which migrants themselves are not responsible?
The UK economy depends on migrant labour, particularly in certain sectors. It's the same in Australia where we have many of these political currents in a similar form. To me it's disreputable to harp on "illegal" migration as if it's a key contributor to the macroeconomics of migration. The unsubtle implication is that legal migrants are also in some sense lawless. If that's not the implication, then undocumented migrants are not the problem.
Particularly after these recent years of flailing around with racist political rhetoric, and gratuitously punitive strains of public policy, which in the UK have been greatly inspired by those of the last decades in Australia, it's frustrating to hear social ills which should be laid squarely at the feet of the economic elite still discussed in this way.
☝️ Not saying you personally hold these views (with the exception of specific stuff further up).
If UK citizen workers want a better deal, they must struggle against employers and landlords politically, not their migrant colleagues. If they want all jobs to go to citizens, they'll have to set up a society which doesn't prefer to underpay migrants for labour citizens either refuse or can't do.
