United Kingdom

Ministers – including the housing secretary, Angela Rayner – had raised concerns about the effect the rules would have on care workers already in the UK who would be likely to face a 15-year wait for settlement, also known as indefinite leave to remain (ILR).

The government’s response to the consultation on the reforms, which will be put before MPs on Monday, is expected give some exemption to care workers already in the UK, though most other professions will face the lengthy waits for settlement.

In June, Rayner described making care workers already in Britain wait up to 15 years for permanent residence as “un-British”. In September, the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, said the plans would have been “tough” for her family, who came to Britain as refugees.

Signatories argue that changing the rules for people who have planned their lives around existing settlement requirements would be unfair and could encourage essential workers to leave the country.

What can I tell you man, karma is a bitch and works on long timescales.

British government and European governments in general didn’t respect the wishes of other countries on planet when they were looting & colonizing them.

This is just an instance of “what goes around comes around”.

If your claims about sovereignty didn’t apply to other countries in the past, they also wouldn’t apply to UK now.

You’re not wrong that it suppresses wages. And if we “just” wanted to fix that we could (by increasing the minimum wage for immigrants perhaps). Interesting that all our anti-immigration policies are less about doing that and more about bullying people.

But on the flip side, we do need immigration. Wage suppression is only a part of it, at some point wages can’t go up because the money doesn’t exist (especially for the kind of roles we need, the kind of person who needs a carer doesn’t have unlimited funds), and we’ll need it more and more as time goes on too. We genuinely need a growing pool of workers whilst we have an aging population. We’re not making enough young workers ourselves to care for our aging population. And turns out the amount of money you need to offer people to make them comfortable to have more kids is rediculously high, so immigration is filling the gap at a much cheaper price.

Eventually the world will shift and immigration will dry up because everyone else will be in the same boat as we are now, then we’ll have no choice but to throw money at the birth rate. Probably at a cost so high we’ll have to concider some pretty terrible things to pay for it, but for now immigration is saving us from that fate.

If someone doesn’t work for 20 years? Other than any Brits who go to university, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant here.

This is discussing people who do work, and how long they need to work before we trust them enough to treat them like citizens.

If someone comes here at 18 and works for 5 years… this may shock you, but they’ve been a net benefit to the country to the tune of 5 man-years of work (minus their salary, which presumably is less than the labour, or nobody would be throwing money at them). They are already better for the economy than an equivalent Brit since they didn’t spent 18 years being a drag on the economy (instead they were a drag of whatever poor country wasted the resources prepping them for us!).

Hypothetically the absolutely most untrusting and stingy position we could take would be to require someone to work long enough to pay off the cost of caring for them for the rest of their life. That would mean assuming they immediately stop working the moment they earn leave to remain. But that would be like a life insurance company saying “we’ll insure you for £100000 but you need to pay us £100000 to cover the risk”.

Thankfully we can very easily predict how people behave in aggregate. We could pick a number where we’re near guaranteed to come out ahead, I bet it’d be embarrassingly short (most people work to just before pension age). But that’s not what’s driving this policy. This policy exists to look “tough on immigration”, but not too tough because we are actually dependent on immigration. Enough to ruin lives without you know... accidentally having any real effect on immigration numbers, since they would be a disaster.

So it’s just political manoeuvring designed to have no real effect on the thing people want to change (because they thing can’t change, we need it too much) but will still do massive damage.

Might as well “solve” small boats by regularly nuking the English Channel, its equivalent levels of bullshit.

I never said evil, but I do think immoral, as I outlined in my previous comment, we’re talking about benefitting from people dedicating a significant amount of their working lives to this country doing jobs we are failing to do ourselves. Leaving those people in limbo for so long isn’t fair to them. This is just statistics to us, but it’s their lives getting uprooted.

If people are bouncing between different countries and jobs, good for them, and this policy won’t change things for them one bit, because they already wouldn’t be eligible, and if they’re bouncing around they really wouldn’t be interested either.