I would have liked to have seen that.

I would be happier if these parties remained single issue parties.....They could join together then upon that issue and not get so tied up in other areas.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

I'm like a modern day staffie. There's a new contender for most helpful poster award in town.

[Link]

"The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat, has, uh... his stoat-hole... but only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity.” Stewart Lee

We're still waiting for a graph on inequality levels in the UK, before your head gets too big.

...we must expand...get more pupils...so that the knowledge will spread...

This is a constant line you put out and you always ignore the answers.

Firstly the statistics that you are quoting from to support your implicit 'immigrants make us richer' are debated.

Secondly and more importantly saying that immigrants pay slightly more tax.....And if I remember correctly it is only slightly ....Saying that completely ignores the costs of providing for these people.

If these immigrants were all earning loads of money and paying large tax amounts and feeding their spare cash back into the economy (instead of a lot of them sending it home) then there would be some sense in your answer.

As it is.....Immigrants increase job competition for British workers and lower wages in some sectors.

Housing low paid immigrants takes away possible housing for British residents and the lack of supply increases the rent or price...The fact that the state needs to build many many new houses for our significantly increasing population puts your 'immigrants pay more tax' line into almost comic relief.

The cost of bigger populations emerging too quickly with their required infrastructure far outweighs the debatable extra income you refer to.

Edited by Stirlingsays (10 May 2014 4.31pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

They are, but usually the debate ends in "well yes, obviously they're a net contributor given they were educated in another country and may well return there later in life when their care needs are greater".

People who are concerned about immigration often cite "common sense". I'd say there's no more obvious example of common sense than the conclusion that immigrants are statistically likely to pay more in tax than they take out.

It doesn't ignore the costs of providing for these people, the costs are part of the calculation. Imagine Manuel comes over here and pays £10,000/year in taxation and only uses £9,000 state-provided services and benefits, for example. He is a net contributor. His £10,000 not only pays for the provision of the services that he uses, it pays for (part of) someone else's services too.

They feed a lot of it into the economy, that's unavoidable. They've got to pay for accommodation here and they're not going to pop back to their original country every time they want a bit of grub, or a telly or whatever.

If the "sending money home" examples had a deflationary effect upon the economy you'd have areas rich in immigrants seeing lower economic growth. No evidence of that happening that I've seen/heard about.

Perhaps, but I wouldn't say competition in your job is a bad thing and obviously the best way to create jobs is to have people who put money into the economy and who pay more taxes than they take in services. As immigration increases, so does employment. Look at the last 60 years or so in the UK, for example.

Hopefully you're beginning to see a pattern in my argument at this stage. The immigrants are net contributors to the state, so those who are net beneficiaries by having their housing subsidised are more than funded by other immigrants who are net contributors.

Whether the state needs to build more houses is of course another debate, but it's not really a debate worth having unless you can calculate the costs of building the new housing and the financial surplus to the state that the immigrants generate.

If there are 26 million houses that 4 people on average can stay in, that's capacity for over 100 million people to live. I'd argue if we can house 35 million more people than we have in the country and struggle to even house those we have, that's a wider problem with the way the economy/state is structured, not a problem with the number of people who need to be housed.

Percentage increase in the population (per decade) over the last century:

1901 38,237,000 385,000 1.01%
1911 42,082,000 195,000 0.46%
1921 44,027,000 201,000 0.46%
1931 46,038,000 213,000 0.46%
1951 50,225,000 258,000 0.51%
1961 52,807,000 312,000 0.59%
1971 55,928,000 42,000 0.08%
1981 56,357,000 108,000 0.19%
1991 57,439,000 161,000 0.28%
2001 59,113,000 167,400 0.28%
2011 63,700,000 458,700 0.72%

The average rate of increase in GDP (the size of the economy itself) over that period was about 1.4%, so since the period between 1900 and 1910, the growth of the economy has been more than twice the rate of the growth of the population for the last century.

Not only this, but government spending as a percentage of GDP has risen from about 15% early in the last century to about 45% today, so government spending has essentially been growing approximately 6 times as fast as population.

"The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat, has, uh... his stoat-hole... but only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity.” Stewart Lee

When the UK population was rising by 214,500 a year for half a century between 1911 and 1961, how do you suppose the money was found to fight two world wars and build a national infrastructure that included state run schools and hospitals up and down the country?

Were we telling our citizens to stop shagging for the sake of the infrastructure, or did we just accept that the more workers we had, the more we produced and sold around the world, the more taxes we would generate and the more infrastructure we could build?

National infrastructure didn't just appear at the birth of the United Kingdom, it was built up by generations of citizens who realised that if they put more in than they took out, we'd end up with some sort of support structures if and when we were old, ill or poor.

We can only make investments in our infrastructure if we are in surplus after the states costs are taken from its income, so it's pretty dubious to say we will protect national infrastructure by turning people away who are net contributors to the nation's coffers.

"The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat, has, uh... his stoat-hole... but only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity.” Stewart Lee