28
Home secretary to make some migrants wait 10 years or more for right to settle in UK
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
28 points (91.2% liked)
United Kingdom
7036 readers
356 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If someone doesn't work for 20 years? No, we don't rely on them.
Unpopular opinion here.. but that's a leech. I'm not from here either but I got to work for it. People native here? Also got to work to get unemployment money.
We don't live in dystopia. Lemmy has some insane takes and this is top of the list. People expect to get stuff for free with literally zero contribution on claim.
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.