Immigration!

[Stew_Matthews]

Originally Posted by Gailh

I watched a programme on TV the other night and they filmed outside a Job Centre and asked some young men, who were there to "sign on" to claim their benefits if they wanted work picking Butternut Squash at £7 an hour along side some immigrant workers but non of them wanted the work. One of the young men asked had previously moaned about "all these foreigners taking our jobs"

Gail

You identify an interesting contradiction. Some Britons complain at the number of migrant workers travelling from Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe to take up jobs in the UK. Yet many of these jobs will otherwise remain empty because Britons are not prepared to take them. Pay and conditions are usually cited for this. Whether the welfare system promotes a ‘is it worth my while’ approach from some or whether the jobs are badly paid, I don’t know. Certainly the ‘minimum wage’ was meant to prevent excessively low pay.

In my experience this isn’t just a problem in Britain. Working in China, they were always complaining about Vietnamese, Cambodian and Korean workers taking jobs (that the Chinese wouldn’t in fact take). In the Middle East it was the Indians to blame and here in the US it seems to be Mexicans and other residents of Central America………........oh and probably me as well!