Immigration is good for our economy as it provides the country with more customers for Business as well as kicking back more tax dollars to govt. (GST and PAYG)
That's the official line of argument as I understand it.
I think the reality is different.
Large scale immigration into a country where jobs are increasingly hard to get provides competition for those jobs and forces wages to fall in a relative sense as wel as an actual sense.
This is a "good thing" for Business (who are supposed to use their inceased profits to expand and re-invest and employ more people, but instead we all have seen how those profits are used to pay their chief executive officers ever higher salaries and give back money to their shareholders as a first priority.
So it's a "bad thing" for most working people.
It also means that immigrants will cost the government in terms of social support if they cannot find work. When I say "costs the government" I mean that it costs those who pay the government (that's us, the workers, the taxpayers . . . not to be confused with the mega corporations which earn billions and which our govt generously allows to avoid their taxation obligations.)
So, how to arrange to bring in a large number of job-seeking, wage-lowering consumers to help prop up struggling businesses who don't really believe in their own mantra of fair competition acting to lower prices and provide better service?
Oh, I know. We'll just find a bogus excuse to make war on foreign countries and produce millions of displaced people and then encourage them to emigrate to our place.
It's good for Business and we all eagerly anticpiate the trickle-down of the succulent crumbs which are sure to fall from the tables of the rich and mighty . . . eventually . . . one day . . . Hey, we were promised it would happen if only we trusted our politicians and voted for them, weren't we?
And some of us did.
Oh dear! We now have to worry about our govt policies encouraging and maybe even facilitating the immigration of people who might just feel a bit resentful and may even be . . . (shock and awe) . . . Terrorists?
No worries mate, we'll just use that as an exucse to enact even tougher policies re surveillance of your every facial tick and twitch . . . and your online reading habits . . . and your email and telephone conversations and put a few more CCTV cameras in our public places.
It's all for a good cause of course. It keeps you safer from those nasty terrorists (who we created in the first place because it makes us sooo much more money, but don't tell anyone because they wouldn't vote for us and then we'd be poor and have to find a real job on the outside where it's cold and harsh.)
Right now it seems that none of our politicians is worthy of our vote. and yet we continue to vote for them.
It's a real puzzle that we do this. Stupidity . . . doing the same thing over and over again in the expectation of a different result.
