Most jobs are not complex enough to require high skill or knowledge articulation. Migrant labour has always had the effect of pushing wages down. The small number of people with high-level skills and knowledge are generally a tiny minority of actual labour flow.
I haven’t noticed any of the wonderful customer service skills either. Just barmen and taxi drivers with no sense of ‘crack’ and worse. If this really existed, you’d expect our cops to be brought in from abroad. For that matter, I notice far better qualified and decent lecturers abroad who work for less than half my rate.
None of this justifies racism, but I suspect that was never the real issue. We have done almost nothing to address proper education for those not suited to school – probably 50% of our population.
I know of no country happy with its ‘guest workers’. The general model has been to export manufacturing, organisational and physical labour requirements – to avoid more difficult routes in competition – or to deskill like McDonalds or import skills as in the Poliish plumber and NHS staff. Our more bureaucratised jobs have largely been spared this, or at least the pace has been slower and barriers to entry, often fictional, higher.
Human populations around the world are more or less devoid of differences other than those formed in culture. So racism is baloney. The big question is governance – the social contract involving legitimate authority – or too often crass authority. This is what we are suffering from.
Essentially we have no democracy to trust in.
Allcoppedout's Blog 