BRITISH GRADUATES COULD BE “ELBOWED” OUT OF THE JOB MARKET, DAILY MAIL CLAIMS. BUT IS THAT FACT OR FICTION?
An “influx” of young, educated Eastern European immigrants could be about to make British graduates’ job hunts even tougher, if the UK’s right-wing press is to be believed.
As restrictions were lifted on 1 January on Bulgarian and Romanian workers coming to the UK, hysteria grew about the possible consequences of their arrival. Much of this centred on low-skilled workers and so-called “benefits tourists”, but the Mail on Sunday also claimed some of the young, well-educated arrivals (who speak perfect English) “could elbow British graduates out of the job market“.
Could competition for paid, permanent, graduate level jobs in the UK be about to get even tougher? Will it become even harder for British graduates looking for “stop-gap” jobs to find even low-paying shop work and bar shifts? Could these immigrants’ arrival impact salaries for everyone? Or is this pure scaremongering?
It’s difficult to know what to think. Facts are hard to come by, as figures and estimates on immigration are notoriously hard to judge and interpret. They are also easy to manipulate and distort. So we want to know what you make of it all.
Interestingly, fresh figures have shown that the group with the most positive views on immigration are graduates – a new survey shows that 60% of graduates think immigration is good for the economy.
What do you think? Are the Daily Mail’s concerns pure prejudice – or are they justified? Are you worried about the impact of immigration on your own hunt for a good graduate job? Or do you welcome young people who want to come and work in Britain? Have your say below…
I think young British graduates were being elbowed out of the labour market long before the Romanians and Bulgarians showed up on our doorstep. There has been a gradual erosion of the British economy since the 1980s, as Globalisation moved up a gear, as more goods that were once produced in Britain began to be made in China, as the European Union opened the floodgates to cheap foreign imports from the Far East, as we deregulated more of our energy sector, allowing the French and the Americans an increasing share in utilities.
In my opinion, as lower level manufacturing jobs have disappeared from Britain, so too have many managerial positions and highly skilled jobs, which graduates would have occupied.
More of something will devalue it. We saw this with the increasing numbers of graduates. The whole point of this policy is to decrease wages through competition. Good for business, but bad for the individuals concerned.
@Simon Hargreaves So do you mean that you are worried that more immigrants with graduate-level education and skills will mean more competition and therefore lower everybody’s chances of getting a graduate job?
@Brian How do you this has been allowed to happen? And are young people being affected disproportionately, do you think?
@Tanya,It’s not Bulgarians or Romanians – or even the Chinese – who we should fear. We should fear the CEOs of large private corporations who are reducing the size of their workforce through technological ‘innovation’. Corporations such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Sony hire the Chinese manufacturer, Foxconn, to manufacture its products in China for a fraction of what it costs in the USA, or Japan or Britain.
Foxconn employs 1 million workers in its Chinese factories to build electronic devices such as the iPhone and is on target to replace them all with robots, some built at its robotics facility in Taiwan. It can build easy-to-train assembly line robots better than those companies presently building them. These robots could build anything, much cheaper and easier to simply adjust the programming than to train a human. This is the future. The facility in Taiwan continues to develop and innovate. How many millions of assembly line robots could it build to use in China and around the world?
In 2009 China became the world’s largest exporter of goods. In 2013 it became the world’s largest trading nation, trading $4tn worth of goods.
If young Chinese workers are considered too expensive, what hope for young British workers? Permanent jobs look to be a thing of the past and replaced with temporary outsourced work increasingly a feature in the UK labour market. Workers will probably be lucky to have a 6 or 9 month contract.
I was dismayed to see this come up, as there’s enough xenophobia towards Romanians and Bulgarians accused of taking unskilled jobs without them being accused of taking skilled ones.
The observation about how well educated many of these people are, and how well they speak English illustrates perfectly how brainwashed British people have become into thinking that being native English speakers gives them an advantage in the international jobs market. It doesn’t – that’s another lie we’ve been fed, along with the more expensive one about how a degree is a passport to a well-paid job, but that’s another story. It’s precisely because these people don’t have English as their first language that they have proved themselves to be more versatile than people who do.
How many British people would go and live in Romania or Bulgaria, other than to work as English teachers? Or any other of these countries? There was a case of a man who did just that – Kevin Aiston, a Londoner, moved to Poland in the 1990s, and learnt the language from scratch before becoming a fireman. He faced violent abuse from locals who accused him of stealing their jobs and their women, and even their land. (Sounds familiar?)
While I dislike xenophobia towards people from these and other countries, I also dislike the constant sneering at British people by newspapers like the Independent, who think that we’re all a waste of space, compared to the new arrivals with their ‘vibrant’ and ‘enriching’ culture.
@Brian
I agree with you 100%, I have been saying this for years.
Eastern Europeans have been under cutting British works since 2004 as they can work for NMW and live 10-20 to a house so they have money to send home.
China at one time was a cheap place to make goods so they could undercut British companies in staff wages, but now china workers are becoming costly, and robotic technology is becoming more advanced, that even people in china are being replace by robots on production lines.
On the case of Romanians and Bulgarians, I don’t think they will undercut British labour as this was done by the Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians in 2004, all the Romanians and Bulgarians will do is undercut their fellow eastern Europeans i.e. pole etc. for cost of wages that they will accept.
The real problem is the offshoring of so many service jobs to India and China. Especially in Banking. The cost of labour is 10X cheaper in Bangalore or Jupai than London. If its not offshoring, it’s onshoring to Eastern Europe. I would seriously advise any graduates to leave the country, there is no future in Britain. And property prices are still rising!!!!
@nicolas
i would love to leave, and go and live in Aus, but working and living in london is costly, so i can not save money up to plan to leave. it looks like i will be stuck her forever