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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15099 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Two frames for the argument about less-skilled migration and similar supply-side tradeoffs

A thought inspired by this article on the UK's ConservativeHome. John Oxley's article criticises the Starmer administration for not saying how they are going to recruit British care workers to replace the immigrant care workers they are cutting visas for. Everyone agrees in principle that pay and conditions for care workers will need to improve to make this happen, and that this is all right and proper as long as the Magic Money Fairy pays for it.

Oxley writes about the problem from the perspective of money flows - if we want to pay care workers more, we will need to funnel money into care homes, either by increasing charges to residents (and therefore making Granny sell her house to pay for care), by raising taxes, or by cutting spending on other things.

I tend to prefer the flipped frame which focusses on the flow of goods and services. If we send British workers (and, in particular, physically healthy British workers with a good attitude - this mostly rules out the argument that better-paid care work would magically bring back all the people who have been claiming disability benefits since the pandemic) into care homes, then the work they are currently doing will not get done. In this frame the median voter will be poorer because their favourite restaurant disappears (people are wiping butts instead of waiting tables), they have to spend time in grubby shops, offices, schools and hospitals (people are wiping butts instead of cleaning), and they have to deal with more unexpected items in the bagging area (people are wiping butts instead of manning tills). The tax rises, spending cuts, or even deficit-induced inflation are just a way of making this impoverishment stick in a market economy.

Whichever frame you use, this doesn't answer the question - there could easily be costs of less-skilled migration which mean it is net-negative for the country. But both are ways of forcing you to confront the tradeoff. I prefer the real resources frame because it makes clear that the tradeoff is inexorable and there is no way out through financial jiggery-pokery.

Do Motteposters have a view on whether thinking about this type of question in terms of money or in terms of real resources is more helpful?

I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.

They are simply people who are desperate to move from poor countries to rich countries. The care worker visas were the only way for them to do that, which is why for some countries (Zimbabwe being the best example) there were ten dependent visas issued for every worker. All they needed to do is work for five years and then the whole family can get indefinite leave to remain, access to the British welfare state, the right to import even more relatives. At that point, there's no reason for them to continue working in care homes (or at all, really).

Now these absurdly large holes have finally been plugged, the Conservative government that introduced the visa removed the ability for migrants to bring along dependents, and the current Labour government abolished the visa route to new entrants (although those who previously came in can still work in the sector) and extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases (we'll see how many exceptions they grant).

I personally am in favour of increasing wages (or at least allowing the market to do so) for care workers. Pensioners are far too wealthy in the UK. The care sector would allow some of that wealth to be transferred to younger, poorer people, allowing them to buy houses and start families. With fewer low-skilled immigrants, the welfare state bill will be less. If that means fewer waiters, so be it.

Most people don’t do everything “in order to work.” They work in order to live here, or raise their kids, or buy that new car, or whatever. What makes migration special?

That they are foreigners.

Okay, but is there an economic difference?

I think the problem is that:

  1. We (often) bring them in to fill specific shortages, enduring the larger problems that arise (loss of cultural integrity, lowered trust, often high long-term welfare costs) because we need those shortages fixed no matter what.
  2. There is no incentive for them to continue fixing those shortages after they get a long-term visa.
  3. The shortages then remain unfilled, so we bring in more immigrants. Meanwhile the long-term consequences are getting more and more severe.

Because our welfare system is set up in such a way that they only need to work for five years before being entitled to live off the taxpayer indefinitely. And the statistics suggest that, as low-skilled immigrants from third world countries, they are much more likely to end up doing so than say, Polish graduates.

That stat doesn’t say anything about the five year trick. Or about Poles. Wait, it’s not even limited to migrants! This is like using the African-American unemployment rate to say that black immigrants are actually planning to quit. That’s not true for the U.S. and I would like to see better data for the U.K.

But let’s assume that 10.7% of Pakistani migrants are in fact arriving, cleaning bedpans for five years, then quitting to live off the King’s largesse. Why aren’t native-born Brits doing the same thing? To me, that suggests it’s not actually a good deal for anyone raised to expect a first-world standard of living. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrage @MadMonzer is talking about.

I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.

You can think about them as wakalixes if you want - it doesn't change the tradeoff that if you eject the people doing work either someone else has to do the work (in place of what they are currently doing) or the work doesn't get done.

Labour-driven immigration is, regardless of the motives of the immigrant, fundamentally a commercial transaction with terms set by the host-country government on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Empirically, Singapore and the Gulf Arabs have demonstrated that you can offer low-skill immigrants much less favourable terms than the West does and still get takers.

After an attempt to fact-check your comment about Zimbabwe, the specific context of the UK care worker visa appears to be a furphy here. It looks like there was an order-of-magnitude drop in the number of care worker visas issued before the change to dependent visas, driven by a crackdown on outright fraudulent applications in late 2023. So this particular case wasn't choosing the wrong-side of a trade-off, it was failed implementation due to administrative incompetence. For anyone familiar with the UK Home Office, this is unsurprising. For anyone familiar with the Johnson-Sunak Conservative regime, this is also unsurprising.

extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases

That's only a white paper and will take at least until next year to pass into law. Currently rules are the same. Also there's a concept in UK common law called "legitimate expectation" where the migrants can argue that they had a legitimate expectation that they'd be granted ILR after 5 years on a visa and that influenced their decision to accept it so now that can't be changed unilaterally (much like how if I have a job contract with you you can't cut my salary unilaterally). They can apply for judicial review on the basis of legitimate expectation and will very likely win and there's even precedent for it: last time the government increased ILR length from 4 years to 5 years the people on the skilled worker visa at the time were able to win in high court.

One of the problems with UK immigration law is that substantive policy issues of general public concern that ought to be legislated are instead put into the Immigration Rules. This causes two problems:

  1. Regulations don't get the automatic deference from the Courts that statutes get. If Parliament changes the law, then legitimate expectations be damned. The only laws Parliament might not be able to make are retroactive criminal laws.
  2. The government can tinker constantly with the rules, so they do. Whether or not it should be legal, ratting on the implied contract with legal immigrants because you needed a quick response to a tabloid campaign is bad policy. Also every time you change the rules gives the Home Office another opportunity to screw up the implementation, most of which they take.

I personally prefer to think in terms of money as the abstraction helps me to reason more efficiently. However for teaching the common man the real resources framework is absolutely the way to go as that way you don't have to waste epicycles telling them why their objection they thought up in 20 seconds isn't gonna solve the issue.

But how will my body continue to function without drugs if I stop taking them?

Maybe quitting the infinite cheap labor pool cold turkey isn't the best or least painful way to get back to a functioning labor market with accurate price signals, shocks never feel good, but it's still better than continuing to slowly turn into South Africa.

Rising wages are an incentive to increase productivity. When did we stop wanting machines to do menial jobs and instead started to want miserable strangers to do them instead?

If you go cold turkey on benzos you run the risk of killing yourself because your body can't handle the stress. The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.

The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.

But antihistamines don't work...oh! I see what you did there.

I like your frame partly because it suggests useful ways of addressing the problem. (I don't intend this as a gotcha).

  • People are wiping butts instead of cleaning -> more robot vacuums / mops.

  • People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.

  • People are wiping butts instead of manning tills -> put more serious work into unmanned checkouts.

Most of these are not insoluble problems, they are problems that nobody was incentivized to solve.

My only worry would be that so much of our economy is purely financialised at this point that such an approach would neglect serious aspects of reality that matter. No idea if this is true.

People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.

Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market. He sees the market shift from low-end full-service restaurants to high-end fast-casual dining as (a) driven by rising low-end wages and (b) an entirely good thing. So the official rat-adjacent neoliberal shill position here is

People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> restaurants targeting middle-class clientele continue to switch from a full-service to a fast-casual model.

I don't follow the argument? If a party of four goes to a full-service restaurant, I'd expect somewhere on the order of 1-2 hours of human time to be spent by restaurant staff on that party (between host, waiter, cooks, dishwashers, management, etc). Assuming that employees are ~1/3 of the cost of running a restaurant, and that the customers make the same wage as the restaurant staff, that's a per-person cost of 45 - 90 minutes of wages. Probably not something you want to do literally every day, but seems like it should be easily doable a couple times a week, not just as an "occasional splurge purchase".

Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market.

I think this might have some truth to it, but there is an element of cultural choice involved. Some cultures have different expectations of "full-service dining" — I'm thinking of how American ones tend to push table turnover, whereas other countries expect to serve each table maybe once per evening.

But there is some reasonable bound on "how much time we spend on each other." One could total up "hours wiping butts" versus total hours worked and see that yes, having the median worker work 40 hours, 10 of which are spent wiping butts, is probably not sustainable. Maybe it'd be at 60 hour weeks, but I'd really prefer more leisure time. There are some real culture choices to be made about the relative merits of time spent on arts, capital investments (building stuff!), research, and medicine — is medicine an end, or just a means to it. It's honestly a pretty open question I'd love to see more debate on, rather than neoliberal "we can have it all" platitudes.

I suppose also that some historic cultures adopted senicide rather than spend time wiping (elderly) butts, although to my modern sensibilities that's rather abhorrent, but perhaps a bit understandable in resource-constrained situations.

One other obvious technology solution would be to automate butt-wiping. I suspect there are fewer qualms about automating geriatric care versus infant care, too.

I don't think this line of argument necessarily proves anything about the optimal number of semi-skilled or unskilled workers to have in a country. Clearly that number is above 0 (or you get reverse complementary task specialisation where skilled workers get moved into care work because the wages are get so high that productivity suffers in the long-run) and might depend a lot on how the generous the state is to recent migrant workers. The Qatari economy would probably not be better off if they deported all the South Asian construction workers (even if we were to assume they were entirely free economic agents rather than borderline indentured servants). What the balance is in any given country is just an object-level question you can't reason your way to an answer to.

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